As a boy, Alabama-born army brat Fred Phillips dreamed of moving west and becoming a cowboy. Today, he’s a restoration practitioner and musician but, as he proceeds to point out, he didn’t miss the mark by much. The job descriptions do end up having quite a bit in common.
A failing landscape-architecture student at Purdue, Fred floundered around looking for inspiration until a friend gave him the telephone number of Dennis Patch, leader of the AhaKhav tribal preserve near Yuma, Arizona, who’d indicated he might have a park-design project for someone bored and idealistic. Fred claims he knew the phone call would change his life, and when Patch suggested he meander down for the summer, Fred and his then-girlfriend drove across the country for a look.
What he found was ‘dire,’ ‘stagnant,’ and ‘disastrous’: an ecosystem completely upended by serial damming, the subsequent invasion of exotic plants that choked out native species, and landscape ill-treated by decades of human use as a dump. Every drop of the Colorado River (considered the most threatened in the United States) had been allocated and diverted: to Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas and other desert cities desperately thirsty for water, not to mention the two million acres of agriculture reliant on the river for irrigation. Indeed, the river manifestly vanishes at the Mexican border, failing to reach the Sea of Cortez; sections of the river where 300,000 cubic feet of water per second had once flowed now only trickled at levels of three to five thousand.
The dams canceled out the migratory cycles of the Colorado salmon, ibis and tern (the fish replaced by non-native tilapia and bass) and eradicated the mountain lions and black panthers. Because dams denied the river of its springtime flooding, exotic plants like tamarisk and salt cedar that had been introduced at the turn of the century to stabilize riverbanks overtook the native riparian cottonwood, willow and mesquite, for whom flooding is a vital part of the life cycle. The exotics sucked up more water than the thrifty natives, further contributing to the dearth of water. Soil had turned to sand; cottonwood forests had given way to invasive, profuse thickets of salt cedar; the ground was littered in trash.
The Colorado River corridor is a particularly important land feature to the American Southwest, supporting a third of all its plant and animal species on only 5% of the land. Of the 450,000 acres existing in 1919, however, only 120,000 were left, and of these remains, only 25,000 acres hosted native habitat. All in all, 90-95% of the land between the Hoover Dam and the delta had been degraded. Cottonwood willows native to the environment had supported sixty species of birds/animals; the new tamarisk forests only welcomed about ten.
Instead of building a two-acre park for the community, as Patch’s had originally suggested, Fred suggested restoring and re-vegetating a chunk of the river, and offered to put a proposal together himself. He dug up an old Mac, cleared out a former kindergarten classroom to use as an office, slept in someone’s basement in exchange for dinner once a week, and sought out USGS maps and old aerial photographs. Hiking and camping in the area had unearthed a ten-acre site he thought might successfully be re-vegetated, so drew up an oversized, intricate color plan and wrote an accompanying booklet. But the summer had ended, and it was time to go home.
Dennis Patch called a few months later to invite Fred back for another summer; a small grant from the Bureau of Indian Affairs had unearthed $10,000 for several acres of tree planting and an hourly rate for Fred and two interns. This time, they upgraded to a hut house accessorized with bullet holes, with blow-up mattresses for beds and lawn chairs for furniture. By the end of that summer, they’d put together a 300-page plan that discussed the acquisition of permits, ways to dredge the river, how much dirt to move, how many trees to bulldoze, and suggested building a plant nursery to cultivate native plants. A consulting firm would have charged half a million for this type of proposal; they’d done it for $7.50 an hour. Shortly thereafter, real money arrived: a state grant worth a million dollars. “Getting up with the money is actually the easy bit,” says Fred. “Coming up with a plan and implementing it—that’s hard.”
Newly energized, they forged on, hiring local youth to dig out three miles of river channel, revegetate 400 acres of tamarisk, blaze four miles of trails, build boat docks and a swimming area. Four semis and a crane dredged out a channel; the dredge went 24/7 for eight months. They bought canoes for the recreation program and organized Saturday morning trips down to the canyon for local kids. They established a nursery, which grew 5,000 plants its first year; today, they churn out 50,000, making it one of the largest on the river. Fred eloquently describes the work as “hard-core, ass-kicking labor.”
The project was not without its problems. Fred, a white man on an Indian reservation, occasionally ran into trouble; if people appreciated what he was doing, they didn’t always appreciate that it was he doing it. “It’s much easier being green in Asheville or Austin or Boulder,” says Fred. “Being an ecologist on an Indian reservation takes a little more sacrifice. You can’t just pop in, a consultant or PhD student, and expect immediate results. Effectuating change requires infiltrating a community and setting up an infrastructure. Culture shifts take time.” And stamina, apparently. Six years after Fred’s initial road trip to the AhaKhav reservation, though, 1,100 acres of degraded river corridor had been restored, $6.5 million in grants had been raised and spent locally (in an area of 3,000 people), and the project, one of the first of its kind, had become a model for river restoration.
It was time to move on. After setting up Fred Phillips Consulting, an LLC that specializes in ecosystem restoration, grants, landscape architecture, and revegetation, Fred attacked the Yuma East Wetlands, a twenty-five mile stretch south of AhaKhav connecting the last dam and the delta that integrates federal, private, city, and reservation-owned land. Naturally, the involvement of so many interest groups complicates things. There are nervous farmers, who’ve built a billion-dollar industry upon water-hungry lettuce heads and don’t want their water ‘stolen’; Native American leaders, whose relationship with the city is tetchy at best; the City, whose politicians align themselves based on public perception, and a dozen other interest groups. Frenzy over border security has the federal government wanting to cut down all the trees and build a big wall. Fred’s alternative eradicates the choking tamarisks but protects the native cottonwoods, so the border patrol has visual clearance but the environment stays intact. So far, 1400 acres of degraded river corridor have been restored in the Yuma East Wetlands, and no one has been murdered yet. One day, seven years after cleaning up a salt cedar forest that had been used as a refuse dump, Fred even saw a bald eagle fly out of the one the trees they’d planted.
Future projects for Fred’s consulting company include a trail corridor master plan for the city of Las Vegas and restoring 20 miles of river corridor in Glen Canyon, and although individually all of these projects are baby steps, Fred doesn’t think that reconditioning the whole of the Colorado River is an impossible dream; already the scope of their accomplishment has exceeded his wildest expectations. “You know, if we can build skyscrapers and tunnels under the Chesapeake Bay, we can restore the whole river,” he says. “Conservation just needs to make economic sense—then we’ll see more of it.”
When asked about the vital components to a project’s success, Fred leans back and reflects, then numbers off his fingers. “Projects like these need a political champion,” he begins. “You need a good plan, and you need to allow people to buy into the plan. You need the startup money to get the ball running, and then the project will take on a life of its own.” He hopes to get a permanent endowment for the Yuma East Wetlands project, so its operational costs can be paid by the interest.
On my way out, Phillips was trawling Ebay for a hat the likes of Clint Eastwood’s in Pale Rider. There was no need for a hat—the man had already proved himself a cowboy.
In October and November 2006, I meandered circuitously between San Francisco to Miami under the auspices of Minnesota-based nonprofit Renewing the Countryside, interviewing farmers, ecologists, musicians and activists for a book on youth revitalizing rural landscapes all across America. Hero-bosses Jan Joannides and Brett Olsen have allowed me to post my interviews here, but look for them in the Youth Renewing the Countryside book, due out in the spring of 2008.
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