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For River Restoration Company, Business is Booming
By BRETT FRENCHOf The Gazette Staff It seems fitting that next door to where the government once considered building a hydroelectric dam - a structure that would have flooded much of Montana's Paradise Valley - Mike Sprague headquartered his river restoration business. "Nature did a great job, we try not to screw it up," Sprague says while gazing across the lush valley, its basin etched by the Yellowstone River with the Absaroka Mountains as an abrupt backdrop. "Our motto is: First do no harm." Sprague's business - Trout Headwaters, Inc. - got its start 12 years ago in Livingston in a reversal of the usual business concept. A landowner asked Sprague for advice on how to restore a section of river on his property. "What would you do if this was yours?" Sprague recalls the man asking. Sprague was a fishing guide at the time and a "trout hugger" philosophically speaking. In his previous life, he had been a photojournalist for global news network Agence France-Presse, covering such subjects as President Reagan's historic trip to Russia and Ollie North's Iran-Contra trial. Yet Sprague had no practical experience in river restoration at the time, just an intuitive sense of what makes a trout stream healthy. So he suggested doing a baseline study to assess the ecosystem. "Sounds great," Sprague recalls the man saying. "Can you get the people?" It didn't hurt that the landowner was Roger A. Enrico, at the time the CEO of PepsiCo, the world's second-largest soft drink company. "I didn't intend to start the company," Sprague says. "But pretty soon I woke up and had all of this work to do." To help him out in his new business venture, Sprague began recruiting the best water resource professionals he could find. Now, 400 projects and a couple of hundred clients later, Sprague says he's doing the job with the same basic guideline - a guarantee of 100 percent satisfaction, what he calls the "no weasel clause." Sprague got into the business at the right time. Since 1990, river restoration has become a $1 billion-a-year business in the United States. There's plenty of work to go around. One estimate says that more than one-third of the rivers in the United States are impaired or polluted. But in an industry with few, if any, recognized standards and few federal guidelines, the methods used to restore rivers have often come under fire. There have been complaints of a "cookbook" application of concepts to widely varying situations. Some river systems have been bulldozed clear of vegetation and rerouted and "restored" in the name of saving them. Some of the projects, costing millions, have completely failed. A paper on restoring rivers written by professors Margaret A. Palmer, of the University of Maryland, and J. David Allen, of the University of Michigan, was subtitled "The work has begun, but we have yet to determine what works best." The academics also undertook the first study to evaluate the effectiveness of river restoration. The results of the study, which collected data on 37,000 projects, showed that only 10 percent of them documented any type of monitoring to judge the work's effectiveness. Often at the center of the discussion of river restoration's good and bad points has been David L. Rosgen, a former Forest Service hydrologist who founded Colorado's Wildland Hydrology Consultants. Rosgen's workshops have educated many of the people working in the field of river restoration today. It is Rosgen's methodology that classifies streams into specific types that is often criticized. "What Rosgen did has been incredibly important because it stimulated people to think critically about restoring streams," Palmer says in a telephone interview. "Fortunately, there's a pretty serious move away from a general classification system to restore streams. In fact, what he's putting out now is so incredibly complex to the point that you could say it's no longer a classification scheme." Do-no-harm philosophy Sprague says he is no "Rosgenaut," as the Colorado educator's disciples have been called. Instead, he's developed his company's philosophy of stream restoration by emphasizing a minimalist, "do-no-harm" approach as well as one that uses "soft" materials such as vegetation to protect streambanks from erosion. The side effect is that it is usually less expensive than using heavy equipment or hauling rock for riprap - which can be the difference between $8 a linear foot vs. $100. "The reason that riprap was so sexy and exciting is because it's heavy and massive and expensive and, as a nation, we've relied on it because its properties and effects are pretty well known," Sprague says. Since he's not a trained hydrologist or engineer, Sprague says his job in developing Trout Headwaters, Inc. has been to recruit the best scientists he can find, and then translate their sciences - what he calls English-to-English translation. "I convert all of this 'ology' to the English language so that it's useable for our clients," he says. His clients have included the federal government - the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management - as well as individual landowners. About 20 percent of the company's clients are in Montana. And since its inception, the company has grown about 15 to 20 percent annually, Sprague says, largely on word-of-mouth advertising. The company employs more than 20 people. Trout Headwaters, Inc. is one of about a dozen businesses in Montana involved in some form of stream restoration, according to Robert Ray, of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality's watershed protection section. "River restoration is a science, but it's also still an art form," he says. "There are a lot of different theories on how to do it right. Different engineering firms have different approaches they're comfortable with." Ray says Trout Headwaters, Inc. tends to look at the problems of streambank stability more holistically, a style now advocated by the