Seventy-five percent of the surface of the Earth is covered with water, but more than ninety-seven percent of it is salt water that makes up the oceans. Another two percent is frozen in glaciers and the polar ice caps, leaving only one percent of all Earthly water available in usable form for life outside of the oceans.
Water is a non-substitutable necessity of life, which makes it paramount for the long-term sustainability of communities worldwide. That notwithstanding, the capacity for a given landscape to capture and storage water is finite. Potable water, which, until recently, was thought to be inexhaustible in supply, is now becoming scarce throughout most of the world. In the western United States, for example, water pumped from deep underground aquifers is today such a valuable commodity that it is often referred to as "sandstone champagne."
The availability of water throughout the year will ultimately determine both the quality of life in a community and thereby the value of real estate. Consequently, our nation's supply of quality water is precious beyond compare. In fact, water is the most valuable commodity from our nation's forests—all of them, public and private. But then, is water really a commodity in the sense of economic markets or is access to water part of the global commons—the birth-right of every individual?
Is water to become the ultimate economic/environmental club with which we bludgeon one another? This question is appropriate because we are running out of available supplies of quality, potable water. The only solution is an environmental one—sound ecological caretaking of our nation's forests as biological living trusts on a landscape scale that first and foremost nurtures the health of soil and water, lest everything else become unhealthy. Like migratory birds and anadromous fish, environmental crises know no political boundaries. Soil, water, air, sunlight, and climate form a seamless whole, the thin envelope of life we call the biosphere, and the biosphere—sandwiched between the atmosphere and the lithosphere—is all we have in all the Universe.
The amount and quality of water available for human use are largely the result of climate and strategies for taking care of the biophysical health of our Nation's forests. In North America, sustaining the health of forests is particularly important in order to protect the annual snowpack from which the vast majority of all usable water comes. Yet protecting the quality and quantity of society's water supply is not a primary consideration of corporations, such as those dealing with logging, mining, and the grazing of livestock.
In fact, a curious thing happens when water flows outside the forest boundary: we forget where it came from. We fight over who has the "right" to the last drop, but pay little attention to the supply—the health of the forested water-catchments. Therefore, a primary goal of caretaking our nation's forests must be to protect and, when possible, enhance a forest's capacity to store water in the form of snowpack, as well as the soil's ability to absorb and store water, and a stream's ability to transport it in throughout the year.
In order to help you understand the hydrological continuum, I must discuss these topics:
THE STORAGE OF WATER
The storage of a community's water originates in the soil of high mountains far from the tap you turn to fill a glass with this most precious of liquids. Water is stored in four ways: (1) in the form of snowpack aboveground; (2) in the form of water penetrating deep into the soil, where it flows slowly belowground; (3) in belowground aquifers and lakes; and (4) in aboveground lakes and reservoirs.
Most water used by communities comes first in the form of snow, either at high elevations or northern latitudes, where it melts and subsequently feeds the streams and rivers that eventually reach distant communities and cities—rivers, such as the Columbia, Snake, Colorado, Missouri, and Mississippi. Snowpack is aboveground storage that, under good conditions, can last as snowbanks late into the summer or even early autumn.
Winter snow is the source of our water (left), which is stored above ground as packed snow (right).
How much water the annual snowpack has and how long the snowpack lasts depends on six things: (1) the timing, duration, and persistence of the snowfall in any given year; (2) how much snow accumulates during a given winter; (3) the moisture content of the snow—wet snow holds more moisture than dry snow; (4) where the snowfall accumulates in relation to shade and cool temperatures in spring and summer, e.g., under the cover of trees and on north-facing slopes versus open clear-cuts and south-facing slopes with no protective shade; (5) when the snow begins melting and the speed at which it melts—the later in the year it begins melting and the slower it melts, the longer into the summer its moisture is stored above and below ground; and (6) the health of the overall water-catchment.
Although the first five points seem self-evident, the last one requires some explanation. In dealing with the health of water-catchments, one must consider those of both high and low elevation. How we treat our high-elevation forests (and those at more northerly latitudes) is how we treat a major portion of the most important sources of our supply of potentially available water, which originates as snow.
Snow melts slowly in the cool shade of the ancient forest (left). Packed snow also lasts longer on cool, north-facing slopes than in less protected situations (right).
Snow disappears in two ways: sublimation and melting. Sublimation means that snow, accumulating in such places as the upper surfaces of coniferous boughs above the ground, evaporates and re-crystallizes without melting into water. When snow sublimates, it bypasses any role in our supply of available water. Melting snow, of course, is a different story.
