We provided them a series. This took a time span of at least three years of ecological awareness. How do riparian areas function? What is the role of watersheds? What is the role of riparian health in relation to water quality? How do healthy riparian areas, the essential filters and buffers, help resolve water quality issues?
We then worked with them, and I might add others, to look at pilot projects, experiments, if you will, with engaged landowners who were willing to change management practices and move cattle wintering sites out of the stream valley to off-stream watering sites. They changed the distribution pattern of livestock so that they didn't spend so much time in a riparian zone or in the stream zone.
Then there was engaging the community in a series of field trips and social events, eventually leading them to the realization that they had to measure riparian health. They had to have a benchmark of where they were. Creating that benchmark was done over a span of a couple years. Then there was coming back in about a five-year time span and remeasuring riparian health, based on the management changes they had done. Then there was helping them use that information to promote the idea that they would be good, and were being good, stewards of the land and were making progress, even though there were big challenges. Those changes would have to happen probably over the span of a decade or two, not overnight.
In so doing, they were providing a message to the outside world that these people were not destroying riparian areas. They were not destroying the watershed. Indeed, they were working on creative and consultative ways of increasing riparian health, and in so doing, water quality for downstream water users.
We're still working with that watershed group and probably will continue to work with them for the foreseeable future. I think we've been working with them now over the span of nine years. This, quite literally, is a patient person's business.