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Leased out at less than $100 an acre by the state of Washington, the 10-acre plot at the bottom of the bay is hardly expensive or large by the organization’s standards. It’s also anything but pristine—the filter-feeding oysters that once purified the water have all but disappeared under decades of accumulated debris. Even the bay itself possesses at best a compromised beauty. Still, that plot of mud may just hold the future of marine conservation. That future had rather inauspicious beginnings, ecologically speaking. In 1926 the Weyerhaeuser Timber Co. began to construct a trestle, boom and log dump at the entrance of Woodard Bay. The South Bay Log Dump provided a sheltered spot from which to sort, gather and chain logs into rafts before making the three-day tug ride to a nearby mill. From the pier and railroad tracks soaring above the bay, millions of board feet of timber were delivered weekly to the water for the mills that waited downstream. In 1988 the state purchased the former dump, inheriting an ecosystem worn threadbare both economically and environmentally. The bay’s bottom, once fertile and deep enough to drive tugs, was by then too dense with sunken logs for shellfish to survive. But beneath the surface is more than meets the eye. When the Conservancy takes on the lease this summer, the plan is to restore the bay’s health by clearing the sunken debris and reintroducing native oysters. Although the bay’s ecology stands to benefit immensely, more important is the lease itself, which marks the first time that submerged land has been leased specifically for conservation. That innovation offers a whole new way of looking at marine conservation.
For an organization accustomed to buying land in order to protect it, Beck had found a niche in marine conservation that the Conservancy seemed destined to fill. Within three years, Conservancy officials in Long Island had acquired some 11,500 acres of Great South Bay, donated by a local oyster company. Last October, the Conservancy purchased an additional 1,500 acres, bringing the total to 13,000. (See “Restoring Great South Bay,” page 2.) Most of the country’s nearshore waters are owned by the states, not private interests. The Submerged Lands Act, which Congress enacted in 1953, conveys “title and ownership of the lands and natural resources of the three-mile territorial sea to the states.” In essence, the water up to three miles from the coast belongs to the states for public navigation and for the development of commercial aquatic resources. Such control means that states can lease marine plots to private interests. In fact, as much as one-third of the United States’ submerged coastal lands are privately leased or owned—and in some cases, parcels are quite large. Moreover, billions of dollars are spent yearly to lease and develop submerged lands for oil, public marinas, private docks and aquaculture—including the cultivation of salmon, oysters and kelp. In Washington, for instance, the state’s Department of Natural Resources manages 2.4 million acres of aquatic land and has granted more than 3,000 leases for commercial purposes. In Louisiana, the state agency leases hundreds of thousands of acres—including more than 400,000 for oyster harvests. In Texas, 4 million acres of submerged coastal lands are owned and managed by the state. The leasing capability of these three states alone adds up to a landmass roughly the size of Belgium. Beck knew that all the nation’s coastal states lease marine land nearly every day. And the beauty of leasing is that, on paper anyway, it’s so easy. Potential lessees simply submit a plan for production to the state’s department of natural resources and pay a fee—a pittance compared with terrestrial costs. And in most cases, the leases are easily renewed. But until Woodard Bay, the idea of leasing for the sake of marine conservation had not been tried. In most states, ocean-bottom leases are reserved for commercial enterprises in which activities produce a physical product and generate revenue. But even though restoration and conservation increase marine biomass and generally make everything in the water healthier, such “production” isn’t necessarily the sort that’s extractable. As with nearly any innovation, the biggest obstacle facing the prospect of conservation leasing was a conceptual one: Could state governments learn to recognize conservation and restoration leases as viable uses of public lands and justify them as nontraditional sources of production?
