It begins at a glacier on an active volcano; crashes down a steep, narrow canyon, through old-growth forests and past herds of elk. Then it meanders across prairies and farmland to its mouth, a largely intact estuarine delta filled with marshes and migrating birds.

“This river is a whole different world,” said geologist Scott Beason, one of a panel of scientists introducing the Nisqually to this summer’s crop of seasonal rangers at Mount Rainier National Park last month. “There’s so much going on here it’s just insane.”

The Nisqually is a model in another important way as well.

For 20 years, it has been watched over by the Nisqually River Council, a loosely knit group of landowners, business people and government representatives who rely on consensus and a mutual appreciation of the watershed.

As the global search for ways to balance economic and environmental needs grows more desperate, the Nisqually plan has begun to stand out as a prototype. The 18-member council has had such success that its philosophical basis is being used as a blueprint for environmental management around the world.

The Nisqually process sounds simple, but it involves revolutionary shifts in thinking about politics, economics and lifestyles.

In short, rather than saving the river from people, the Nisqually River Council tries to save the river for people. Its members use collaboration instead of government regulations and the courts, looking for places where economic values and nature’s values align.

“We’re not going to get anywhere if we fight,” said Steve Pruitt, a Nisqually River landowner and longtime participant in the process.

“There is absolutely nothing to be gained by getting into a corner and saying the environmentalists are the good guys or the business people are the bad guys. That’s a monumental waste of time.

“We’re past the point where we can just protect everything for people. We need to find a way to protect the land as we live on it.”

AN UNUSUAL CONCEPT

The Nisqually, which flows along Pierce County’s southern boundary from Mount Rainier to Puget Sound, began to be recognized as an environmental treasure in the 1970s. When the Nisqually management plan was first put into practice in 1987, one of the most revolutionary things about it was the idea of defining the entire river, from source to delta, as a single, integrated whole.

At the time, that was an unusual concept.

The difficult management issues in the Nisqually watershed – salmon recovery, logging, hydropower, urban sprawl, among them – were spread among more than a dozen jurisdictions, including three federal agencies, two utility districts, four state agencies, three counties, numerous town councils, an Indian tribe and the U.S. Army.

The Nisqually River Council got them all sitting in one room and talking to each other.

Now, environmental scientists recognize that the boundaries of natural systems such as watersheds often create the most effective political boundaries.

“They were way ahead on that,” said Randy Brake, an engineer and river specialist with the Pierce County Public Works Department. “They were instrumental in leading up to the state’s Watershed Management Act.”

That act, passed in 1998, identified watersheds as management units and set a framework for developing local solutions to watershed issues.

David Batker, the co-founder and executive director of the Tacoma-based nonprofit organization Earth Economics, uses elements of the Nisqually approach on consulting projects around the world. Natural boundaries lead to a holistic view that’s unlikely to occur when boundaries are drawn using other criteria, he said.

“The Nisqually River Council has all the right players at the table,” Batker said. “It’s an open, transparent system. There are no black boxes where you don’t know what’s happening. That’s why we’re using it as a model in other countries.”

The council – made up of representatives from 19 groups, including a separate Citizens Advisory Committee – has no regulatory authority. In the early days, some saw that as a shortcoming. In retrospect, it has come to be regarded as one of the plan’s greatest strengths. Because no one can lay down the law, all participants have to struggle until they can agree.

Justin Hall, a state Department of Ecology employee who helps coordinate the council’s efforts, says the group’s method is best summarized by the three words at the bottom of its letterhead: “Collaboration, Education, Advocacy.”

“Without the power of regulation, the council collaborates on a position surrounding an issue, educates themselves and the residents of the watershed on possible solutions and then advocates change,” Hall said. “They advocate either directly to a member agency that does have the regulatory power or, more commonly, through an incentive-based program that provides assistance to operate in a more sustainable fashion.”

Other than Hall, none of the members is paid for working on the council. Each member organization provides a representative who serves as a liaison between the council and his or her agency. Officers are elected each year by council members.

The collaborative approach was the dispute-resolution model for the state Timber, Fish, and Wildlife Agreement, the much-praised 1986 accord that brought tribes, loggers, environmentalists and government agencies together to develop logging guidelines.

Successes induced Gale Norton, when she was secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior in 2005, to call the council’s work “a blueprint for cooperative conservation projects.”

The Interior Department recently featured the Nisqually River Council in a training DVD on cooperative conservation, a new direction in federal land management.

William Ruckelshaus, the first director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, was an early advocate of the Nisqually approach. Now, as head of a new state agency called the Puget Sound Partnership, Ruckelshaus is using elements of the approach in the agency’s efforts to protect and restore Puget Sound. He has referred to the Nisqually River Council as “a beacon that all can follow.”

‘PIECES JUST FALL INTO PLACE’

On a recent Friday morning at the fire station in Ashford, a meeting of the Nisqually River Council seems more like a bore than a beacon.

Shortly before 9 o’clock, two dozen council members and guests leave the bright sunshine in the parking lot and file into the meeting room, where tables and folding chairs are arranged in a rectangle. The room has just one small window and fluorescent lights. A slow-turning ceiling fan barely moves the air.

Local landowner Pruitt, drafted to chair the meeting in the absence of both the appointed chairman and the vice chairman, reads minutes from the previous month. Committee leaders give reports on land acquisition and tree planting; a guest speaker runs through a PowerPoint presentation, speaking in a monotone.

Three hours later, the meeting ends with little apparent progress.

But progress was made, Pruitt says. The value was in the personal connections, the continued awareness of others’ work and re-established trust.

