In May 2022, Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer presented her book Braiding Sweetgrass at a talk given under the dappled shade of a great oak tree at Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. Late spring washed over the rows of chairs as dozens of students, faculty, and community members – and a few curious woodpeckers in the branches – listened intently to the speech. Dr. Kimmerer’s book, whose full title includes Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, calls for modern science to listen to indigenous generational wisdom. In turn, it speaks to the need for the two ways of seeing to work together for greater mutual understanding. Nearly two years after her talk, Dr. Kimmerer’s message reverberates through the woods of Jasper Ridge in the light of recent events.
Anyone familiar with Stanford’s campus has likely heard of Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. Rising discretely along the San Andreas Fault in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the area boasts rolling, oak-covered hills, forested creek channels, and pastures of wildflowers in the spring. This unassuming ridge has been the site of continuous change – in stewardship, in purpose, and in infrastructure. Most recently, Jasper Ridge has been in the public eye because of the contested fate of the Searsville Dam.
Jasper Ridge: A Short History
The construction of Searsville Dam in 1892 created Searsville Lake, a reservoir on the Corte Madera Creek channel that passes through Jasper Ridge. Sitting on the ancestral territory of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe and originally owned and operated by the Spring Valley Water Company, Stanford University purchased the land in the early 1900s. For much of the last century, the reservoir behind Searsville Dam served as a summer recreation hotspot for many Bay Area families; facilities such as a diving board from the dam, lakeside beaches, and several structures lined the shores of the artificial lake, all made possible by the great concrete wall holding back the creek’s flow.
For decades, the “lake” was used primarily for recreation by local families. Then, in 1973, Stanford turned the area into a biological research preserve and shortly thereafter closed down the property to the public. The recreational infrastructure surrounding the reservoir was removed, and the body of water was left to seemingly fit into the natural landscape.
The Current Problem
One of the primary problems facing the reservoir and its custodians today, however, is the fact that approximately 90% of the artificial lake’s former carrying capacity has been inundated with upstream sediment. That sediment that would usually flow downstream has no way to bypass the dam, and so today, Searsville Lake stands roughly six feet deep.
In light of this recent situation, I sat down with Professor David Freyberg – arguably the most knowledgeable faculty member when it concerns the current project at Jasper Ridge. He has been working closely on projects with the preserve for decades, often taking his classes on field trips or consulting Stanford’s water department. He explained to me the current issues facing Searsville Dam, the interested parties involved, and some of the possible futures that Stanford is currently considering in their project to reassess the dam.
Professor Freyberg pointed out three main issues that the university is facing: the dramatic decrease in water holding capacity due to accumulation of sediment, the impacts of changes made to the dam on downstream communities, and the passage of endangered steelhead trout into spawning areas above the dam – something that was rendered impossible with its construction in 1892. With these factors all coming to a head in recent years, the university has set a project in motion to address them.
“The basic structure of the solution is to bore a tunnel at a low level through the dam with a gate on the upstream side” according to Professor Fryberg and the Searsville Watershed Restoration Project website. This plan was chosen among a variety of options considered. Although Professor Fryberg thinks it will take several years before the end goal is realized, he spoke about how this project would address multiple objectives.
“So, there really are kind of three goals that are driving it,” says Professor Freyberg when asked about the project’s focus. “One is fish passage, two is sediment management and three is impacts on the downstream communities during flooding events, so the goals have been to try to allow fish passage, to mitigate the sediment accumulation that has occurred, and to have as positive a benefit on downstream flood peaks as is feasible given the other two goals.”
Various Interests
Over the past few decades, there have been a variety of opinions concerning the fate of the dam, from concerned residents downstream who want the dam raised in case of floods to environmental activists who for decades have been calling for it to be taken down. Professor Freyberg spoke about how environmental activists have been pushing the university to remove or alter the dam in the interest of the fish population for decades, a stint that included a lawsuit against the university in relation to the Endangered Species Act. Although the case was stayed, he made clear that the reason for the current project is evident.