With the advent of late spring and early summer in decades past, the snows of winter began to melt, and the water gradually infiltrated the soil until every minute nook and cranny was filled to capacity with the precious liquid that was all the while obeying the unrelenting dictates of gravity as it journeyed along the ancient geological path toward the streams and rivers of the land on its way to the sea from whence it came. As gravity pulled the water downward through the soil, the slowly melting snow continually filled the void left by the departing liquid. In this way, the melting snows of winter fed the streams of late summer and autumn, thereby bringing water to human communities.
Snow and ice melting under the summer sun as the water slowly sinks into the soil, there to commence its long journey to the sea.
Then came the roads, chain-saws, yarders, and log trucks and the ancient forest that once protected the snowpack from the heat of the sun began to disappear. As logging roads progressively fragmented the once contiguous forest and clear-cut after clear-cut merged into gigantic, naked mountain slopes, the snow melted earlier and faster than in decades past and in so melting saturated the soil in a short time. Now the water-holding capacity of the soil is often reached in late May and early June, greatly exceeding gravity's ability to pull the water through the soil into the valley bottoms and thus allow the soil to absorb all the water. The inability of the soil to absorb the great pulse of water from the melting snow in May and June causes most of it to flow over the surface of the ground, where it rushes down streams and rivers, speedily fills the reservoirs to overflowing, and so is lost to the human communities when they needed it most, late in the year.
To help you visualize what I am talking about, consider a large log, with both ends cleanly cut off, lying across the contours of a steep slope (up and down the slope) under the canopy of an ancient forest. If the snow is deep enough, the melting water infiltrates the log at its upper and is gradually pulled downward through the interior of the log by gravity until it drips out the bottom of the cut face at the log's lower end, answering the inexorable pull of gravity.
There is, however, a caveat to this phenomenon. If the snow is deep enough to cover the upper end of the log, it can absorb the same amount of water that drips out the bottom just as long as the supply lasts. As soon as the snow is gone, the available supply of water is cut off, and that remaining in the log will eventually drip out the low end without being replenished. Therefore, the longer the snow last at the upper end of the log, the longer the log can act as a conduit for the water infiltrating its upper end, passing though its length, to drip out its lower end. Conversely, the faster the snow disappears from the log's upper end, the faster the supply of water from melting snow is cut off, the quicker the log progressively dries out, even as water continues to drip out the lower end. That, too, will shortly cease because, without the water stored in the snowpack above ground to cover the log's upper end, there is no replenishment for the limited supply of water pulled through the log by gravity.
So it is, when considering the supply of water for communities, that humility, wisdom, and long-term economics dictate that some forested areas, especially on public lands at high elevations, should not be clear-cut—even once—for the perceived, immediate, short-term dollar value of the wood fiber. To protect such areas for the storage of water in the form of snowpack will require a drastic shift in thinking because, at present, the only economic value seen in high-elevation forests is the immediate extraction of wood fiber. Nevertheless, the roading and clear-cutting of high-elevation forests, which catch and store water, affects all human communities, from the smallest rural village to the largest city.
In contrast, most low-elevation water-catchments, which may or may not be forested, must be much larger in area than a high-elevation catchment to collect and store the same amount of water. Although snow may not be as important for the storage of water in low elevations, the ability of water to infiltrate deep into the soil is equally important. The storage of water at low-elevation, nonforested areas is often in wetlands, subterranean aquifers, and lakes, as well as in aboveground reservoirs. Regardless of where a water-catchment is located, the quality and quantity of water that ultimately reaches a community is directly dependent on the biophysical integrity of the stream-order continuum. Topics
Water stored in a mountain lake.
THE STREAM-ORDER CONTINUUM
The source of a first-order or "headwater" stream (left), and the first-order stream itself (right).
The stream-order continuum operates on a simple premise: Streams are Nature's arterial system of the land. As such, they form a continuum or spectrum of physical environments, with associated aquatic and terrestrial plant and animal communities, as a longitudinally connected part of the ecosystem in which downstream processes are linked to, and affected by, upstream processes.
The idea of the stream-order continuum begins with the smallest stream and ends at the ocean. The concept centers around the resources of available food for the animals inhabiting the continuum, ranging from invertebrates to fish, birds, and mammals—including people.
As organic material floats downhill from its source to the sea, it becomes smaller in size, while the volume of water carrying it becomes larger. Thus, small streams feed larger streams and larger streams feed rivers with partially processed organic matter, such as wood, the amount of which becomes progressively smaller the farther down the continuum of the river system it goes.
This is how the system works: A first-order stream is the smallest undivided waterway or headwaters. Where two first-order streams join, they enlarge as a second-order stream. Where two second-order streams come together, they enlarge as a third-order stream, and so on.
The concept of stream order is based on the size of the stream—the cumulative volume of water, not just on what stream of what order joins with another stream of a given order. To illustrate, a first-order stream can join either with another first-order stream to form a second-order stream or it can enter directly into a second-, third-, fourth-, fifth-, or even larger-order stream. The same is true of a second-order stream, a third-order stream, etc.
