Ross Freeman, American Rivers

Ross Freeman is staff scientist at the Northwest regional office of American Rivers, a conservation organization that restores and protects river systems nationwide.

I often reflect on past jobs I've held, and the lessons from them that now travel with me. One of the positions that yielded especially lasting memories was my role as raft program manager for SPLORE, a nonprofit based in Moab, Utah, that provides outdoor trips for people with disabilities and special needs.

For three summers, I supervised and led about 40 river trips per season, all of which provided safe but exciting outdoor experiences for a very wide range of participants. Our mission was to provide a positive venue for self-reliance, independence, and personal growth -- challenging the limits that society assumes restrict individuals with disabilities. The absence of familiar constraints led to some remarkable achievements. The concept that perception equals limitation has never left me since.

In my current work, we spend a great deal of energy on public perception. What do people think about an issue? Do they even know about it? Can we change their understanding of the key problem and debunk myths that pit economic security and environmental well-being against each other? The subject of endangered salmon recovery in the Northwest frequently navigates this rocky terrain.

Over the past six months, my own work in this area has focused on an exciting new way to portray a future with an undammed, free-flowing lower Snake River. American Rivers, along with many fisheries scientists, believes that removing the lower four dams on the Snake River must be part of any successful plan to address the catastrophic drop in salmon abundance along the lower Snake River in southeast Washington. Other recovery plans that avoid dam removal have been attempted, but they have not sought to restore sustainable and harvestable populations. We believe the best way (and probably the only way) to recover abundant wild salmon and protect the river for local communities and future generations is to partially remove the four lower Snake dams, which severely limit effective salmon passage up and downstream.

Working closely with a consultant in Colorado, my task has been to create a computer visualization that portrays what the Snake might look like after dam removal. The software we're using is produced by CommunityViz, a project of a foundation that provides tools to rural communities grappling with growth and sustainability. The end product is a photo-realistic, interactive, three-dimensional landscape model that allows stakeholders to navigate the terrain, and manipulate its features, in real time. What that means in English is that users can travel through a recognizable landscape, compare current to future visions, and chose to move architectural features as they wish. And the whole process is actually quite engaging.

Last week I spent two hours on the phone with our consultant, Lex, going over his latest work and discussing what data I needed to prepare for him next. Through some technical wizardry, I gave him control of my computer so that he could show me (from Colorado) what he was looking at on his screen. Welcome to the new millennium! We are layering aerial photos over a digital elevation model, adding streets and land cover, and then including 3D details such as buildings, bridges, and the river channel (of course).

My colleague David in our Portland office works on the programmatic side of this project, and yesterday afternoon included a lengthy conference call to make sure we have all the information we need to proceed. Currently, we're contemplating a field visit to some of the visualization sites in order to acquire digital photos that we can drop into the model. As you might guess, this is a groundbreaking project with a lot of details to coordinate.

Yesterday also involved a long conference call with some of my colleagues in Washington, D.C., who are working hard on a new initiative, spearheaded by American Rivers and river community leaders, called the River Agenda. It's an effort to identify some widely held goals that can become a platform for the river movement nationwide. So far, one of the issues most frequently identified by grassroots river groups is the impact of growth and development on rivers. We've been calling experts around the country to learn more about this topic, and yesterday we spoke to 1000 Friends of Washington about the connections between water and sprawl/growth issues. We're looking for policy solutions at the state and federal level that could address these impacts via the River Agenda.

I sit on the board of a local nonprofit educational organization, the Homewaters Project, and last night we met after work, as we do every month, to plan out fundraising activities and outreach efforts and go over other governance issues. Our programs provide local schools with outdoor instruction centered around the connection between people and nature in their own area. We hope the students in these programs will become engaged citizens who recognize they have the power to make a difference in their communities. Now that I work on the environment from the office setting, I especially enjoy staying connected with outdoor education programs.

The calendar's open for the rest of today, meaning that maybe I can catch up on an instream flow toolkit project, as well as the latest developments of the Habitat Conservation Plan that we're part of in the Walla Walla River Basin. We'll see.