A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 4

October 05, 2023 by James G. Blaine in A River and Its Water

Fourth in a series

“To think of any river as nothing but water is to ignore the greater part of it."
- Hal Borland

In the early 1970s, Robin Vannote presented a novel idea to a group of freshwater scientists who had gathered from across the country at the Stroud Water Research Center in rural Pennsylvania. His idea would evolve into the “River Continuum Concept”, which forever changed our understanding of streams and rivers. As you may have guessed, both from its name and my last post, the River Continuum Concept was based on the fact that a river flows, which might seem pretty obvious to you.

“In those days,” Vannote told me many years later, “most scientists studied a square meter of water to death.” But a stream is fundamentally different from a lake: it changes constantly as it moves downstream, and it can only be understood as a continuum. Bern Sweeney, then a young graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, vividly remembers Vannote outlining his idea. “The scientists gathered in that room were just in awe. It was a major, major event.” Part of the reason was that, in hindsight, the concept was so simple that they couldn’t believe no one had thought of it before.

From those early insights, Vannote, other Stroud Center staff, and a few university colleagues developed the River Continuum Concept, which revolutionized stream research.

During the same period, noted geologist Luna Leopold was developing a formula for understanding a stream’s physical behavior. He saw that a river’s width, depth, velocity, and temperature change constantly as the water flows downstream. More importantly, he recognized that those changes are interrelated — and because a change in one factor affects all the others, a river’s pattern is predictable.

Drawing on these physical studies, Vannote and his colleagues added a critical element to the puzzle of how streams work. They argued that a river’s biological and chemical processes correspond to its physical attributes, and that the nature of biological communities changes just as the river itself does as it flows downstream. This means that the structure of a stream’s living communities is also predictable and that the communities adapt to the particular conditions of a stretch of stream.

The work of Vannote, Leopold, and others not only upended traditional scientific thinking; it also added a crucial new approach to water and watershed policy making. Underlying the economic, social, and political factors that had dictated almost all previous water policy, they demonstrated that a stream’s geological, geographic, physical, and biological dynamics must undergird the effective management of water resources. Big engineering solutions, such as massive dams and moving channels, would give way to understanding a stream’s ecology, and politics would henceforth have to take science into account.

A river is not a static body of water, and it is more than the sum of its parts. It is a single continuum that flows ceaselessly from its source to the sea. To understand what is happening at any point along the way, you must understand both what is happening upstream and what is entering it from the land through which it flows.

The River Continuum Concept was the first unified hypothesis about how streams and their watersheds work. It dominated river studies for the next decade, and it remains, almost 50 years later, the most often-cited article on freshwater studies.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 3

October 02, 2023 by James G. Blaine in A River and Its Water

Third in a series

“No man can step into the same river twice.”
- Heraclitus (6th century BCE)

Question: What is a river?

One simple definition I found is: “a wide, natural stream of fresh water that flows into an ocean or other large body of water and is usually fed by smaller streams, called tributaries, that enter it along its course.”

On a more ethereal level, Herman Hesse describes Siddhartha sitting by a stream and discovering “one of the river’s secrets, one that gripped his soul. He saw that the water continually flowed and flowed, and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new.” Or, as Heraclitus put it more succinctly over 2,500 years ago, “No man can step into the same river twice.”

That a river flows is hardly breaking news. But it’s precisely what distinguishes streams and rivers from other bodies of water and what underlies the science, history, politics, economics, and aesthetics of rivers that this series will consider.

Let’s look first at the science.*

Question: Is fresh water a renewable resource?

No. At least not in the sense that water molecules reproduce themselves. Water does recycle itself, but the total amount of water has not changed since Earth began – and 97 percent of it is salt water. Of the remaining three percent, three-quarters is locked in glaciers, which climate change is melting at unprecedented rates, or is in deep aquifers or too polluted to drink. That leaves only 0.5 percent for all the needs that all living beings – not just human beings – have for fresh water. Increasingly, there is not enough to go around. There are too many of us. We use too much of it. And we pollute it.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 2

September 28, 2023 by James G. Blaine in A River and Its Water

Second in a series

“Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”
- Garrett Hardin

Readers’ views: “Thank you, Jamie, for this new blog. Water and blood, the two most mystical, magical, essential, and interesting of fluids. I would hope that, as all things seem to be coming apart, we return to our ancient and common belief – or in the current vernacular, story – that rivers are sacred.” Warren Burrows

Editor’s Note: I apologize for the redundant sentences and missing word in the first paragraph of Monday’s post. Embarrassing.

“Picture a pasture open to all,” wrote Garrett Hardin a half-century ago in his landmark essay. His pasture, however, is no idyllic meadow where local herdsmen amicably graze their cows, but a place of impending devastation, where it’s in each farmer’s self-interest to pack as many cows as they can onto the communal grass. The resulting “tragedy of the commons,” wrote Hardin, “brings ruin to all.”