A third-order stream in the mountains (left), and a fifth-order stream—river—in the valley (right).
In addition, the stream-order influences the role played by streamside vegetation in controlling water temperature, stabilizing banks, and producing food. Streamside vegetation is also the primary source of large organic debris, such as tree stems at least eight inches in diameter with their rootwads attached, or tree branches greater than eight inches in diameter. Forests adjacent to streams supply wood (stems, rootwads, and large branches from trees.) Erosion also contributes organic material to the stream.
In addition to the wood itself, habitat diversity in the streams and rivers of the western United States has been historically maintained by regular flooding, droughts, and every imaginable condition in between these extremes. The variability of the conditions experienced by the streams and rivers continually shift the wood around and alter its function in a way that augments biophysical diversity in space and time, thereby causing indigenous organism to evolved in ways that allow them to cope with the extremes of survival. Three examples are: cottonwood trees, a caddisfly, and a giant waterbug.
Cottonwood trees, which once grew in profusion along the banks of western streams and rivers, where they provided shade, woody debris, and nutrients to the aquatic-terrestrial interface, have all but disappeared to the detriment of the ecosystems they served. Cottonwoods require the bare, scoured banks that result from floods in order for their seeds to germinate and grow, despite the fact that some mortality of the trees themselves is experience as a consequence of the flooding. Today, because of flood-controlling dams, cottonwood trees and dying out in many areas—and the free, ecological services they performed with them.
Wood in streams increases the diversity of habitats by forming dams and their attendant pools and by protecting backwater areas that are important winter habitat for fish.
There is a caddisfly that inhabits a stream system in the mountains of Arizona, where it is subjected to the extremely violent force of flash floods that occasionally scour out the stream channels. The caddisfly, in turn, has evolved through the generations to metamorphose from the immature, aquatic state into their winged, adult phase during a period that is almost perfectly timed to miss the most common season of flooding, which keeps enough of the population out of harms way to perpetuate the species.
Finally, a giant waterbug that lives in some desert streams has adapted over the last 150 million years to "read" the weather and make a mass exodus from a stream that is about to experience a flash flood. During the exodus, the waterbugs literally climb the canyon walls to escape the dangerous waters, but return to the stream within a day.
When rivers are "harnessed" and "tamed" with dams, the organisms that have evolved to cope with Nature's disturbance regimes are likely to die out and be replaced by a range of different organisms. The shift in habitat and the attendant aquatic organisms that result from the construction of dams can dramatically alter how the ecosystem functions in a way that is detrimental to the food web within the entire drainage basin affected by the dams, such as preventing driftwood from completing it journey to the sea.
Conversely, when streams and rivers are unrestrained, the driftwood they carry provides nutrients, a variety of foundations for biological activity, and both dissipates the energy of the water and traps its sediments.
Processing the organic debris entering the aquatic system includes digestion by bacteria, fungi, and insects that are aquatic in their immature stages, such as midges, stoneflies, mayflies, and craneflies, as well as physical abrasion against such things as the stream bottom and its boulders. In all cases, debris is continually broken into smaller pieces that makes the particles increasingly susceptible to microbial consumption.
The amount of different kinds of organic matter processed in a reach of stream (the stretch of water visible between two bends in a channel, be it a stream or river) depends on the quality and the quantity of nutrients in the material and on the stream's capacity to hold fine particles long enough for their processing to be completed. The debris may be fully utilized by the biotic community within a reach of stream or it may be exported downstream.
Debris moves fastest through the system during high water and is not thoroughly processed at any one spot. The same is true in streams that do not have a sufficient number of instream obstacles to slow the water and act as areas of deposition, sieving the incompletely processed organic material out of the current so its organic breakdown can be completed. So small streams feed larger streams and larger streams feed rivers.
As a stream gets larger, its source of food energy is derived more from aquatic algae and less from organic material of terrestrial origin. The greatest influence of terrestrial vegetation is in first-order streams, but the most diversity of incoming organic matter and the greatest diversity of habitats is found in third- to fifth-order streams and large rivers with floodplains.
Small, first-order, headwater streams largely determine the type and quality of the downstream habitat. First- and second-order streams are influenced by the configuration of surrounding land forms and by the live and dead vegetation along their channels. This "riparian vegetation" interacts in many ways with the stream.
The canopy of vegetation, when undisturbed, shades the streamside. The physical energy of the flowing water is dissipated by wood in stream channels, slowing erosion and fostering the deposition of inorganic and organic debris. These small streams arise in tiny drainages with a limited capacity to store water, so their flow may be scanty or intermittent during late summer and autumn, but during periods of high flows in winter and spring, they can move prodigious amounts of sediment and organic material.
