CBC In Chico

Why Watersheds?

By Phillip Wallin, River Network

www.rivernetwork.org

Albert Einstein said, "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." This is especially true in the environmental area. There is a need for a new, holistic way of thinking and acting that looks at complete systems, not isolated elements.

The watershed is emerging as the holistic frame of reference in which environmental issues will be addressed in the years to come. Why? Because ridgelines divide the landscape into geographic units within which environmental problems can be addressed effectively. The critical factor is water, the medium through which energy, elements, soil, and pollutants circulate through the biosphere. Watercourses tie together the headwaters and the estuary, the land and the water, the forests and the farmland and the cities. For these reasons, the watershed has become the most practical unit for an ecosystem approach to resource issues.

Watersheds naturally create workable units that bring various interests together for solving complex social concerns. The activities of people upstream have an impact on lives downstream. Everyone in a given watershed depends on watershed health for drinking water, flood protection, protection from toxics, sustainable resources, and other quality of life elements.

Political boundaries are often arbitrary. So many of the issues that confront us, especially environmental issues, cannot be resolved within the limits of a city, county, or state. Living in a watershed gives us all a kind of citizenship that is based on real things — water, soil, geography. The quality of drinking water is unrivaled as an environmental concern, and that drives us toward a watershed perspective.

A watershed approach is also valuable because it binds together people from different walks of life — loggers and miners in the headwaters, farmers and ranchers in the rural valleys, recreational and environmental interests, businesses, and water users in the cities. Approaching problems from a watershed perspective requires us to find common ground among people who see things very differently. It is no coincidence that the watershed approach to problem solving results in a process that is much more inclusive and cooperative than traditional forms of environmental issue resolution.

Within the river protection community, it has become obvious that meaningful results cannot be obtained by focusing on river segments, or on mere watercourses. We have to follow the problems that afflict our rivers to their sources in land-use, follow them all the way to the headwaters. In the last few years, "non-point pollution" — polluted runoff from farms, forests, ranches, and developed areas — is far and away the most serious threat to river systems. We have embraced the watershed approach as a way to get a handle on the forces that determine whether our rivers will live or die.