Protecting the Willamette Confluence Preserve in Lane County

More than 1,200 acres of land about seven miles from downtown Eugene will now be managed by the McKenzie River Trust. The Willamette Confluence Preserve includes wetlands, a floodplain forest and is home to more than 30 native fish species and other wildlife. Joe Moll is the executive director of the trust. He joins us with how the organization plans to preserve the area moving forward.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We start today at the Willamette Confluence Preserve. It is a 1300 acre site about 10 miles from Eugene where two forks of the Willamette River converge. Like so many parts of the Willamette Valley, it was once teeming with wildlife. Then came development, in this case, a gravel mining company. The Nature Conservancy acquired the property 13 years ago and began a painstaking process of restoration. Now it’s been transferred to the Mackenzie River Trust, which as Eugene Weekly reported recently is facing both a practical and a more philosophical question: how to balance the needs of fish and birds and other newly returned wildlife with a desire for human access. Joe Moll joins us to talk about this. He is the executive director of the trust. Welcome to the show.

Joe Moll: Thanks, Dave. It’s an honor to be here.

Miller: What was this site like before the Nature Conservancy took control of it about a dozen years ago?

Moll: If you think to the post war boom, 1940s, all the interstates, city construction, you see the footprint that large gravel mining operations have historically. Meandering rivers like the Willamette and the forks here produced readily accessible, high quality gravel. And we’ve literally built our communities on them. So the site was pretty beaten down. When you dig gravel out of a river flood plain the groundwater comes up, and so there were a number of rectangular, deep, steep walled ponds, a lot of pounded down ground, and a heck of a lot of blackberry.

Miller: And what about the way the river had moved and shifted, and flooded or not flooded in given years, compared to what it was like when it was the controlled version, while gravel mining was taking place?

Moll: 1940s is when they began mining here and in much of the valley, when it really reached intensity, two things happened. Just a growing demand for the product, but also recognition that with dams, some of the higher flooding events could be tamped down. So the spigot got turned off in the headwaters of the middle fork in this case, and so the historic really high floods just aren’t as frequent. So what that does with the river, it allows people to live closer and closer with less fear of flooding. And then it just sort of simplifies things. We put in roadways on its edge, we put in dykes and revetments, and it just constrains. It’s hard to imagine for people that the Willamette was every bit as sinuous as the Nile or the Alaskan braided streams you see now, because we think of it as this single channel thread. And consequently, native fish and wildlife take it on the chin when they lose all of that dynamism and space that they had had previously.

Miller: Why was this particular site so coveted by conservancy groups? Why was this one of the targets of purchase and renewal?

Moll: The project came about in 2010, really before then, at a time when all of us working in land and water conservation in the valley were seeing that there’s still opportunities with some fairly large, in this case 1300 acre properties, where we could bring the river back in, allow it to have a little bit more access to its floodplain. And that has benefits not only for species that are having trouble, like Oregon chub or spring Chinook salmon, but it also both attenuates flood damage by slowing things down a little bit, and it cleans water. And this is an area that is immediately adjacent to Springfield and immediately upstream of the city of Eugene. So the size of it, and its continuous nature next to the city is what put it on everyone’s target list.

Miller: So, what kind of work did the Nature Conservancy do once it took control of the site? What did restoration entail?

Moll: It was interesting because it went from being a construction site to being a construction site. The same kind of heavy equipment was used to bring soil and things back into some of the compacted areas, to slope the deep steep ponds into gentler shallower wetland emergent ponds, and to recontour some of these areas. They removed about a half a mile of dyke that allowed the river to back into some of these now more wetland-like ponds. So at first, it was every bit as heavy equipment as it had been.

And then with years of planting millions of plants, some by hand, many by volunteers, it has allowed the place to recover very much on its own. And it’s been wonderful to see how the river has done that.

Miller: Well that recovering on its own, it does make me wonder, after a landscape has been so altered by humans, how you think about letting nature take its course, or guiding a landscape in a particular way, in a particular direction.

Moll: We’re in this really conflicted space now, because with endangered species and other things, nature is kind of on the edge. And humans, we are boisterous, curious, consumptive social animals, we’re hungry for nature. And so this question of, this was set aside for nature, for fish and wildlife and yet at a time when, for many people, the opportunity and the ability to be with nature, and quite frankly to touch it, becomes more limited. And then on top of that, you layer COVID and how hungry people became for that.

It’s a real conundrum; how can you take care of a space, love it, without “loving it to death.” And as recreation has grown, we’ve seen in other places many of our favorite trails get beaten down, and you can see it in any place where we love to recreate. We’re big, active animals. And so the question for us becomes how can we restrain ourselves, how do we change our behavior in these places? And how do we encourage that in other people? This adjoins a county park, where recreation is the primary purpose of that park, from the 1970s. And this is a little different, with a porous border, so I see it as a great opportunity for us to learn and adapt. Because there’s no question that the future of nature really does depend on our behavior change. And I also firmly believe that we can and we are adapting and learning. So it’s a great space to explore this.

Miller: Well, what conditions were put on the transfer? There are the big picture questions that you’re getting at there. But there are also legal realities of what you can or can’t allow based on the land use agreement. So how much has already been set in stone?

Moll: Good question. The money that came that allowed the Nature Conservancy to acquire this and do some restoration was specific to fish and wildlife habitat. And so for example, we can’t build on the property. We couldn’t build a visitor center, for example. We couldn’t put in a paved bike path. But because it’s an old gravel site, there are still a number of pretty firm gravel roads, and it allows us to do things like bring in small buses for people with limited mobility, or folks who might not otherwise have an easy way to get to a quiet place in nature. We can do that.

Miller: It sounds like it was actually a choice to keep those paths there. Often when we talk about forest restoration, people get rid of forest service roads if it’s gonna prevent erosion or soil going into streams, for example. But you made the decision to keep those up, or the Nature Conservancy did, in the near term?