“Lots of time it seems like nothing is happening,” Pruitt said after the meeting, “but then something comes up and the pieces just fall into place.”

It’s worked in the past.

The council has composed model agreements with timber owners, coming to terms on sustainable harvest levels that in many other places wound up in litigation or in stalemate. Working with the Nisqually Tribe, the council developed recovery plans for endangered salmon that became prototypes for other rivers. And members have worked hard to build an environmental ethic in the river community. Working through the council’s “Stream Stewards” program, hundreds of volunteers donate time and muscle in restoration and monitoring activities.

Most recently, the council’s groundwork set the stage for a new state park on the river – to be established in celebration of the state parks’ centennial in 2013.

ADVANTAGES AND PROBLEMS

With regard to solving environmental problems, the Nisqually has many advantages that other watersheds in the Puget Sound area do not. Thanks to its relative isolation, the river was spared the rush of development and misuse that compromised most other Washington waterways in the 20th century.

The densely populated Puyallup River watershed, for example, with its heavily channelized lower reaches and a Superfund site at its delta at Commencement Bay, faces a far more difficult recovery.

Another advantage: Much of the 760 square miles of land in the Nisqually watershed is owned by the federal government, which protected it from the excesses of private enterprise.

The Nisqually’s headwaters lie within Mount Rainier National Park, and six square miles of its delta are protected by the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge. The Nisqually Indian Reservation, held in trust for the tribe by the federal government, manages another eight square miles of the watershed.

A large chunk of the lower Nisqually lies within the Fort Lewis military reservation. Damage from heavy artillery and tank treads, it turned out, was less harmful than the highways, subdivisions and logging outside the gates.

The fort now is one of the largest remaining natural areas on Puget Sound, with 16 square miles of forests, native prairies and wetlands.

Despite its advantages, the Nisqually has the same problems as every river in Western Washington, and they are far from solved: competition for water rights, dying fish, loss of wildlife habitat, logging, agriculture, urban sprawl and pollution.

Finding solutions has meant building trust, starting with the first discussions.

“I was scared in the beginning, to be quite honest,” said Jim Wilcox, whose family has farmed along the banks on the Nisqually for nearly a century. “I thought it was the end of the line for us as far as a family farming operation.”

Wilcox said he joined the planning process on the Nisqually early, mainly because he wanted to protect his family’s interests on their 1,800 acres where they’d established a multimillion-dollar dairy and poultry business.

“There were people with all kinds of grandiose plans,” Wilcox remembered. “They were talking about things like establishing a national park all the way from Mount Rainier to Puget Sound, or putting in trails along each side of the river the entire way, with access about anyplace.

“That just wouldn’t work in terms of trying to run a farm. I was really, really apprehensive.”

As the talks continued, though, Wilcox said he changed his mind.

“Gradually, as we got into the process, I really had an about-face,” he said. “From a position of being really concerned that agriculture and the way of life I grew up with was going to be ended, I came to the conclusion that agriculture and what was in the best interest of the river could go hand in hand.”

Wilcox and his family embraced the concept of environmentally friendly farming, planting thousands of trees on their property to accommodate salmon, shutting down a large dairy operation and setting their chickens free from cages. They now specialize in free-range chickens and organic eggs, a rapidly expanding and profitable market.

Finding that kind of balance between the environment and business is what the river council is all about, members say.

“There can be more money in leaving a tree standing than in cutting it down,” Pruitt said.

Appreciating that fact, he said, creates more value than what he calls “the big bucks approach,” based on the attitude: “How much of the environment can we afford to rape?”

Along similar lines, business owners are encouraged to pursue environmentally friendly “heritage tourism,” which capitalizes on the area’s pioneer past. Owners of relatively small parcels of timber are encouraged to follow environmentally sustainable logging practices in order to be certifiably “green” and therefore demand higher prices in an increasingly environmentally conscious marketplace.

ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS

The council’s conviction that natural systems have quantifiable value was ahead of its time, says Batker, the environmental economist.

Traditional accounting methods were formulated 200 years ago, when the bounty of the natural world was thought to be inexhaustible and human labor was scarce, he notes.

Now, with the world’s population at 6 billion and some global natural systems apparently near collapse, the equation has changed.

“Natural resources have economic value that has traditionally been ignored in decision-making,” Batker said. “When we look at the work natural systems do for us, then we realize how valuable they are.”

For example, he said, healthy forests not only provide timber but also flood control and water filtration. If those functions had to be re-created with human engineering, they’d be extraordinarily expensive, and their value should be assessed with that in mind.

The concept of ecological economics has been used on the Nisqually River Council for years, Batker said.

“They really got the big picture,” he said. “If your landscape falls apart, your economy falls apart. They knew that. We need an economy that is sustainable, and that’s what they are building there.”

Sustainability is the key, Pruitt agrees.

“We’re not changing a river,” he said. “We’re changing the way we live.”

Rob Carson: 253-597-8693

The 18-member Nisqually River Council is made up of representatives from:

• Pierce County
• Thurston County
• Lewis County
• State Department of Fish and Wildlife
• State Parks and Recreation Commission
• State Department of Natural Resources
• State Department of Ecology
• Nisqually Tribe
• Citizens Advisory Committee (two seats)
• Washington Conservation Commission
• University of Washington/Pack Forest
• U.S. Army at Fort Lewis
• Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge
• Mount Rainier National Park
• Tacoma Public Utilities
• Eatonville, Roy and Yelm (one seat to cover all three towns)
• Gifford Pinchot National Forest