We Value

Past permitting requirements have either directly produced, or been helpless to prevent, the state of our current degraded landscapes. It’s time to move from regulation of degradation to facilitation of restoration.
Restoration is the second- highest use for diesel. The first is leaving it in the ground.
A barren altar calls no gods. Decide what you’re willing to sacrifice for what you love, because you’ll have to.
In spite of all your efforts, some of what you love will die. Hold all of it lightly.
Forget clock time. Restoration occurs in flowing and growing time, a seasonality that encompasses and ignores us equally, and our only task is to nudge and offer new paths for the water and sunshine falling on and flowing through the landscape.
Beavers have practiced dam-building for 5 million years. Let us learn from them.
There’s nothing better for restoring an incised creek than a good fire upstream
Rivers don’t make mistakes. They are infallible teachers, perfectly fair, and hold nothing back in critiquing a build.
If we correct source problems and commit to a relational framework, all will be revealed.
“One and done” restoration is neither

Live The Process

These guiding principles are about preferences, not dogmas, and allow for edge cases and gray areas in cases of clear and present needs that simply cannot be addressed otherwise. For example, if we need a 6-lane road crossing modified to open up process space, we will probably opt for excavators, but that decision will itself be open to edge cases and special circumstances.

Jobs for people, not machines

We’re trying to grow a restoration economy that pays a living wage to as many people as possible. Even if it takes a little longer, it’s worth it. For example—maybe an excavator can do the work of many people in an hour, but that simplistic statement ignores all the embedded costs.

The carbon burn and environmental costs of manufacturing the machine, driving it to the site, walking it out to the meadow, building roads and crossings, and returning it to the corporate yard it came from, burning diesel all the way, are just the start. The fraying and disconnection of our social fabric are worsened by widespread unemployment and the immiseration and homelessness that follow it, which is a problem we can solve by simply employing handworkers.

That same job might get done directly by those many people, all earning a dignified, living wage, for a much lower disturbance footprint. Those earned wages then circulate in local economies, instead of going to overseas corporations that manufacture excavators and export oil to be lost forever.

“Work is love made visible.” — Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Mimic beavers more than geology

Beavers use the materials they can fell and move with the tools they’ve got—teeth and paws. We may have chainsaws and griphoists and post drivers, but they’re all human-scaled and portable. Tying into the jobs for people point above, attempting to mimic geologic forces is very likely to result in a reversion to the outmoded diesel paradigm— creating jobs for machines rather than people. If we stay focused on beaver mimicry, even when building geomorphic structures, we’ll be continually re- oriented to the appropriate scale of tools and materials.

“Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity.” —Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Restore function rather than build form

Any attempt to create a stable form within a dynamic system is destined for failure in the long term. In this instance, long term may usefully be considered as more than a human lifespan, which is well beyond the normal time horizon we employ. Functions, with their feedback loops and embedded life, can persist for millenia, thus making them a much better restoration goal.

‘The measure of intelligence is the ability to change’ — Albert Einstein.

Directly interact with the real world instead of machinery and digital representations

An engineer looks at blueprints and CAD drawings. A surveyor looks at a stadia rod, laser level, and other instrumentation. A GIS specialist manipulates pixels on a liDAR map. A machine operator interacts with levers and foot pedal. While occasionally useful, none of these professions are directly engaged with the actual riverscape itself, on its own terms. This middleman problem is actually quite serious, as every intermediation acts as a lens, or a filter, and inevitably demands a cost—either economic, temporal, experiential, or even emotional. It’s quite hard to care deeply about a plan set in and of itself, but quite easy to fall in love with the landscape that plan may represent.

“Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes that see reality.” — Nikos Kazantzakis

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.

“Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.” —The Dalai Lama

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.

“Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For, indeed, that’s all who ever have.” — Margaret Mead

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.

“Be not afraid of growing slowly; be afraid only of standing still.” — Chinese Proverb

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).

“Life is a process. We are a process. The universe is a process.” — Anne Wilson Schaef

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.

“In the living world, the habitat of someone is always the weaving of all the others.” — Baptiste Morizot