He had a point. By treating our commons as a resource to be exploited instead of a public trust to be protected, we threaten to destroy the very thing on which we depend. Nowhere is this more true than with our treatment of rivers and their watersheds, which sustain all life on earth.

Consider all a river provides us: drinking water, electric power, irrigation, sanitation, transportation, recreation, nourishing food, intangible beauty, habitat for wildlife. Hardin describes two types of commons: ‘a food basket,’ from which people take what they need, and ‘a cesspool,’ into which they put what they don’t want. Rivers are both – and more, for people actually take the commons itself, removing ever-increasing quantities of water or diminishing its quality to the point it becomes unusable. It’s as if some of Hardin’s herdsmen crept back into the pasture after dark, dug up the grass, and replanted it in their backyards.

Meredith Sadler designed and drafted the figure.

Given all the diverse claimants to – and uses for – a river’s goods and services, is it possible to protect it both now and for the future . . . so that the commons will be passed on to future generations in the same or better condition than it was inherited from the past.

Start with the premise that (1) almost everybody needs clean fresh water, healthy wetlands, and unpolluted rivers and (2) most of us depend on economies that have long despoiled all three. To stop, or even slow, the decline is a difficult task, but it pales in comparison to trying to restore a river to its more pristine past. Just as damage was caused by a thousand cuts across time and the river’s watershed, so restoration will require tens of thousands of physical, chemical, biological, and political bandages. At the core of the matter are a river’s many constituents who continue to resist cleaning up the messes they and their predecessors have made. For them, the commons is not a public trust. It is a public trough.

The result? Almost half of America’s streams and rivers are in poor condition, particularly the smaller watersheds that provide over 70% of the nation’s water. The cause, of course, is us. For centuries people have dammed and removed more water than our rivers can replenish and have disposed of more waste, toxins, and detritus than our rivers can process. No worries, we said, everything goes downstream – until we discovered that everyone also lives downstream.

Clean fresh water is not free, and it is no more inexhaustible than a pasture’s grass. A river is not a pipe whose function is to deliver water and other products for human consumption. It is an ecosystem in which all life is connected. As the life’s blood of the watersheds through which they flow, all rivers are deeply impacted by human activities. “The health of our waters,” wrote Luna Leopold, “is the principal measure of how we live on the land.”

Much of this post is taken from an article Bern Sweeney and I published in Waterkeeper, Jan. 27, 2021.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 1

September 25, 2023 by James G. Blaine in A River and Its Water

First of a series

“Rivers are the gutters down which run the ruins of continents.”
- Luna Leopold

The Colorado River provides water for 40 million people and is the lifeblood of some of this nation’s the most productive cropland. It stopped flowing regularly to the sea in 1960. Earlier this year, more than six decades later – and following 23 consecutive years of serious drought exacerbated by the increasing impacts of climate change – American Rivers designated the stretch of the Colorado that runs through the Grand Canyon as the most endangered river in the United States. For over two centuries, Americans have brought a variety of tools to exploit this majestic. Foresight has rarely been among them. Are we at finally waking up to the crises of our rivers?

Nor is it only a problem here. More than half the world’s rivers are seriously depleted and polluted. China’s Yellow River runs dry for two thirds of the year; the Ganges is befouled almost from its source; and the Volga annually transports 42 million tons of toxic waste to the Caspian Sea.

Streams and rivers provide the essentials of life – water and food – for all living beings. For humans, they have done much more. We have used rivers to bathe our bodies, wash our clothes and remove our waste. Rivers have irrigated our farmlands and carried in their waters the fertile sediments that create and replenish the soil itself. Rivers have made possible the inexpensive and efficient transportation of goods—and with them the social, cultural, and intellectual exchanges that have spurred the development of ideas and the spread of knowledge. Harnessing the flow and capturing the power of rivers was the source of the Industrial Revolution and the modern world as we know it.

The earliest civilizations grew on rich alluvial plains that rivers created, and to a great extent rivers defined those early communities. People venerated their rivers as the source of life. Their earliest gods were river gods. But rivers could also be arbitrary forces of destruction, and people were often at their mercy, as floods obliterated their homes, droughts withered their crops, and contaminants poisoned their water. The river brought death as well as life.

Today, despite all humankind’s spectacular engineering feats, over a billion people around the world lack access to safe drinking water – and three times that number suffer from inadequate sanitation. Diarrhea kills almost three million people each year, the majority of them infants and children. Two hundred million people suffer from schistosomiasis, an infection caused by drinking contaminated river water, and more than six million Africans have river blindness.

This series will take a wide-ranging look at rivers and their waters, examining their history, science, politics, and economics; marveling at their beauty; grappling with the issues they face; and seeking remedies at both the macro and micro levels. For if, as Luna Leopold wrote, “the health of our water is the principal measure of how we live on the land” (and it surely is), how then can we ignore Marq de Villiers’ lament that “a child dies every eight seconds from drinking contaminated water?”