THE SWIFT WATER DESIGN TEAM
We are rabid about Process Based Restoration - we attract only the most passionate and generous from an ocean of talent devoted to the mission.
Start with this—the vibrancy and inventiveness of Earth’s natural systems were sufficient to give rise not only to humans, but more significantly to all the ancestral forms required to assemble a human: bacteria, blue-green algae, sea sponges, and millions of others through billions of years.
We’ve only very recently decided that humans should make decisions for all other life, despite our most-junior status in the group, and hilarity has not ensued.
So, just as Zen practitioners aspire to non-doing, or not forcing, we restorationists can best serve the needs of Life by listening to and following the natural systems we work with and in. By emulating the ever-changing element we negotiate with (water), and flowing with what is toward what we want, we can become gentler stewards and more humbly appreciative of what it took for us to simply exist.
SWIFT WATER DESIGN CREW
What draws people to practice Process Based Restoration?
ABOUT KEVIN
He's 8 million years late to the beaver party, but learning fast
Water’s Dual Nature
I grew up a 5-minute walk from a beaver pond complex in one direction, and a steep, rowdy river 5 minutes the other direction. This early experience of both poles of water—stillness and incredible power—was foundational to my early life, and remains so today.
By maintaining this awareness of water’s potential, we ensure that all of our restoration planning, design and implementation is grounded in reality, not just paper and pixels.
SWIFT WATER DESIGN TEAM VALUES
Kindness, clarity and immediacy in all communications
This work is hard, on all fronts. Physically, mentally, emotionally, logistically, it’s weeks at a time of living outside, minimal creature comforts, close quarters, and very little of the normal low-value emotional bubble wrap that characterizes a lot of jobs. At the end of a hard day, you can’t just flop on the couch and watch TV for hours, so the anaesthics of modern life are mostly missing. That means letting things fester in secret isn’t an option, and screaming at people and throwing tantrums will get you voted out the same day, so we stay current and address issues in the moment, while being kind and transparent. There’s also no need to lie and say you’re fine when your dog just died.
Care for one another
A crew has to be a mutually self-supporting organism to survive. We share food, water, sunscreen, tools, stories, encouragement, jokes, tasks, good and bad times, and do so with thought for the others first and ourselves second. Be the first to pick up a tool, and the last to set them down. Race the others to get first dibs on the worst, hardest, most boring job. Carry more shovels between structures than the gal next to you. When we run short of chips at lunch, volunteer to do without. Get up early and make coffee for everybody, not just yourself. Cut your hitch short to make room for a newer employee who’s just starting out. Leave the last beer in the cooler. And so on. Of course, This does not mean push through injuries to keep working, or neglect self care.
Keep a growth mindset
Nobody’s good at something the first time they try it, and that’s ok. The important thing is that we keep improving our skills as we go, and yes, it’s still possible to get better at using a shovel after five years doing so. Cleaner, better felling cuts with a chainsaw, faster knot tying the first time, learning to sharpen loppers properly, gaining understanding of geomorphic processes and the designs that utilize them, reducing panic when speaking publicly, touring beaver dam complexes to improve mimicry, the list is endless and we support them all. For those who’ve made the difficult trek to team lead, we also support development of skills that have nothing to do with work.
Restore the process
Beyond the company, if we’re to restore a landscape to proper ecosystem function in a time frame that’s meaningful to living humans, we’ve got to restore the process itself along the way. That means addressing outdated regulatory frameworks, finding new and innovative funding sources, building new partnerships with local NPOs, tribes, businesses and affiliate groups, and developing radical new approaches to implementation of PBR (including crazy schemes that might totally fail—we’re not playing it safe here).
Care for human animals
The false dichotomy between human and animal helps no one. We’re mammals, subject to exactly the same biological restrictions of all the non-humans animals our work serves, and thus equally in need of restoration. Watershed restoration as a field needs to explicitly work toward building PBR leadership among the local tribes and communities that inhabit these riverscapes. Without them we as a community will forever lack the deep relationship with place that’s only available to locals. Equally, we’ll suffer from the lack of innovation that each unique place will demand as restorationists grapple with different constraints, abundances, and ideas.
“Be not afraid of growing slowly; be afraid only of standing still.” — Chinese Proverb
JOIN OUR PROCESS BASED RESTORATION TEAM
You’ve taken the first step already, today, by becoming curious about this strange, difficult art.
The good news is you’ve come to the right place, and there are lots of supportive people in the community, as well as an ocean of talent. Seriously —the sheer amount of genius piled up in one esoteric field is amazing, and we’ve never met more generous people.
The bad news is we’re currently a small community of rabidly committed people who are utterly buried, so please heed the following advice: you can best help us and yourself by coming with an offer of some sort, as well as an ask. This works because most of us have thousands of unread emails piled up and things falling off the back burner and down behind the stove, despite our best efforts.
So to stand out, an offer that’s large and immediately helpful to the PBR movement as a whole always goes to the top of the stack. Remember that piece—it doesn’t necessarily have to do me personally any good, or Swift Water Design as a company, it just has to help more good work get done faster.
If Process Based Restoration excites you, and you aren’t afraid of getting a little (or a lot) dirty in the service of the greater than human order, click the button to email us: