A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 5
Fifth in a series
“We have met the enemy and he is us.”
- Pogo
A river is the ultimate commons. Its waters don’t belong to any one of us, but are held in common by all of us, for all of us. At least, that’s the theory. It has rarely been the reality. Moreover, throughout much of human history, “all of us” has meant, well, us humans. But we overlook, to our detriment, that our well-being depends on the health of literally trillions of other living organisms with whom we share the watershed.
Rivers are not simply pipes for delivering water from one place to another. They are complex and fragile ecosystems that provide a myriad of often-conflicting benefits to various claimants. Particularly over the past 60 years, scientific research has vastly expanded our understanding of rivers and their ecosystems – their hydrology and chemistry, their physical properties and biological communities. Perhaps the most profound result of this work has been to demonstrate empirically what people understood intuitively for millennia – that a stream is a dynamic system whose equilibrium depends on constant change, that it does not flow in a vacuum but is an integral part of the landscape it drains, that what happens throughout a river’s watershed determines the health of the stream, and that upstream activities determine downstream health. No part of the river’s ecosystem – not even a single organism – can be completely understood except in its relation to everything else.
Human activity is the single greatest threat to the rivers on which we depend – and our dependence on rivers is not going to change. We cannot stop drinking their waters, nor eating the food they provide. We will continue to demand the power they generate, the transportation they make possible, and the recreation they support. But we must stop reducing streams and rivers to their utilitarian functions and calculating their value solely in economic terms. It is both an environmental and an economic imperative to restore their place in the natural world so that they can both regenerate themselves and continue to provide their unique array of benefits and resources.
In place of the multi-faceted relationships people historically had with rivers, we have substituted a single determinant of their value: What can this river do for me? In our drive for economic growth, we have bent rivers to the human will. Across the globe there are now more than 50,000 large dams, which collectively have displaced 40 to 80 million people. From Louisiana’s Atchafalaya River to China’s Yangtze, we continue to impose ever-bigger engineering solutions on natural wonders we do not understand and have ceased to care much about. Nor are we safe from these solutions: In 1975 a dam in China collapsed and as many as 230,000 people died; and they will be accounting for the dead in Libya for a long time to come.
Rivers have provided us immeasurable benefits. But we are destroying them, and in doing so, we are imperiling our future. We need to step back from the brink and reconnect with our rivers. We need to understand them, not simply try to control them – to appreciate the whole of a river, not just those parts we find useful, to realize that a river is not merely a channel through which we can push water and waste, but a natural system of which we are a part. We need to awaken to the beauty of our rivers and to see clearly the forces that threaten them.