17 



then we are all going to go broke, and we are never going to get 

 there. 



Mr. Karr. I would just comment, if I may, on that as well. Many 

 proposals have been made over the last 10 or 15 years dealing with 

 issues like classified channel and cross compliance, a whole series 

 of land-planning programs within the agricultural community that 

 provide very important mechanisms to both protect the interests of 

 agricultural productivity over the short-term and the long-term 

 and the other environmental benefits that will come from these ac- 

 tivities. 



Mr. DoppELT. If I may add one thing also, I think that I fully 

 agree with what Pat just said. I would also add that for the most 

 part, farmers and ranchers and local landowners within a river 

 system or watershed don't really know how their lands connect 

 with the rest of the system and how they may be impacting folks 

 downstream or upstream of them. I think they need to be brought 

 into a process to understand how the whole system works, where 

 their lands are, what their impacts may be, who is impacting their 

 lands from above them upstream. There are a number of strategies 

 for doing that. We propose that a national watershed registry 

 system be put in place which brings together all the landowners 

 within a watershed to develop an assessment of the system, to iden- 

 tify what the problems are, to begin to look at restoration alterna- 

 tives. 



From that, I think quite often people find that restoration is pos- 

 sible, and it is not a great financial loss. In fact, it is financially 

 very helpful, but they first have to be brought into understand how 

 the system works and their role in it. 



Mr. Naiman. I would agree also, and a point I would add is that 

 the Northwest is going through at this stage is what the rest of the 

 developed world has already gone through. If we look to other de- 

 veloped countries such as Japan or throughout Europe, they went 

 through these same sorts of issues (with probably not as much scru- 

 tiny) anywhere from decade to centuries ago. 



And if we look at what is going on in many of those countries, 

 especially in Europe, they have major restoration projects on the 

 Danube, the Rhine, the Garonne, and other rivers. They realize the 

 value that the natural ecological services that those systems pro- 

 vided for them. They spent lOO's of years ago, probably the equiva- 

 lent of millions of dollars to straighten those same rivers and iso- 

 late them from the riparian floodplains. Today they are paying 

 hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars to reconnect those 

 rivers to their floodplains to get back the same ecological services. 

 In the Northwest we are very fortunate because we are not as far 

 along that continuum of degradation. We still have the possibility 

 to turn this around and have those ecological services work for us 

 essentially for free. 



Now, another aspect is what is going on in agriculture, grazing 

 lands, and forests. When we look around the world, we see plenty 

 of demonstrations of how good land management benefits either 

 the rancher, the farmer or the person working in the forest. In 

 eastern Oregon, for example, the work on rotational grazing on ri- 

 parian lands, we have streams that did not flow permanently for 

 the last 90 years flowing year round now. The ranchers now have 



