We were excited then to come across Let the Water Do the Work (Chelsea Green, 2009), Zeedyk and Clothier’s comprehensive manual on the Induced Meandering approach to river restoration. We’ve expressed our admiration for Craig Sponholtz and Brad Lancaster at every opportunity (check out our resources page for links to their work), and we’ve referred to Bill Zeedyk’s practical introductions to erosion control and induced meandering in planning strategies for our property. In his foreword to Zeedyk and Clothier’s book Let the Water Do the Work, Courtney White articulates the characteristics of this approach: it is evidence-based, its affordability and relative simplicity make it accessible, it is based in ‘soft engineering’, challenging “the dominant paradigms of river and creek restoration”, it requires “humility, attentiveness and patience”, operating at the pace of the ecosystem, and finally, it’s at a human scale, flourishing with the participation of community, that offers “joy in companionship, in learning together, and sharing knowledge.” Rather than advising that landowners simply save up and pay an expert, their work seeks to empower communities to manage, monitor and maintain water in their landscapes through accessible, practical and locally-adaptable erosion control and water harvesting responses. While they don’t flinch from the importance of technical understanding, they cultivate strategies that are based in the thoughful observation of those who are connected to a landscape, that utilise locally available materials, and that draw on community power to create modest interventions that can be tweaked over time. In their work, these thinkers and practitioners of water management and restoration, offer a radically different approach to watershed restoration.
Thankfully, we came across the work of the likes of Craig Sponholtz, Brad Lancaster, Bill Zeedyk and Van Clothier, and in Australia, Cam Wilson and Peter Bennett. This disturbed us, because it seems to suggest that land restoration is the domain of those with cash to splash, and that those people or places without the necessary resources may just have to resign themselves to the continued collapse of their landscapes. As we’ve explored the best strategies for managing and restoring these sections of the property, the advice we’ve received has often tended towards paying someone to think about it and do the work for us, purchasing expensive, industrially produced tools and materials, and utilising heavy machinery, all of which bring with them a substantial price tag.
In a fit of masochistic optimism, we were excited by the prospect of working to restore a degraded landscape to a level of ecological function, of seeing gully walls stabilised with plants and creeklines resounding with a froggy chorus. Many of the ideas and concepts are transferable to other regions of the world, and the authors present a well illustrated, practical and clearly written text for those involved in the restoration and management of the degraded geomorphology of small streams and river systems.Weirdly, one of the elements we found appealing about our property was the erosion. The concepts, developed by the authors, have been based on Zeedyk's experience, which has been gained from works carried out on more than 150 streams in New Mexico. Recognising that controlling erosion through the construction of check-dams was frequently ineffective and that wetlands had a value in themselves, Zeedyk latched on to the work by David Rosgen on river classification and restoration and, in the 1990s, began to experiment on the use of structures and plantings to induce the sinuosity of incised channels and restore lost floodplains. The book is by the enthusiastic Bill Zeedyk who, as a young wildlife biologist in the 1960s, began to take an interest in ways of improving degraded streams, and his friend, Van Clothier, who has contributed to explaining the scientific basis of the techniques described. This book gives practical advice, based on experience gained in the arid landscapes of the American southwest, on restoration of small floodplains and the encouragement of biodiversity, by inducing meandering in incised channels.
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