Mimicking Mother Nature

The Lower Colorado River Multi-Species Conservation Program, a $626-million joint project of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation and several Western states, is designed to offset the environmental impacts of drawing water from the Colorado River. Situated just a few miles north of where California, Arizona and Mexico meet, it looks a bit like a suburban construction site right now, though once completed it will re-create 8,132 acres of habitat: groves of cottonwood, willow and honey mesquite, ponds and marshes. Endangered birds such as the yellow-billed cuckoo and threatened fish such as the razorback sucker and the bonytail should thrive there.

Still, nature it’s not. Its orderly, vaguely kidney-shaped pools look more like the water hazards at a golf course than the random wetlands of wilderness. It will take a system of pipes to drain the ponds, biologists to oversee the species and a $25-million upkeep fund to tend to the project over the years.

There’s usually something a little pathetic about human attempts to mimic nature, or to restore it. Our attempts to save the coastal sage scrub of Southern California are another perennial reminder.

For one reason or another, settlers introduced all sorts of plants that now are crowding out the native flora: grasses (to feed cattle), black mustard (as legend has it, to show the golden path from one California mission to the next), tumbleweed (actually, that one arrived by accident, mixed with imported flaxseed). Local nature preserves hold “stewardship days,” with volunteers breaking their backs to pull out and hack down the botanical invaders. They toss wildflower seeds and plant little groves of coast live oak that look like tidy orchards.

The work is grueling and the intentions are noble, but the task is never accomplished. Once we have interrupted the balance of nature, we can seldom trust it to take its own course. We become perpetual zookeepers of endangered animals, constant gardeners of the sage scrub. Knowing how much we have changed the wild, we forever try to keep it from changing.

Even now, nature has its ways of winning. This spring is a perfect example. The abundance of native wildflowers is eye-popping, fields of them so dense they indeed sometimes look like gardens. Not that the region received so much rain; this was no El Nino winter. It’s a certain combination of the amount of rain and its timing that determines whether the indigenous plants will prevail despite the invasives. Humans can’t imitate this combination with sprinklers; no one has even figured out the magic formula, which seems to change yearly. We can only stand back and admire a calculus that has no seeming order -- which is its very beauty.

Eryn Brown and Karin Klein