What I have just described is the beneficial aspect of the stream-order continuum, but there is a tragically human side this story as well. Ditches along forest roads (and elsewhere) form a continuum or spectrum of physical environments (the same as streams), a longitudinally connected part of the ecosystem in which "downstream" processes are linked to and influenced by "upstream" processes. The ditch continuum begins with the smallest ditch and ends at the ocean. So it is that little ditches feed bigger ditches, and bigger ditches eventually feed streams and rivers that ultimately feed the ocean. Remember further that as organic material (food energy) floats downhill from its source to the sea, it gets smaller—more dilute—as the volume of water carrying it gets larger.
Here the question is: What happens to the continuum concept when a ditch is polluted? To pollute a ditch means to contaminate it by dumping human garbage into it or by consciously or unconsciously discharging noxious substances into it, such as oil or hydraulic fluid from vehicles and logging equipment, both of which in one way or another disrupt biological processes, often by corrupting the integrity of their chemical interactions.
While Nature's organic matter (food energy) from the forest is continually diluted the further down the stream continuum it goes, pollution (especially chemical pollution) is continually concentrated the further down the stream continuum it goes because it gathers its potency from the discharge of every contaminated ditch that adds its waters to the passing flow. Hence, with every ditch we pollute, the purity of the stream and river accepting its fouled discharge is to that extent compromised, and the amount of pollution that ends up being dumping into the estuaries and oceans of the world through the stream/ditch continuum is staggering.
We must learn to care first and foremost for the humble things in our environment, such as a roadside ditch, before we can learn how to care for the mighty things in our environment, such as a river. Defile the ditch, and we defile the stream, river, estuary, and ocean; protect the ditch and we protect the stream, river, estuary, and ocean in like measure, and it all begins with how we think about water-catchments. After all, everyone lives downstream. topics
HOW WE THINK ABOUT WATER-CATCHMENTS
Although most people talk about "watersheds," where "shed" means to get rid of water, I think of the same areas as "water-catchments." A "water-catchment" is an area that captures precipitation, be it rain or snow, stores it, purifies it, and releases it slowly over time, thus helping to ensure a sustainable supply of quality water for human use—provided the biophysical health of the water-catchment is protected and the water it produces is prudently used.
As with any problem, there are solutions, but we tend to think about and look for solutions only where the symptoms are obvious, a situation seldom apparent with water-catchments. The problem with water-catchments normally begins with the headwaters, the first-order stream and its water-catchment, usually a trickle far removed from human habitation. A first-order water-catchment is always a special case; in fact, it is probably the only part of the land in which the hydrology has any semblance of ecological integrity since it is the headwaters and so controls the initial water quality for the whole catchment basin.
Our thinking, and so our view of the world, is generally limited to a kaleidoscope of special cases because we choose to focus on "discrete" parcels of land as "real estate." If, for example, we deal only with a reach of stream (the visible portion of a stream between two bends in the channel), we perpetuate our inability to understand that particular reach of stream because we view it as an independent variable in an interdependent world, a relationships that cannot physically exist. We must, instead, view the reach of stream in relation to the entire water-catchment—and ultimately to the entire catchment basin—as an interdependent whole. If we view a reach of stream in this way, we enhance our ability to understand both the reach of stream and the water-catchment because each is defined by its relation to the other. Understanding how a reach of stream relates to the whole water-catchment is like understanding how a single chair relates to a room.
A farmer is clearing the riverside forest—the dark area with piles of debris—because it is viewed as "non-productive" unless it is farmed, despite its intrinsic value to the health of the stream (left). Farming right up to the edge of a stream or river guarantees that much of the non-point-source pollution from agriculture will go directly into the nation's waterways (right).
If you were to stand in the doorway and survey a room, you would see the chair both in the room and in relation to the room, but when you focus only on the chair you can no longer see the room or the chair's relationship to it. Unfortunately, most people do not see that the first-order water-catchments (head waters) are the initial controllers of water quality for supplies of domestic water. For this reason, exploitive forestry allows destructive practices to occur down to the edges of both first- and second-order streams, even in municipal water-catchments, because the timber is thought to have greater immediate economic value than the water. (And this says nothing about the 1872 mining law, which allows gold miners to utterly destroy reaches of streams.)
Moreover, since politically important fish, such as salmon and steelhead, do not live at the high elevations in which most of these small streams occur, the water is deemed to be of no visible, economic importance. The invisible importance of the water in a water-catchment, far from the tap that dispenses it, becomes visible only when the water reaches human communities and becomes usable. That said, people seldom realize that drinkable water comes predominantly from forested water-catchments. Even much of the prehistoric ground water that is pumped to the surface for use in agriculture came from forested water-catchments. Salmon, water, and hydroelectric power are forest products just as surely as is wood fiber.
