With the hire of a new director for the Rio Salado Audubon Center, the Arizona Audubon Society is moving forward on its plans to teach underprivileged children about nature with interactive technology. 

The new downtown Phoenix education center targeting underprivileged youth will be a part of the larger local effort to bring nature into urban settings. 

Cheryl McNabb, the newly appointed director of the center, said that the center will avoid a traditional museum-like atmosphere. “There’s going to be an interactive educational design to help educate students about nature and conservation,” said McNab, the newly appointed director of the center. “We’re going to make it fun, as well as educational.”

The contribution by the Audubon Society adds an educational component to the 85 million dollar Phoenix-Rio Salado Restoration Project, which has already served as an experiment in its own right. 

The center, planned for the intersection of the Rio Salado River and Central Avenue, will be part of the Rio Salado Restoration site, just a few miles from the center of downtown Phoenix.

The nature center, like the Rio Salado Restoration Project, is part of Phoenix’s experiment in bringing nature back into urban areas. 

“This is one of about five or six new projects that we (at the Audubon Society) are putting into urban settings, because we really want to reach out to students who are in an urban environment and wouldn’t be able to see natural areas otherwise.”

As one of the first major restoration projects of an urban river in the nation, the collaboration between the Army Corps and the City of Phoenix on the Rio Salado project has drawn its fair share of criticism and acclaim, as it attempts to adapt to the unique challenges of bringing a river back to life in a desert city.

The urban desert setting initially presented serious challenges for efforts to secure water said project coordinator Karen Williams. “Water’s never free in Arizona. Every drop of water we use, we have to replace it, and we have to pay for it. We can’t tap into household use because of the drought and water management plan for the city.”

The problem, according to Williams, has been largely solved through creative use of treated wastewater and runoff from golf courses. As part of the project, wastewater from Phoenix is cleansed and released into recharge wells. This adds water to the underground aquifer to replace the water that is pumped from the ground farther south for use in the restoration effort. The project currently adds more water to the Phoenix aquifer than it takes out, Williams says.

Some environmentalists have found the solution lacking, insisting that until upriver dams are removed the Rio Salado can’t be considered restored. 

According to Dr. Robin Silver, M.D., director of the Arizona Biodiversity Council, which has been an advocate and partner in the San Pedro River and Fossil Creek restoration projects, “You can have some native habitat, but without a natural pattern of flooding there will be the tendency for the area to be overtaken by exotic plants.  Consequently (the Rio Salado project) is more of a large scale gardening project than a restoration project.”

For those working on the project, the use of groundwater was seen as a necessity for moving forward. 

“The dams are going to be there, at least for the rest of our lifetime. Part of what we’re doing is something that has never really been done. We have such a degraded hydrology, that we have to make sure that there are other ways to ensure water availability,” Williams said.

Whether or not the river will truly be restored, the restoration project plan is a significant change from the dry riverbed, filled with trash and pocked by gravel mines that existed when the project was proposed. The plan includes over 200 acres of native vegetation, which contributors to the project hope will serve as valuable habitat for native species. “The Phoenix Rio Salado area was a privately owned site that was filled with trash and the city of Phoenix took the risk to purchase the land and clean it up. Now we’ve documented 88 different bird species at the site,” Williams said. 

Though Williams already sees success, she recognizes that many questions are still unanswered.

“This is the first restoration project the Corps of Engineers has done without a natural source of water. We see this as kind of a living experiment and we want to apply lessons learned and change what we are doing based on what we find out.”

An ongoing debate in the scientific community about restoration lies at the heart of this uncertainty over the Rio Salado restoration experiment. Ecologists disagree over how to measure success of restoration projects and what it means for a natural system to be sustainable. Deciding on the correct method for bringing back damaged environments is hindered by the mysteries surrounding ecosystems. Why are some ecosystems more stable than others? Why are some able to bounce back after disturbances such as drought or climate variation while others appear to be permanently changed? Though many theories exist, these questions continue to perplex scientists. 

Many scientists and environmentalists, like Silver, believe that only full restoration of natural processes can hope to protect an ecosystem from future damage.  Others insist that the environment is fairly tough in the face of disturbance. If given some of the basic structural elements such as native vegetation, they believe that an ecosystem is likely to eventually become stable on its own.

While this debate continues, a general consensus exists among most environmentalists and scientists that efforts to protect and restore Arizona’s rivers must move forward.

A combination of natural fragility and human demand for water has destroyed as much as 90 percent of riparian habitat in Arizona, according to Tom Hildebrandt, vice president of the Arizona Riparian Council, a river advocacy and education group. 

“We have already lost a significant portion of our riparian habitat. We have also seen a change in composition of vegetation, with more alien species in riparian areas,” Hildebrandt said. “With 5.2 million people in Arizona the riparian areas will never be the same. Invasive species, dams and competition for water make it unreasonable to assume that is possible. However they can be better than they are now, and they need to be established as a priority in discussions about water allocation.”

For the Arizona Riparian Council and the Rio Salado Audubon Center, education is the first step.

“You can’t do enough teaching to children and adults about the environment and how to keep it safe and healthy,” McNab said.

As efforts to protect and restore rivers continue statewide, she and the Audubon Society believe that educating children about the importance of rivers and how to be involved in protecting them will instill an appreciation for nature even among those who may never leave their urban setting. 

“Water is such a big issue. One of our big issues is going to be water and the whole water cycle,” she said. “Everyone including the governor of the state is saying that we need to create a culture of conservation. I would like to have water conservation to a big part of the efforts here. Especially out here it’s important for people to understand how this process happens and why it’s important.”