Lifelines: The Case for River Conservation / Edition 2 available in Hardcover, Paperback, eBook
Lifelines: The Case for River Conservation / Edition 2
- ISBN-10:
- 0742531392
- ISBN-13:
- 9780742531390
- Pub. Date:
- 01/29/2004
- Publisher:
- Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
- ISBN-10:
- 0742531392
- ISBN-13:
- 9780742531390
- Pub. Date:
- 01/29/2004
- Publisher:
- Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Lifelines: The Case for River Conservation / Edition 2
Buy New
$53.00Buy Used
$31.50-
-
SHIP THIS ITEM
Temporarily Out of Stock Online
Please check back later for updated availability.
-
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780742531390 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 01/29/2004 |
| Edition description: | Second Edition |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.74(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.61(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Lifelines
The Case for River Conservation
By Tim Palmer
ISLAND PRESS
Copyright © 1994 Tim PalmerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55963-220-1
CHAPTER 1
Sustaining the Lifelines of a Continent
* A Fading Brilliance
From willow-crowded shores, sweet with the scent of summer growth, I walked along the headwaters of the Salmon River in Idaho. At a clearing where bunchgrass and the deeper green of sedges blanketed the shore, I sat to hear the liquid song of the river and to be mesmerized by the flashing quickness of the flow The glistening, riffling continuity marked one of the basic aspects of nature: water flowing toward the sea. Then I saw the fish.
Silver, brilliant in evening light, the river master surfaced, rolled forward like a diminutive dolphin, and disappeared forever from my sight. A brief acquaintance, the fish was there and gone in one plunging instant. But another fish surfaced. Then another, and then more. Not just creatures of the currents, those salmon were part of the mass of the river, and my evening became filled with one of the most wondrous migrations on earth, a journey as inspiring as that of Arctic terns flying 18,000 miles from north to south, as dramatic as caribou by the thousands fording braided channels in Alaska. After living several years in the ocean, the salmon were returning to the rivers. Some fish barely parted the water with their dorsal fins; others surged with impatient force above the wet edge, muscling their way upward, very close, now, to the spawning grounds for which they had swum thousands of miles at sea and 930 miles up the Columbia, Snake, and Salmon rivers.
Twenty-five years have passed since I sat on that shore in the wilds of the northern Rockies. Today I would have to sit a long time in order to see a fish. Today, the salmon are in very serious trouble.
On many streams where salmon once spawned, dams block their upriver paths. At one of those sites lacking fish ladders, salmon swim against the current, leap as instinct demands, and smash into the face of the dam. The fish had evaded all the previous hazards, but battled and beaten, they collapse into the current. Lacking any alternative, uncompromisingly driven by the urge to ascend the river, to reproduce, to survive as a unique creature, they repeat the futile leap against the dam until, bruised and exhausted, they confront the concrete impasse to their species one final time. Then, with their lives unfulfilled, they die.
Not one species but many, salmon of various types ascend the rivers at various times. Some of the major "runs" and many of the minor ones are already extinct, having come and gone without so much as an adequate biological record, without mourning, without dynamite to correct the problems of dams. Now, the remaining runs in the Salmon River appear to be facing the same deadly fate owing to the eight downstream dams that block their path—lethal barriers despite fish ladders. The federal government built the dams so that barges could ship grain to foreign markets, and now the dams provide northwesterners with some of the cheapest electricity in the nation. The cost of extirpation of these species is omitted from the utility bills that arrive each month in the mail.
* An Urgency Across the Land
Family records indicate that my ancestors touched shore in America in 1637, no doubt finding a wealth of wild rivers in New England. The settlers depended on the streams for sustenance. They surely would have feasted on the swarming rafts of Atlantic salmon, free for the picking, a pitchfork being adequate for fishing. All rivers then surged from countless headwaters at springs and snowbanks and flowed down to our three oceans—the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic. Abundant runoff raged wild and high in springtime, clear and cool in summer. Rivers nourished the greatest abundance of life this continent has ever known. One might think of it as "North America National Park." Imagine an untouched Mississippi! The Great Lakes as a drinkable wilderness! The wildlife glories of Yellowstone—everywhere! Yet it was even better than that, because much of the continent, especially the East and South, was richer than Yellowstone, being humid, temperate, and at a low elevation, far more conducive to the propagation of life.
While my ancestors from the Pilgrim days on down possessed so much, they never lived in harmony with the land, but subdued it to the limits of their technology, as we are still doing today. Now we see the results: a lot of people possessing only a fraction of the original, natural, free wealth of the continent. Those who say we cannot afford to protect rivers are referring to only the final remnant that has somehow escaped wholesale development and rearrangement. It is about this final trace that we now argue so much. It is about this token of our ancestors' heritage that we are still pressed at every turn to compromise.
From the coasts of Maine and Florida to the shores of California and Alaska, our rivers are beleaguered by dams, pollution, diversions, and streamside development. The qualities that once seemed limitless are today utterly forgotten at waterways as massive as the Missouri, Tennessee, and Sacramento. Many people living along the Ohio River don't even know that it is dammed; in fact, it is not free-flowing at all. Sluggish, currentless, rainbow-oiled waters are all that many residents have ever known, all they ever imagined.
The abundance of water and of the life it holds were once real, but only aspects of that abundance remain. With the pressures of an American population that grows even in eras of economic recession, rivers continue to be regarded as a resource for expedient consumption.