As a nation with once bountiful resources, the United States has rarely faced limits to those natural resources. Although times have changed, continuing trends and experience indicate that "informed denial" is rampant in that every additional drop of water conserved by one segment of the public is thought to be available for ever-more economic growth by another segment of the public, further raising the demand for more water and more economic growth—like a circular firing squad. Effective caretaking of water will necessitate attention to both demand and supply.
The availability of water also depends on such variations in components of the hydrologic cycle as precipitation, evaporation, transpiration, infiltration, and runoff. Because these components are interrelated, a change produced by technology in one component of the cycle will inevitably affect other components.
In the short history of the United States, there have always been more lands and more resources to exploit and a philosophy that technology could supplement natural resources, or even supplant them as needed, an idea confidently stated by L. C. Everard, editor of the 1920 Agricultural Yearbook:
As a Nation we have always stood on our own feet and felt ourselves masters of our own destiny. Our immense and varied natural resources have enabled us to maintain this position and have justified this feeling. It is largely because of our confidence in the sufficiency and permanency of these resources that we have been in the past and are now able to look the future calmly in the eye and go on our way steadily improving the quality of our national life. We have always been able to look beyond the frontier of cultivation to new and untouched fields ready to supply the landless farmer with a homestead and to meet the growing demands of the country for food, clothing, and shelter. The untouched reserve has about disappeared. We have another reserve, however, as vast as that which lay before the pioneers in the old days. It is the grain and meat, the wool and the wood, the thousand and one other products of field and forest that we can add to our store by applying more intensively on the farm and in the forest the scientific principles and methods to come forth from laboratory, sample plot, and experimental farm. As the days go by we learn more and more the underlying causes of success in agriculture, we perfect methods of applying the new discoveries, we reduce more and more the element of chance and guesswork, we grow in knowledge of how to get more and better crops from the land and how to market them where they will do the most good. The answer to the problem of both producer and consumer lies in the extension of our efforts in these directions, in the use and distribution of what we have on the basis of more complete knowledge, and in putting the idle land to work and making all the land work to better purpose.
Now, in 2004 and beyond, we have a different picture. Today's perceived dilemma is one of stretching such resources as water to accommodate the continuing economic growth of the western United States (indeed the whole world), while protecting the existing patterns of water use, a behavioral norm requiring levels of technical development that are increasingly damaging ecologically and no longer feasible economically. Moreover, few people realize that only a small part of the water used in the United States goes to towns and cities. The overwhelming share is wastefully used for irrigation.
In California, where growth in the human population has been virtually unlimited, such growth was possible because, for many years, the "excess" water from the Colorado River was given to the state. That came to an end in 2003, when California had to give up enough water from the Colorado River to supply roughly 1 1/2 million people in order to ensure allocations of water for six other Western states. This reduction amounted to thirteen percent of the total water that California had been taking from the river.
The state could have avoided the cutback, if water agencies in Southern California had resurrected a deal aimed at reducing the state's over-dependence on the Colorado River. The deal called for a transfer of some of the Imperial Valley's massive share of the river's water from the valley's desert farms to the city of San Diego by the end of 2002. Even so, the Imperial Valley water board, the overseer of the nation's largest irrigation project, fused to sell a drop of water.
Compounding the problem is the fact that the Colorado River burst through a farm dike in 1905 and flowed unimpeded for more than a year into California's southeastern desert, where it filled an ancient seabed and created the Salton Sea. Runoff from farms in the Imperial Valley, that annually sees the use a trillion gallons of the river's water, have kept the sea alive ever since. Now, with supplies of fresh water running low in the American West, the Salton Sea (largely ignored until 2002) has become the center of controversy among the competing interests in the fragile ecosystem that has supported millions of birds and other wildlife for close to 100 years, a region in which farming produces much of the nation's wintertime vegetables, and fast-growing cities.
The idea of precious water from the Colorado River collecting in an agricultural sump 227 feet below sea level, is not well received by those people in Western states for whom continual growth is their focus. These people, from such states as Arizona and Nevada, are ill content to keep the Salton Sea alive if it means foregoing the potential of more water for human consumption, and hence continual economic growth. To such people, saving the Salton Sea is simply a "waste" of water—a loss of potential economic gain.
For residents of the Imperial Valley there is an additional concern. Should the Salton Sea begin to dry up, it might unleash a dust storm much like the one residents of the Owens Valley complained about after the city of Los Angeles made its infamous water grab in the valley ninety years ago.
Although caretakers of forests are, for the most part, familiar with the hydrologic cycle, which continues for better or for worse, the idea of a hydrologic continuum is not so familiar. A hydrologic continuum implies the maintenance of delicate operational balance among the processes within the hydrologic cycle that involve air, water, soil, biosphere, and people. In other words, if withdrawals of water by humans are balanced with Nature's capacity to replenish that the water that is used, the use of water can be measured in such a way that the available, long-term supply is protected from being overtaxed.
There are four options in caretaking the use of water: One is to protect the availability of the long-term supply by disciplining ourselves to use only what is necessary in the most prudent manner. Another is to protect the health of an entire water-catchment and so the supply of snow. A third is to simultaneously account for the first two, and the fourth is take water for granted and use all we want with no discipline whatsoever (as we do now through continual economic expansion) and then wonder what to do when faced with a self-inflicted shortage, as is happening in northern China.
Tianjin, a city in northern China, has sunk more than six feet in the past two years, which has damaged buildings and pipelines, as well as concentrating salt and other chemicals in the groundwater. The subsidence is caused by growing number of funnel-shaped areas—more than thirty—beneath the North China Plain, an effect of increased pumping of the groundwater for agricultural and household uses. It is feared that all the funnels will eventually coalesce to undermine an area of 15,400 square miles.
By using all the water we want in a totally undisciplined manner, we are insensitive to both the care we take of the water-catchments and the speed with which we mine the supply of stored available water. As stated by Professor D.J. Chasan, "One might suppose that people would automatically conserve the only naturally occurring water in a virtual desert, but one would be wrong. Land and farm machinery have capital value. Water in the ground, like salmon in the sea, does not. Just as salmon are worth money only if you catch them, water is worth money only if you pump it."
Consequently, we are pumping ground water, and we are damming, diverting, and channelizing the rivers to "tame" and "harness" their water for short-term use based on poor economics, rather than nurturing the water-catchments to ensure the availability of an adequate long-term supply of water.
With the growing realization of the ecological interdependency among all living forms and their physical environment, it can hardly be doubted that even "renewable" resources (such as water) show signs of suffering from the effects of society's unrelenting materialistic demands for more. These demands have degraded the renewability of resources in both quality and quantity. Water can be thus characterized because it is increasingly degraded by soil erosion, increases in temperature, pollution with chemical wastes, salts from irrigation, and overloads of organic materials. Add roads and urban sprawl, and is it any wonder that the hydrological system is under stress? topics
ROADS, URBAN SPRAWL, AND WATER
Roads affect the quality, quantity, and distribution of water in the soil of the catchment, regardless of whether they are graveled and constructed to extract timber or paved and constructed as access to homes in a housing development. The construction and use of a road severely disturbs the soil that, in turn, increases the rate of runoff, may reduce the flow of subsurface water, and alters the equilibrium of shallow groundwater. Unfortunately, the information needed to understand the effects of a road on the regime of surface and subsurface water is still limited.
Unless water infiltrates deep into the soil of a water-catchment, it runs downhill and reaches the cut bank of a logging road or even a major highway that brings it to the surface, collects it into a ditch, and puts it through a culvert to begin infiltrating again. The water then meets another road cut, and so on. Water is sometimes brought to the surface three, four, or more times before reaching a stream. Water is purified by its journey through the deep soil, but not by flowing over the surface of the ground.
Roads bleed water from the soil the same way cuts in the bark bleed latex from a rubber tree or sap from a sugar maple.
In fact, ditches and gullies, such as those that form on the downhill side of culverts passing under roads, function effectively as pathways down which water flows. The denser the network of roads, the greater the drainage of water over the soil's surface, and the less time it takes for peak flows to occur.
This poses a question: How deep into the soil is deep enough for water to avoid the ditches at the bases of banks alongside roads? I have seen roadbeds blasted out of solid rock to depths of fifty or sixty feet, and I have seen water seeping out the "bottom" of this same rock into the roadside ditches in July and August, a predicament symptomatic of the disruption in the flow of water. This means we are bringing precious water to the surface of the ground, where it not only evaporates but also becomes polluted by sediment, oil, and chemicals from the road's surface and human garbage in the ditch. Consequently, roads have a negative, cumulative effect on the hydrological cycle of a water-catchment and on the purity of the water that ultimately reaches human communities.
Rubber tree bleeding latex.
For example, if a logger drains waste oil from a loader onto a landing. Where does the oil go? It soaks into the soil and is carried downhill by water and gravity. True, the oil will be diluted by the time it reaches the ditch of the road twenty feet below the landing, but it is still polluting the soil as it goes. With the winter rains of the fifth year, the oil collects in the ditch, is mixed with other oil that leaked from passing vehicles, is flushed through the culvert under the road, and continues its journey. Given enough time, it will reach the stream 100 feet below the road and pollute the stream that flows into the small reservoir that supplies the local community with drinking water.
