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Science by Consensus
Scientists have long been loath to suggest protective policies for the Estuary because of their enormous uncertainty about how the ecosystem, in all its complexity, actually works. But most agree that 100% certainty will be a long time and a lot of unavailable dollars coming, and that by then the last few winter-run salmon and smelt might be belly up.
For most of the water wars, meanwhile, scientists have found themselves flanked by lawyers and policymakers at the podiums of adversarial proceedings - a far cry from the textbook view of scientists as neutral observers.
"Scientists have been used as advocates, each presenting the views of a particular agency, water user or environmental group," says estuarine scientist Wim Kimmerer in a recent paper. "Opportunities for subjectivity abound in such a framework. The result has been a lack of agreement on key facts about the Estuary, on interpretation of analyses and on the likely results of management actions - a major impediment to resolution."
The policy gridlock was partly broken in the latest water wars offensive by a fresh approach to the science. In the four years before the Bay-Delta accord, local scientists - from the engineers at the pump controls to the hydrologists at the flow meters and the biologists at the fish screens - participated in what has been called "consensus science" as workshop participants, species recovery team members and negotiators.
Who knows what William Safire might make of the term "consensus science," but a general definition would be to place a diverse group of scientific peers face-to-face, give them a specific problem, then ask them to find enough common scientific ground to reach consensus and make a recommendation, which in turn might inform policy.
This approach is a departure, in many ways, from the textbook view of scientists holed up in ivory towers in search of tiny kernels of untruth. "The role of scientists is usually to question," says consulting ecologist Jeff Harte, referring to the classic scientific duo of theory and falsification. "What's hidden is all the stuff we've come to accept," he says. The step-by-step path from hypothesis to testing to results to peer review to general acceptance was sped up and enhanced by the consensus science that backed up the Bay-Delta accord.
Another departure was synthesis. Traditionally, scientists have been most comfortable sticking like glue to their own disciplines and data and to not making wild leaps into what it all means in the big picture. But in the Estuary's case, such leaps were sorely needed.
"Vast amounts of data had been generated but no one ever really put it together to say what it meant," says U.S. EPA's Tim Vendlinski, who organized a series of consensus-building workshops two years ago for scientists under the S.F. Estuary Project. The purpose of the workshops was to develop a rationale for an estuarine standard - such standards, and what science they should be based on, were some of the most insurmountable obstacles in the early water wars.
Peter Moyle, who participated in the workshops and led the Delta's Native Species Recovery Team (another consensus-driven effort), says the group approach gave scientists access to hot, new data. "We've got all this unpublished stuff in our heads, some observation we made on the boat yesterday, some new data from the lab," he says. "As long as everyone at the table respects you, it's an opportunity to work with the most up-to-date information. It also encourages us to break out of our inherent caution and conservativeness as scientists because everyone at the table signs off."
Kimmerer writes that the workshops produced one of the first forceful statements from a diverse group of scientists about the response of the Estuary to freshwater flow. And their recommendation for a salinity rather than flow-based standard provided the scientific justification for the new standards in the Bay-Delta accord.
Randy Brown is one of the scientists who didn't concur with the findings of the workshops. Brown, of the state's Department of Water Resources, had reservations about the approach. "The data should be so clear you don't need consensus," he says. "In the short run, maybe it helps coalesce some ideas. But in the long run, only the hard data will tell you if you're doing the right thing." Brown also thought the workshops should be revolving around outflow not salinity. Outflow has long been the focus of those scientists at the helm of the state and federal water project pumps, and Brown and BurRec participants at the workshops had similar problems with the focus. Though all participated in the scientific dialogue, none signed the final document. But 23 others concurred.
"Consensus science doesn't mean everyone has to be on board before anything can happen," says another participant, EPA's Bruce Herbold. "That's not the way science should work." But what it does mean, if you get enough of the best and brightest to concur, is that regulators have to pay attention.
But it took more than the workshop recommendations to make the leap from science to policy. After the workshops, it was Herbold's job to go back to the more outflow and operations-oriented scientists from Water Resources and BurRec, many of whom were engineers, and to hammer out the evolving salinity-based standard for the accord. Those follow-up meetings involved him in consensus-building on a smaller scale between state and federal agency scientists, and between two different views of the world.
"Engineers generally assume that nature exists for human purposes and that they can mitigate virtually all negative impacts arising from their projects," writes political scientist Paul Sabatier in a recent paper. "In contrast, wildlife biologists tend to view virtually all species as having intrinsic worth and are skeptical of the ability of humans to manipulate natural systems without unforeseen adverse consequences..."
Despite different world views, Herbold says that at a certain point on the science side of the Bay-Delta negotiations, a few biologists and a few engineers bridged the communications gap and "really drove this thing."
"Integration between the physical knowledge that engineers have and the biological knowledge that biologists have has skyrocketed as a result of this effort," says Herbold. "We're so far beyond where we were, I'm really jazzed."
The science behind the accord didn't stop with the state and federal engineers and biologists. The water users and watchdogs - the CUWA/AG coalition (California Urban Water Agencies and the agricultural interests) and the environmentalists - also pitched in with their own proposals and opinions.
"It was kind of a poor man's peer review," says the Bay Institute's Gary Bobker. "It enabled us to get past misunderstandings of the science and better receive improvements to the science."
While consensus science may not be a panacea for all the tough environmental questions of the future, its role in the Bay-Delta accord suggests the importance of providing more opportunities for scientists to step down from their ivory towers and single interest soapboxes and step into conference rooms where they can put their heads together. In this scientific synergy, perhaps, lies the closest we can get to truth in terms of our relationship with what's left of nature.
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