Introduction

Rock and Soil

* The SNEP Study Area

Climate

Water

Plants and Vegetation

* Ecosystems

* Insect Species Found Only in the Sierra

Animals

HUMANS IN THE SIERRA

SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

* Land Ownership and Reserve Allocation in the Sierra Nevada

The Sierra Nevada of the Future

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Humans are an integral part of Sierra Nevada ecosystems, having lived and sustained themselves at various elevations in the region for at least 10,000 years. Indigenous populations were widely distributed throughout the range at the time of European immigration. Archaeological evidence indicates that for more than 3,000 years Native Americans practiced localized land management for utilitarian purposes, including animal hunting, forest burning, seed harvesting, pruning, irrigation, and vegetation thinning. These practices no doubt influenced resource abundance and distribution in areas of early human settlement. On a longer timescale, humans may have played a role in the decline of large vertebrates during prehistoric times. Extinction of a large and diverse megafauna throughout western North America, including the Sierra Nevada, at the end of the last major ice age (around 10,000 years ago) coincided with the arrival of humans in North America. Some scientists link these extinctions to overhunting by humans of animals already stressed by changing environments.

Immigration of non-Indian settlers in the early 1800s began a period of increasingly intense resource use and settlement. By the late 1800s, parts of the Sierra had been transformed as a result of intense interest by these immigrants in Sierran resources. Agriculture, mining, logging, and grazing activities were extensively practiced in many regions of the Sierra. The need to divert water to support resource extraction and settlement led to a major reordering of natural hydrological processes through a vast network of ditches and flumes. In some areas, impacts from early use of the Sierra created rapid and irreversible changes from precontact conditions.

By the early 1920s, a new phase of Sierran history was emerging, in which resource use was more regulated and forest and range protection was emphasized. Suppression of fires became a primary goal of federal, state, and private efforts, controls were imposed on the timing and locations of grazing, and timber harvest was systematized under government and industrial forestry programs. Although trends of use have varied over the last 150 years, increasing population pressure and complex demands on Sierran resources pose serious ecological threats in some regions and severe management challenges elsewhere. Similarly, changing values for natural resources present economic and social challenges to rural communities within the Sierra Nevada.

Social Institutions

The web of institutions laid across the Sierra by successive generations of Americans is central to an understanding of the mountain range and its future management. This web is the eventual target of the current study, in that the projects assessments and strategies must be absorbed, adapted, and implemented not by the biology or geology of the mountain range but rather by the institutions through which human society operates.

Institutions are central elements in the ecology of the Sierra Nevada because they mediate the relationship betwen the labor and desires of people and the Sierran ecosystems those people use. In a biological analogy, institutionsthe governmental and nongovernmental organizations, agreements, and regulationsconstitute a key part of the life history strategy that the human species currently uses in the Sierra. Institutions are in large measure how people link themselves to other parts of the ecosystem.

Institutions govern not only what people extract from the ecosystemwater, timber, recreation, amenitiesbut also how they reinvest in the natural capital through actions such as planting trees or restoring habitats. The extent to which institutions and policies close the loopthat is, mitigate the environmental impact of human activitiesis a critical part of a Sierra Nevada ecosystem assessment.

As institutions regulate the exchanges between people and the ecosystem, they also link people who reside outside the mountain range with the ecosystem within it. Institutions that close the loop by extracting water or reinvesting (for instance, in hatcheries to mitigate for habitat loss) are also closing a loop that passes beyond the Sierra to include urban and agricultural water users in the San Francisco Bay Area, southern California, and the Central Valley. Closing the loop, then, includes identifying and accounting for the values of all stakeholders in the Sierra Nevada, regardless of their locations within or outside the range and understanding how benefits and costs flow among coupled ecosystems.

Although institutions are part of the ecology of the Sierra, nothing ensures that those institutions perceive the entire ecosystem, much less manage it in a sustainable manner. Heretofore, institutions have largely focused on portions of ecosystems. For instance, for streams on the east side of the Sierra, the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board has jurisdiction over the quality of water, the California Water Resources Control Board over the rights to the water, the California Department of Fish and Game over the trout in the water, and the U.S. Forest Service and the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection over the trees that grow next to the water. Jurisdictions split along geographic as well as resource lines. The U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service manage the land along the upper reaches of most Sierran rivers, while private landowners, the federal Bureau of Land Management, municipal utilities, and local irrigation districts manage much of the land along the lower reaches. There are no existing mechanisms to ensure that the sum of the management of the parts of the ecosystem adds up to wise management of the whole ecosystem.

Like all other parts of the Sierran ecosystem, the institutional components change over time in response to larger forces. Population growth and development bring more people into the region, increasing not only the demand for services but also the diversity of values and issues influencing management of the range. The creation of markets for values and benefits that heretofore have been allocated by right or administrative arrangementwater is the preeminent exampleupsets many existing arrangements and creates the need for different types of institutions. Interagency and intergovernmental cooperation blurs lines of authority and blunts institutional prerogative but may allow movement in arenas currently stymied by gridlock. Grassroots activism creates new institutions, which compete with existing ones for legitimacy and authority. These driving forces interact in different ways in different regions of the Sierra and force the evolution of institutions in the range.

SNEP owes its existence to the desire of Congress to search for policies and institutions that can transcend their ecosystem component status to perceive the Sierra Nevada as a set of ecosystems with links to stakeholders within and outside the range, and to manage both extraction and reinvestment to ensure the long-term persistence of the ecosystem and the people who depend upon it.