With these questions in mind, Beck led a review of state policies to determine where there might be opportunities to engage in conservation-oriented leasing and ownership. The goal was to prove that a lease—one that works within an already delineated state system of aquatic leasing—could be a practical conservation option. Ultimately, the aim was to create a precedent for states across the country. The 10-acre Woodard Bay pilot lease this summer will mark a major achievement for the conservation community, but it is the repeated use of the concept that will, according to Beck, transform the idea from what he calls a boutique approach into one with national ramifications. That idea appeals to the Russell Family Foundation, which has donated $90,000 to the Conservancy’s Washington chapter, most of it designated for this project. Says Nancy McKay, the foundation’s environmental program manager, “Our desire to fund this [lease] program … was so this concept could be used not just once. We’d like to see it developed … and accepted by agencies in authority.” Among the states the Conservancy views as promising for conservation leasing, where policies include environmental preservation and stewardship, are California (where the Conservancy is bidding to lease more than 200 acres of kelp forests), Hawaii, New York, North Carolina, Oregon and Texas. “I think we’ll find that there are three types of states,” says Beck. “Ones that want to lease for restoration. Others that say, ‘Maybe you can sneak it under the wire or make the policy more explicit.’ And those that say, ‘No, it doesn’t fit with our policy.’” In Mississippi, for example, Margaret Bretz, a senior attorney in the state’s public lands division, likes the idea of conservation leasing because it would give form to a philosophy that already exists in that state. “We have a declared public policy that favors the preservation of the natural state of [the] tidelands and its ecosystems,” says Bretz. “That dovetails perfectly with leasing for the purposes of conservation. I think this idea can work and may be the only way to have private conservation efforts on submerged lands in many states, because these lands are held in [public] trust.”
Getting Its Feet Wet On a drizzly day in September, Roger Fuller, a Conservancy landscape ecologist, sloshes through the Port Susan Bay preserve’s tidal flats at low tide. Along with the pattering of rain, the sound of rubber boots slurping in and out of the mud dominates. In one direction are the foothills of the Northern Cascades; in the other, the Olympic Mountains loom through low clouds in the west. “Around here they say that negotiations can only start after 500 cups of coffee—and it’s the last five that count,” Fuller says. The years of negotiations paid off: “Very few entities own estuarine habitat at a sufficient scale to allow experimental approaches to the whole ecosystem,” he says. With its diversity of tidal habitats, Port Susan Bay is one of the most important stops for migratory birds along the Pacific Flyway. And though 85 percent of its historic tidal marsh was significantly altered by dikes built for agriculture in the late-19th and 20th centuries, the preserve and adjacent areas are still home to a multitude of fish, including threatened chinook and three other types of salmon.
The resulting logjams will provide habitat for fish, create stream channels for salmon and catch sediment to form new marshes. Beyond the need to re-establish Port Susan Bay in its vital role as a home and nursery for a range of species, the preserve is significant because of the Conservancy’s role as primary steward on the property and the experimentation and pilot studies that accompany such a position. As well, Port Susan Bay acts as an incubator for partnerships the Conservancy is cultivating with local communities, government agencies, universities and Native American tribes. Still, just as important was Port Susan’s role as icebreaker for the Conservancy and the state in the realm of aquatic leasing. “The purchase was a green flag and a real driving force,” says Paul Dye, former marine conservation coordinator for the Conservancy in the northwest region and one of the contacts between the organization and the state of Washington during the initial lease talks. “Even within the Conservancy, people were cautious about what to do next because some didn’t want to dig any dry wells, so to speak. After Port Susan, we knew [we] were really interested in getting involved.” A Confluence of Circumstances “In October 2000 a constituent asked me if he could lease an area of state-owned aquatic lands—that had been encumbered by a finfish netpen—to preserve the site in its natural condition,” remembers Udelhoven, who is something of a governmental Renaissance man, having served in both the Army and the Peace Corps. At the time, the state Department of Natural Resources, which manages Washington’s state-owned aquatic lands, leased those lands according to only three of its primary mandates: public use and access, water-dependent use, and renewable-resource use. The agency was not leasing submerged land to ensure environmental protection—the other of its four primary mandates. “I thought to myself, ‘It’s ironic, you’re not supposed to lease to protect … you have to lease for purposes that impact,’” says Udelhoven. “But later I began to think, ‘If someone wants to lease to protect, at least it’s legitimate.’ And for the most part, all of the necessary statutory mechanisms are in place to make it happen.” By that point, Beck had organized a workshop in New York focusing on conservation leasing—the first conference of its kind. He asked Conservancy officials in Washington state to invite a representative from the state Department of Natural Resources. The representative turned out to be Udelhoven. “It was a ready-made situation,” says the Conservancy’s Dye. “Mike [Beck] had asked me to forge a relationship and see if I could find anyone interested, and when I started to tell Jay [Udelhoven] our idea, he just looked at me and said, ‘It’s really funny that you say that, because I have been thinking the exact same thing.’ That was really the dumb-luck part, because without that chance interest, the idea could have easily sat on some bureaucrat’s desk for a long time.” With a state partner willing to make a philosophical shift from allowing public lands to be used for revenue generation to allowing them to be used for restoration and conservation, the time needed to realize the lease was drastically reduced. In 2003 the Conservancy—after raising private funds and receiving the grant from the Russell Family Foundation—sponsored Washington State University and the Department of Natural Resources in the development of a training session that provided instruction to approximately 50 staff members in the department. Among other things, the session introduced lease documents and fleshed out questions about operations, maintenance and monitoring for conservation leases. Udelhoven is the first to admit that conservation leasing represents a conceptual leap for the state agency. While some in the Department of Natural Resources are wary of placing more management in the hands of private conservation organizations, others believe it’s an idea whose time has come. And it facilitates the flow of private conservation and restoration dollars, which the states themselves aren’t able to raise. “The pilot lease with the Conservancy shows that we’re willing to try new and different ways to keep that commitment [to conservation], and that it is possible to fulfill more than one mandate at once,” says Doug Sutherland, Washington’s Commissioner of Public Lands. “There are bound to be conflicts,” Sutherland continues. “At some point, there may well be two different interests wanting to lease the same piece of ground. This is new, and for some folks it’ll take some getting used to.” But, he adds, “if other states follow suit, folks will say we were on the leading edge. Some may say we went off on a wild goose chase. Either way, we are out there testing what’s possible, looking at new ways to fulfill our commitment to conservation in a changing world, and what we find––for better or worse––may help other states with their programs.”
Defining Success When they get to the water, White points toward the bay and the pilings shooting above the surface. “The lease will be in that area,” he indicates. With the tide rolling in, the water laps against a shore that’s a mixture of mud and sand. “And the first thing we’ll need to do is survey and take core samples to make sure there’s nothing toxic under that parquet floor of logs lying on the bay’s bottom.” According to White, at the same time that survey work is being done, experiments to determine the presence of native oysters in the bay will move into high gear. In one test, so-called shell necklaces will be suspended in the water in an effort to attract any naturally occurring native oyster larvae migrating to the site. In the best-case scenario, when the logs are removed, larvae will be looking for a new place to call home. More likely, native oysters from surrounding areas will have to be planted. Either way, new oysters should do much to improve the ecosystem. An adult oyster can filter as much as 60 gallons of water a day, eliminating harmful nutrients. When the rain starts, the two men head back to the parking lot and then drive to a pub called the Fish Bowl, where they continue to talk shop. They agree that the Woodard Bay lease is a huge achievement for marine conservation. “But success will come only when more leases are signed on and the idea has taken hold,” says Udelhoven. “The conservation leasing program is the most important thing I’ll do in Washington.” Alex Crevar is a freelance writer now living in Croatia and working on a book about that country’s islands. His work has appeared in National Geographic Traveler, Texas Monthly and The Miami Herald. Photographer Natalie Fobes is the co-founder and past president of Blue Earth Alliance, an arts education nonprofit dedicated to helping photographers pursue projects that educate the public about endangered environments and threatened cultures. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Smithsonian, Sunset, Newsweek and Audubon. |
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northeast of Olympia, Washington, from beneath abandoned railroad tracks and tired-looking pilings, from beneath the surface of water that is the color of the mud below, comes the promise of renewal. Here in Woodard Bay, several hundred yards from shore, beneath the rickety reminders of an industrial past, lies a plot of “submerged land” that may represent one of The Nature Conservancy’s most important investments.
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