The role of the volunteer is not to be underestimated, and in the case of the Tanana Valley Watershed Association and other similar partnerships in Alaska, where I am focusing my research as part of my graduate studies in environmental policy, volunteers are an integral piece of a healthy watershed. Watershed partnerships are informal governing networks comprised of multiple stakeholders within an ecosystem basin.  Often these stakeholders have competing interests, but work as a body to make consensus-based decisions on things like which scientific research needs should be pursued or a plan for restoring a watershed or which issues require greater regulatory oversight. Participation in watershed partnerships is not mandatory.  The theoretical incentive is the desire to maintain a healthy ecosystem, one that can continue to provide jobs, services, clean water and a high quality of life for all.

Okay.  Tweed-wearing, pipe-smoking academic definitions aside, this seems a relevant topic as last week we were all called to serve by our new president.

An August 2008 article in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner about the two-year old Tanana Valley Watershed Association pointed to the group’s volunteer water quality testing and monitoring program as a way to engage the watershed’s residents in the changing ecosystem. The TVWA has focused on two particular projects: the above mentioned volunteer water quality monitoring program that collects information on dissolved oxygen, nitrogen, coliform and trace metals; and the development of a Riparian Management Plan, which the Association describes as a set of zoning overlays designed to protect private property investment from erosion and maintain fish habitat threatened by erosion caused by development along river banks.  The two activities are tangentially linked, in that riparian development can affect water quality, and honestly, does anyone really want to live near a nasty body of water?

At a meeting last spring, two members of the TVWA presented a slideshow and outline of the Riparian Management Plan to the Fairbanks chapter of the Alaska Miners Association.  One of the TVWA members works as a hydrologist for the US Fish and Wildlife Service.  The second presenter works for the Bureau of Land Management.  Both were speaking on behalf of the TVWA and not acting in their professional capacity.  Afterwards, during a question and answer session on the plan, skeptical members of the Miners Association criticized the plan and said they were concerned about becoming subjected to regulations that were contrived by amateurs.  One miner said “you aren’t going to get professional solutions with a bunch of well-intentioned volunteers.”

(in my best, snarky voice): Actually, I, and many others who are much smarter than me would disagree.  In his 2005 book The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman describes open-source software and a the Web platform Apache, developed by a community of online users who all decided to share information for free and make it available to the public at no charge.  Volunteers.  The only stipulation was that any changes to the software be shared in the same manner and any patents that resulted from innovation originating from the software acknowledge the source from which it was derived. This community of amateurs, (nothing more than “well-intentioned volunteers”, out-developed engineers from corporate giants like IBM, who eventually joined in and contributed to code development and the open source project.

Ironically, Friedman carries his thesis on open-sourcing to the mining industry.  He describes Canadian firm Goldcorp, which in 2000 made publicly available all of its data on a mining claim in northwest Ontario, and challenged the world’s geologists to analyze it and tell the company where it was likely to find its next big strike.  Goldcorp offered up a half-million dollars in prize money and received interest from over 1,400 scientists from around the world.  Four of the top five judged submissions resulted in the production of nearly a half-million ounces of gold, none of which might have been possible had Goldcorp not open-sourced its information to the public.  Clearly there is a disconnect, and the geologists had a rational, self-interested incentive to work on the project.  But I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to say that volunteers in the Tanana Valley Watershed are self-interested enough to put forward their time and effort for the sake of a healthy ecosystem. In fact, last summer’s modest data collection effort indicates as much.

It is this type of open-sourcing, engaging stakeholders a.k.a.“well-intentioned volunteers” as the miner pejoratively put it, in the activities and changes within their watershed, that can result in, at the very least a heightened sense of ecological awareness within the community, and at the very best, draw on unsolicited expertise that can enlighten and enhance resource agency decision making. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 at 7:39 am by Jedediah Smith and is filed under Anthropology, Democracy, Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.