Disrupting the flow of water through the soil on steep slopes, even forested slopes, can cause instability and increase erosion during a severe rainstorm or as snow melts. Such conditions in the vicinity of the seeping water can cause soils to become saturated with little or no infiltration that in turn weakens them and leads to greater local runoff of water over the surface of the soil and hence greater erosion.
In housing developments within a water-catchment surrounding a community, on the other hand, roads and streets are paved, creating an impervious coating over the surface of the land. This impervious layer prevents the water, both rain and melting snow, from infiltrating into the soil, where it can be stored and purified, and can recharge existing aquifers and wells. Instead, the water remains on the surface of the roads and streets, where it mixes with pollutants that collect on the pavement.
Because paved roads and streets are lined with curbs and gutters, the now-polluted water is channeled from the paved surface into a storm drain. In addition, each house has an impervious roof that collects water and channels it into gutters along the edge of the roof. Upon collecting water, the gutters channel it, more often than not, out to the street, where it joins water from the street going down the storm drain. It is then conducted either directly into a sewage treatment plant or directly into a ditch, stream, or river.
In any event, the water is not usable by the local people. Beyond that, the storm water either adds to the cost of running the treatment plant, where it must be detoxified, or it pollutes all the waterways through which it flows, from its point of origin into the ocean.
The effect of roads, streets, parking lots, and the area covered by houses, all of which eliminate the infiltration of water, is cumulative. Enough roads, streets, parking lots, and roofs over time can alter the soil-water cycle as it affects a given community. Remember, the quality and quantity of water is a biophysical variable, irrespective the fact that many linear-minded economists and linear-minded "land developers" consider it an economic constant.
Even if water was a constant, a variable is introduced with construction of a single logging road or city street. The variable is compounded by constructing and maintaining multiple roads to extract timber or create a housing development. In addition, intensive forestry, such as clear-cutting, alters the water regime that affects how the forest grows. In this way, a self-reinforcing feedback loop of biophysical degradation in a water-catchment is created, altering the soil-water regime, that in turn alters the sustainability of the forest, that in turn affects the soil-water regime in a never-ending cascade of cause and effect. Eventually, the negative effects are felt in those communities that are dependent on a given water-catchment or drainage basin for their supplies of potable water.
We humans can continue to degrade the forested water-catchments and impoverish our supply of water, or we can risk abandoning our conventional thought pattern and, with a strong, concerted commitment, reverse the trend. In the final analysis, we must remember that only so much water is available, and with a change in the global climate, that amount may become even more variable and unpredictable than it already is. That notwithstanding, more water cannot be found in a courtroom, no matter how hard we try or who holds the priority rights to the water already available. And so it behooves us all as American citizens to consider how we care for the sustainability of our nation's forests—lest all forest-dependent industries suffer the consequences. topics
FOREST-DEPENDENT INDUSTRIES
Although the timber industry, as it's usually thought of, goes from the forest to the mill, the United States—in fact the world as a whole—is founded largely on an interdependent suite of forest-dependent industries that individually and collectively rely much more heavily on abundant, clean water than they do on the growing and harvesting of wood fiber. A forest-dependent industry is any industry that uses raw materials from the forest, including amenities and services like oxygen, water, electricity, and recreation, as well as commodities like migratory animals, such as salmon and steelhead. A forest-dependent industry also includes any industry that uses extractive goods like minerals, wood fiber, forage for livestock, resident fish and game animals, and pelts from fur-bearing mammals.
Some forest-dependent industries are based on amenities and services that are not extractive in the sense that the products either enter and/or leave the forest under their own volition. Such industries include the sport and commercial fisher who catches migratory salmon and steelhead in the ocean and rivers outside of the forest, the farmer who uses water to irrigate crops, the person who markets those crops, the electrical company that uses water converted to electricity, and the municipal water company itself.
Other forest-dependent industries are based on extractive products that are physically removed as raw materials from the forest and made available for refinement. Such industries include timber companies that cut trees; people who gather mushrooms commercially; ranchers who graze livestock in forested allotments; miners who extract ore; hunters, fishers, and trappers who kill and remove forest-dependent wildlife.
Forest-dependent industries that refine the extracted products include carpenters, boatbuilders, artisan woodworkers, anyone who uses paper, meat cutters and packers, and furriers. Finally, these forest-dependent industries are all interwoven because each industry uses one or more of the other's products, such as water, electricity, wood fiber, red meat, and vegetables. Because all forest-dependent industries center around the availability and use of water, how communities cooperate and coordinate with their respective bioregions is critical. topics
OF COMMUNITIES AND BIOREGIONS
The setting of a community helps define the community because people select a community for what it has to offer them within the context of its landscape. A logging community is therefore set within a context of forest, a ranching community within a context of lands for grazing livestock, and a community of commercial fishers along a coastline, be it a lake or an ocean. The setting helps create many characteristics that are unique to the community. By the same token, the values and development practices of a community alter the characteristics of its surrounding environment.