“It's really the endangered species that are driving the choice of solution, in this particular case.” In terms of the choice of solution that he refers to, the relevant advisors have discussed other possible outcomes, including letting the reservoir completely fill in with sediment and transitioning the ecosystem into a meadow habitat. This would create a waterfall over the current dam and, with fish ladders installed to aid steelhead passage, was seen as one of the options available to the dam ecosystem. Because the steelhead are the driving force, however, Professor Fryberg made clear that the prospective tunnel is the best way to achieve the main goal – to support the reintroduction of this species into channels upstream of the dam.
Broader Implications
I wanted to know if this project on Searsville Dam had any broader national or societal relevance, since dam removal has become increasingly common in the United States in the last several decades. With recent successful removals on the Elwha River in Washington and the largest dam removal project in U.S. history currently in operation on the Klamath River in Oregon and California, I wanted to know how Searsville fit into this picture.
Professor Fryberg spoke about the fact that many dams in the United States are removed or altered due to safety issues – antiquated architecture, failing supports, or the cost of updating these old structures being some of the factors that go into dam removal consideration.
“Probably one of the major drivers of modification or removal is in fact dam safety,” he said in reference to the national phenomenon. He noted, however, that despite Searsville Dam’s remarkable age, it does not in fact fall into this category. Rather, as we have already seen, its alteration points to something else.
“The other major factor is a distinctive, societal refocus on ecosystem health… We’re sort of coming to terms with the environmental costs.”
Indigenous Context and Thoughts for the Future
Even though Professor Fryberg specifically attributed this societal shift to a refocus on ecosystem health, another intrinsically related aspect of many of these massive dam removals is the amplified voices of indigenous stakeholders. On the Klamath River, for example, members of the Yurok Tribe at the mouth of the river have fought for decades to remove the four dams that increase stagnated water temperature and toxicity. These conditions led to the largest salmon dieoff in the history of the western United States – a resource that the Yurok people, as well as the Karuk and Klamath tribes further upstream, have relied on for cultural and physical sustenance for generations.
Despite its current ownership, Jasper Ridge, as well as the Santa Cruz Mountains and much of the Bay Area, is the ancestral homeland of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe. Professor Michael Wilcox, a lecturer in the Native American Studies department at Stanford, has worked in Jasper Ridge and the greater Bay Area as an archaeologist and cultural historian.
I had the privilege of taking one of Professor Wilcox’s classes, where he spoke about the long inhabitance of the Jasper Ridge area and the persistence of culturally important sites within the preserve. Even though Jasper Ridge has provided educational opportunities for students to learn about local indigenous history, lack of federal recognition for the tribe has long been a roadblock for Muwekma representation.
“It’s an ongoing struggle for Muwekma,” Professor Wilcox says, “to achieve cultural recognition, to retain and reclaim their history, and also to educate people about the fact that they’re still here today – a thriving indigenous community of the Bay Area.” This fight for recognition may point to a relative lack of representation in the specific case of altering Searsville Dam; however, the shift that Professor Fryberg pointed to in terms of highlighting ecosystem health is necessarily reliant on and indebted to indigenous perspectives.
Professor Fryberg made clear that the primary reasoning for the planned alterations to Searsville Dam comes down to “a distinctive, societal refocus on ecosystem health.” Stanford’s project fits into the larger national shift towards dam removal – a trend that has largely been spearheaded by indigenous stakeholders. In light of these societal changes, it would seem we can take hope for a future that values indigenous wisdom as well as western scientific research. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer likens this pairing to the complementary relationship of goldenrod and asters:
“Might science and traditional knowledge be purple and yellow to one another, might they be goldenrod and asters? We see the world more fully when we use both.”
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Nur is a photographer and writer from small-town Oregon. He is a masters student in the Environmental Communications program at Stanford and graduated last June with a degree in English.
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