Small group a big friend to rivers

By Rob Zaleski

January 30, 2001

These are not the best of times, Todd Ambs will tell you, for people who make a living trying to protect America's environment.

If it's not the PCBs and mercury that linger in our waterways, it's the numbing effect of sprawl - not just the urban variety, but the proliferation of cabins and cottages on lakes and streams throughout the country. If it's not our disappearing forestlands, it's the fear of what some think will happen if Gale Norton is approved as U.S. secretary of the interior.

"A terrible choice,'" grumbles Ambs, 42, executive director of the Madison-based River Alliance of Wisconsin. "When it comes to rivers, she's consistently said that the only people who have rights are the private property owners who live on the banks.

"She's argued that the Endangered Species Act is unconstitutional, that the naming of national monuments is unconstitutional. She's consistently taken the view that we should just leave it to industry to do the right thing."

Fortunately, Ambs says, a lot of positive things are also happening - much behind the scenes - that are giving environmentalists reason for hope. In 1990, for instance, an estimated 700 local watershed and ecological groups were scattered throughout the United States. Today there are more than 5,500.

And few of those have been as effective as the tiny, nonprofit River Alliance, which in its seven-year existence has not only earned widespread acclaim for its efforts to improve the quality of Wisconsin's 30,000 miles of rivers and streams, but has emerged as the No. 1 state group in the country in advocating for the selective removal of old dams.

Ambs notes that there are roughly 3,800 dams in Wisconsin and that a small percentage still serve a purpose. But in many instances, the dams are not only unsafe and uneconomical, but repair costs can often run in the $1 million range. In the case of municipal dams, taxpayers foot the bill.

Those dams, it turns out, are also a key reason a lot of rivers are ailing.

"Short of dumping raw sewage into a river," Ambs muses, "I can't think of anything worse you can do to screw up a river than to dump a chunk of concrete in it."

And when you remove those man-made impediments, some truly remarkable things happen, maintains Ambs, who cites the stretch of the Baraboo River that flows through downtown Baraboo as the most striking example.

Just four years ago, the water there was mostly stagnant and, on some days, downright smelly. Indeed, when the Department of Natural Resources conducted fish-shocking tests in the impoundment near Circus World Museum, it discovered just 11 species of fish, the most predominant of which was carp.

Then, the River Alliance, with assistance from the DNR, began meeting with city officials and several local groups. The Alliance said it would provide educational workshops on the long-term benefits if the city agreed to move its two downtown dams. And Alliance representatives talked to an individual who owned another, badly deteriorated, downtown dam, the Linen Mill Dam.

Today, the two city dams have been removed, the privately owned dam is scheduled to be taken out next year and the river is once again a picturesque, free-flowing waterway. What's more, the number of fish species has more than doubled - and the carp have largely been replaced by smallmouth bass.

Not surprisingly, this has spurred an economic revitalization effort in the downtown area and has suddenly made the river a hot spot for canoeists and kayakers.

"I mean, even for us, the renewal of that stretch of river was quite astounding in such a short period of time," Ambs says.

Of course, the Baraboo will never be of the same pristine quality as the Wolf or Brule rivers, he says. But when a fourth dam near La Valle, about 30 miles upstream, is removed within the next two years, it will stretch impediment-free for 120 miles and represent the largest stretch of restored natural river in the country.

Now, with its dam removal program well under way and a $380,000 annual budget, the Alliance's four full-time staffers and 1,500 members (including about 200 in Illinois) are focusing on what most agree is the boldest, most far-reaching environmental measure in state history: a 500-page proposal hammered out by a broad coalition of farm leaders, business officials and environmentalists that promises to dramatically reduce non-point pollution.