Army Corps of Engineers who approve or deny stream work. Environmentalism at work Sprague's philosophical approach to river restoration seems to be a combination of advocacy for large, monied landowners - people who have the wherewithal to invest in restoration - blended with an activist environmentalist mentality. "To me, it is so unbelievable - it's exciting - that people with their own private resources will invest in leaving the planet, leaving their backyard, better than they found it," he says. "That to me is what brings me to work early and makes me stay late." While others in Montana may decry out-of-staters buying huge farms and ranches, Sprague notes that it is these same people who can afford to restore and protect waterways and the diverse ecosystems they support. That's critical, he says, because although less than 5 percent of Montana's land is in riparian corridors, they account for 80 to 90 percent of the animal and plant diversity. "It's critical habitat for bird nesting and other species, not just fish," he says. Sprague also speaks passionately about his desire to soften man's impact on the planet, the benefits of living lighter on the land. "We need to live sustainably and invest in these precious water resources," he says. "It makes good environmental and economic sense. Property values are higher, recreational use is better." Sprague backs up his environmental rhetoric with on-the-ground action in his backyard. For the past seven years, his company has sponsored the cleanup of a Livingston-area creek. Water quality deteriorating Sprague was just a teenager during the heydays of environmental activism in the 1970s. Back then, the government responded to the public outcry. In 1972, the Clean Water Act was passed creating regulations to stop surface water pollution from sources such as factories. Although government may have set the tone, Sprague says it was private investment and private companies that developed the technology to clean up rivers. Now, a similar scenario is playing out. Today in Montana, 60 percent of the stream miles assessed by the Department of Environmental Quality are not meeting federal water quality standards, Ray says. Of those 12,600 miles of waterways not meeting standards, about 90 percent are impacted in some form by nonpoint sources - such as runoff from agricultural fields or storm drains. Professors Palmer and Allen write that in 2004 - the first time since the Clean Water Act was passed - the Environmental Protection Agency found waterways getting dirtier thanks to poor land stewardship. River restoration advocates and academics are hoping the federal government will once again step in, this time to create regulations and guidelines to improve the fast-growing river restoration business, making it more accountable for the work it has done. "The problem is that there are no policies to support restoration standards, to promote the use of proven methods, or to provide basic data needed for planning and implementing restoration," Palmer and Allen write. Once that is done, Sprague says, "It will be again, private companies and private investment that repair and restore that water." Sprague acknowledges the industry's problems. "Part of the challenge to the industry is that it doesn't have a lot of tools or accepted standards or practices," he says. "It's growing and evolving, improving and changing every day." And dealing with river ecosystems, which Sprague characterizes as incredibly complex organisms, requires an understanding of those intricacies that doesn't currently exist, or is often managed for on a piecemeal basis without regard to what's going on upstream or downstream. "We have a lot to learn," he says. His hope is that the industry can learn fast enough to sustain itself. "My biggest fear is that if the industry doesn't do a better job in general, doesn't do a great job, we may diminish the appeal of the consumer," he says. "And I don't think we can afford to let that happen. I don't want anything to stand in the way of us making the planet better." New tool for the trade In an industry with few of its own tools, THI RiverWorks Inc. has come up with a shockproof, waterproof computer just for river restoration. Called the RiverWorks Rapid Assessment System, the $2,500 unit combines a digital camera, Bluetooth wireless technology and a GPS receiver to make observations while performing assessments, monitoring or inspecting. "Because the industry is so new, it was borrowing technology and tools from other industries," said Michael Sprague, CEO of THI RiverWorks. "Tools specific for its use hadn't been created." But by working through Montana State University's TechLink center, a technology transfer agency, RiverWorks was hooked up with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory for a joint project to test and refine the software program. The Corps is the chief regulatory agency for the nation's river restorations. The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation later kicked in $120,000 in funding for the project, along with other private funding sources. "We can collect two to three times as much data now than we could before," Sprague said. In announcing its support in 2002, John Berry, then-executive director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, said, "The grant to THI recognizes the opportunity for systemic change in our nation's approach to river restoration." The Rapid Assessment System is specifically designed for water resource assessment, monitoring and inspection and to assist computer modeling for restoration projects using natural materials like vegetation instead of "hard armor" like rock or concrete. "Riprap is hardly a solution to restoration," Sprague said, a technique often used in the past that he called hardening the artery. "We can do things that are more restorative and cost less." THI Riverworks has three other products being developed for the river restoration industry. Contacts
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