In addition to the surrounding environment, the constructed environment within a community is also part of its setting and therefore its identity. Aesthetics, both internal and external to a community, is crucial to how the community defines itself through the philosophy it reflects in its livability. Much of what a community is saying about itself and how it cares or does not care about future generations is reflected in the physical structures with which it chooses to surround itself. This includes buildings, zoning, design of transportation systems, and the allowance of natural occurrences within the structured setting.
In turn, a community's world view defines its collective values, which determine how it treats its surrounding landscape. As the landscape is altered through wise use or through abuse, so are the community's ecological and social options altered in like measure. A community and its landscape are thus engaged in a mutual, self-reinforcing feedback loop of reciprocity as the means by which their processes reinforce themselves and one another.
Each community has physical, cultural, and political qualities that make it unique and more or less flexible. The degree of flexibility of these attributes in a community is important because sustainable systems must be ever flexible, adaptable, and creative. The process of sustainable development must therefore remain flexible, because what works in one community may not work in another or may work for different reasons.
Beyond this, the power of sustainable development comes from the local people as they move forward through a process of growing self-realization, self-definition, and self-determination. Such personal growth opens the community to its own evolution within the context of the people's sense of place, as opposed to coercive pressures applied from the outside.
Sustainable development encompasses any process that helps people meet their requirements, from self-worth to food on the table, while simultaneously creating a more ecologically and culturally sustainable and just society for the current generation and those that follow. Due to its flexibility and openness, sustainable community development is perhaps more capable than other forms of development of creating such outcomes because it integrates the requirements of a local community with those of the immediate environment and surrounding landscape, as well as neighboring communities. Sustainable community development can thus instill a relative balance between the local community and the bioregion within which it lies.
Bioregion refers to a geographical location and the ideas (collective consciousness) that have developed about how to live in that location with a sense of place. Within a given bioregion, the conditions that influence life are similar and thus have a similar influence on human occupancy. The notion here is that human cultures are differentiated at a bioregional scale in which the characteristics of the geographical region coincide with the collective consciousness of the people and are expressed as a specific culture.
In terms of community sustainability, a bioregion must also be largely self-contained when it comes to an available supply of potable water. There is no chance of social-environmental sustainability without including the water-catchment for the entire bioregion, because without a sustainable supply of water, sustainability is merely a paper exercise.
For a community to be socially and ecologically sustainable, it must simultaneously be as economically sustainable as possible, which means that communities must cooperate and coordinate within a well-defined bioregion. This seldom happens, however. The result is that—without a collective vision of sustainability within a well-defined bioregion—communities are no more than economic colonies for national and international corporations. In some cases, such as Ethiopia, which has long been ravaged by famine, the politics of water has kept the tributaries of the Blue Nile flowing into Egypt, while forbidding Ethiopians to use any of the waters, despite the fact that the water originates within Ethiopia's national boundaries. One of the results from this unjust political situation is that women, as a "profession," must continually carry huge loads of fuelwood, which physically wracks their bodies, because the people are denied hydroelectric power from the water that originates within their own country.
The whole principle of colonialism is to exploit someone else's natural resources, shipping as much of the principle as possible, as fast as possible, to whichever market will pay the highest price. Thus, the more communities rely on outside markets, either for import or export of goods and services and/or jobs, the more they become economic and political colonies that progressively give up self-rule—and therefore democracy.
This means that a centralized national and international economy may be good for the corporate-political elite—but not for a local community. To be ecologically and socially sustainable, communities must learn to practice the politics of place, which is what bioregionalism is about.
Bioregionalism is important because each community's economic sustainability demands that only the ecological interest of a bioregion is marketed. But the centralized corporate economy is in a constant feeding frenzy as it gobbles up all the ecological principle of all the available natural resources it can get. The legacy of this continual enrichment of the already wealthy minority is an increasingly fragile, ever-more endangered local environment.
Social-environmental sustainability is therefore dependent on a decentralized political-economic system of democracy if economic sustainability is to be achieved. Economic sustainability, in turn, is dependent on the cooperation and coordination of communities sharing a common vision of the greatest possible economic independence within the broad landscape of a well-defined bioregion.
Such economic independence—and with it the return of a free democracy—will not be easily wrested from corporate control. But it is possible, if communities can find the moral courage and political will to stand united within the umbrella of a shared vision of bioregional social-environmental sustainability for which they are willing to be accountable in the present—at least to the present generation and that of their children and their children's children. topics
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