Moll: That’s true, recognizing however, that even with dams upstream, we will continue to get big floods. And with some of the climate change projections, probably some big, big floods that could really shift things. And it’s possible that some of those roads might get taken out over time.

So our job now, for the next two years, is to do an updated management plan, try to anticipate some of that. One way to approach a site like this, which is really extensive, would be to focus human activity in some areas, and really steer it away from others. So we may obliterate some of the roads or some of the paths that are existing. But most of the restrictions are from this baseline of where it stands today, let’s not make it more difficult for fish and wildlife to thrive.

Miller: We skipped ahead to the current or future uses of this land, but we neglected to talk about what it actually looks like now and how different it looks now compared to just 15 years ago. What do you see when you walk around now?

Moll: It’s a joy. I’ve been in this position for 18 years now, and there’s similar restoration work that has been done in other places in the Willamette Valley, just a few miles downstream where the Willamette and the Mackenzie come together you have a place called Green Island. And after restoration projects go in and get established in that first couple of years, you see willow and cottonwood and other things just start to take off. I was just there this past Sunday, and things are just beginning to leaf out a little bit. The eruption of color in willow stands, and obviously the water fowl that are gathering this time of year through migration. We were doing a tour, looking with our heads down at the ground. And in one of these big stormy scenes forty Sandhill cranes started circling above us looking for a thermal to head north and, and we just were stopped and we were able to watch that.

It’s the kind of place where you can witness big picture change, the river moving in and depositing big amounts of gravel and new things shooting up from that, as well as really small scale things. At the end of the day, on a pretty cool day, there was a turtle just sitting on a log all by itself. So it’s that range of things, knowing that for us to be successful in conservation, being able to do this work on the scale of hundreds and thousands of acres is critical. And yet as humans, that interaction, the importance of that interaction in the immediate, right in front of me or the sky over my head, is something that I think is equally critical for ensuring that people will always support conservation in decades ahead.

Miller: There’s been a theory in the past, and I don’t know if it’s true or not, but that if you give humans access to a place like this, and maybe tell them the story of a restoration place like this, that they’ll be more likely to support these kinds of efforts. But the very act of getting them into this place like this, it could have a potentially negative effect on the landscape. How do you deal with that?

Moll: Again, because we’re in the conflicted space, because so many species are on the edge, we think of them as threatened or endangered, the consequences of that are bigger than they were say 200 years ago, when Native peoples especially had a direct closeness working and interacting with the natural world. And so one of the ways we’re learning and thinking about this is to listen and study, and learn from Native peoples in the area who are still practicing these things today. How do you have, as Robin Wall Kimmerer, a writer, frequently describes, this reciprocal relationship, so we’re not just taking, we’re not just using nature, but we’re being present, we’re learning about it, we’re recognizing our hand in its stewardship, we’re recognizing that we can be disturbing beasts, and quite frankly restraining ourselves?

What has been very encouraging is to have people who come to sites like this and volunteer, participate directly in its care. But then also, to meet people who simply are happy to know that it’s there, and see the Willamette confluence from the other side of the river, where there is a paved bicycle path, for example. There’s some really creative thoughts from grad students at the university here who studied the area, and said maybe in the future there could be some viewing platforms from far away that would allow you to see this meandering river, but not be in the midst of it. So it’s gonna take as much creativity and as much restraint as we can bring to bear on it. And that’s why it’s sort of an all hands on deck. Again, it’s an exciting sort of tabula rasa in many ways to explore these ideas and these actions.

Miller: There’s another political or economic facet of this, which is that this site that we’ve been talking about is one of a number of Willamette Valley conservation efforts that were all made possible because of this big settlement between the Bonneville Power Administration, BPA, and Oregon’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, $150 million settlement from back in 2010. It was a huge infusion of money but it was a one time deal, meaning BPA said we’ll give you this money, but this is it in terms of our money for restoration efforts stemming from a whole series of dams. We don’t have time to get into that debate, but there were definitely groups at the time who said this is not enough and we want more. How do you think about that deal now, 13 years later?

Moll: I think that deal has become such a leverage point for investment in a much broader sense than simply “mitigating” for the dams, which is what that came out of, and what it has done up and down the valley. Similar investments all the way downstream towards Portland has helped people see that this isn’t just about salmon, this isn’t just about a particular species or its habitat. It’s about a river, it’s about a river system. And we’ve come to understand more and more how healthy meandering rivers provide clean water, hold more water in potentially droughty times. You’ve heard in recent years this discussion of natural infrastructure. It brings it more directly into our day to day lives to recognize that a healthy river system keeps us from having to invest in hard gray infrastructure for water cleaning facilities. It has given rise to a number of new thoughts on how we protect ourselves from flooding. One of the ways to protect yourself is not to keep the flood out, but to expand the floodplains so that when water rises it comes through, but with less power.

And so you’re seeing not simply these responsive investments saying there’s a problem we need to clean up, but progressive investments. In our area, we have wonderful utilities, the Eugene Water and Electric Board and the Springfield Utility Board, both of whom recognize that investing in natural areas and in river health is directly related to the bottom line, and more importantly, to that part of the bottom line which is the provision of goods and services to their members.

I think you’re seeing a lot more state agency crossover. There is another big water bill moving through the legislature now that includes investment in headwater forests and flood plains, again, as a part of water supply and water quality issues. The Wildlife Mitigation Program, which is what was produced in that settlement between BPA and Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, was I think a really critical leverage point to where we are today 13 years later.

Miller: Joe Moll, thanks very much.

Moll: Really appreciate the opportunity, Dave. Thank you.

Miller: Joe Moll is the executive director of the McKenzie River Trust.

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