Progress in conservation has been made, but too often we define environmental progress as a slower rate of loss. It is considered an accomplishment when a stream is reclaimed, not to healthful conditions but to anything outdistancing the toxic dumps we have come to expect of rivers ranging from West Virginia's Kanawha to California's Alamo. At a time when environmental awareness has perhaps reached a modern zenith, policies and practices continue to degrade the very basis of ecosystems and communities—the arteries that provide water, a parade of life, and a proud identity to otherwise increasingly faceless cities, towns, and countrysides.
Yet who does not desire a river of life? Who would reject a river where children can swim on summer afternoons, where anglers can cast a fly or a worm for food or sport, where homeowners can live in admiration of the fruitful shores and stroll with joy in their hearts on a summer evening? Rivers, quite simply, are part of the American ideal, as expressed in the pioneering Anglo settlement at the mouth of the James River, the tales of Mark Twain, and the paradisiac scenes on calendars, postcards, and advertisements for products as far removed from rivers as chewing tobacco.
Our rivers are fundamental to the quality of our lives, but by some perverse ingratitude they go largely unrecognized in the process of building America. In spite of important gains in pollution control, economic analysis that halts new dam proposals, and a handful of wild and scenic river designations, rivers remain a poor orphan to the nation that we continue to develop. Rivers remain victims of a wringing of wealth that ignores the source of that wealth, calling to mind an old story: the goose that laid the golden egg was killed because of the greedy belief that many eggs could be gleaned at once.
* the Nation's Heritage
Rivers are central to America's existence—to people's existence. Coursing in our veins as rivers do on earth, water constitutes 75 percent of our own body weight. With uneasy concern, the president of the organization called American Rivers remarked, "My twelve-year-old daughter is three-quarters Potomac River." A light-hearted interpretation of the Creation says people were invented so that water could walk from place to place. Central to our regard for rivers is the fact that we drink from them. More than half the water used in this country comes from streams, and the rest comes from groundwater, inextricably tied to the surface flow because rivers recharge the aquifers, and the aquifers in turn seep into the rivers.
Rivers have been a staple ingredient in our civilization. They still are. Correspondent Charles Kuralt said, "America is a great story, and there is a river on every page of it." Stories of river travel are as old as our presence on the land. Imagine the tales of Jacques Cartier sailing up the St. Lawrence in 1534, of revolutionary army volunteers ascending the Kennebec River in Maine or crossing the Delaware with George Washington, of keelboaters on the Ohio River, or of John Colter poling up the Missouri. More recently, naturalist Edwin Way Teale wrote, "To the lost man, to the pioneer penetrating a new country, to the naturalist who wishes to see the wild land at its wildest, the advice is always the same—follow a river. The river is the original forest highway. It is nature's own Wilderness Road."
Musician and songwriter Mason Williams has collected more than 1,000 river songs and performs concerts in which he never strays from a riverine theme. The standards include "Shenandoah," "Deep River," "Shall We Gather at the River?" "Down by the Old Mill Stream," "Moon River," and so on. The cultural anthem of modern-day river lovers might be Loggins and Messina's "Run, River, Run."
Rushing from rivulet to riparian artery, waterways have formed our highways—the Hudson, Mohawk, Susquehanna, Tennessee, and Mississippi—all well-known routes of settlement. Now, discovered by canoeists, rafters, kayakers, and captains of anything that floats, including more than one rubber dinosaur I have seen, thousands of rivers in all corners of the countryside are routes of adventure, recreation, and escape. They offer a different way to see the land, a remarkably fitting way to enjoy the wonders of America.
Rivers offer a way to enjoy the earth, to appreciate it. Fishing, boating, swimming, hiking alongside waterways, and all forms of river recreation surge in popularity. One conservative count has Americans spending more than 550 million days a year in recreation by streams, a figure that no doubt fails to account for those times people simply stand at the water's edge to look, to think, to laugh, to cry, to reflect on the past, and to plan for the future.
Except for driving—and one could argue that time spent in a car is not really recreation but only a gas-consumptive means of getting somewhere—water—based pursuits are the most popular form of outdoor recreation. In much of the West, tourism outranks all other "industry," leaving ranching, mining, and logging far behind. The popularity of rivers can be seen explicitly in the boom in whitewater paddling, an industry at once nonpolluting, labor-intensive, and dollar-infusing to such towns as Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania; Albright, West Virginia; and Wesser, North Carolina. This is also seen at Moab, Utah; Galice, Oregon; Buena Vista, Colorado; Taos, New Mexico; and Coloma, California.
On the Gauley River in West Virginia, a rafting season of only twenty days generates $20 million of economic activity, each visitor resulting in 1.8 days of employment, giving that mountain state an alternative to the chemical-factory and strip-mine way of life. In Colorado, commercial river running accounts for $70 million in the state economy; fishing contributes a whopping $1 billion. The number of anglers nationwide doubled between 1955 and 1988. In 1985, 38.4 million anglers spent $17.8 billion, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Since 1960, canoeing has increased in popularity by 515 percent compared to the mere doubling of hikers, bikers, and campers. In Arkansas, canoeing contributes a generous $20 million a year to the economy.
Time spent on rivers is more than recreation; it can be re-creation in the finest sense—a renewal of the spirit, a refreshment of the mind, a reinvigoration of the body. Floating on a boat in the current, we watch a kaleidoscope of scenery drift by. Skimming through morning mist, sneaking past herons, warming our bodies with sunshine that scatters stars of reflection aross the water—all of these moments add to our understanding of what a river is. Blue depths beyond whitewater ledges, rocks colored red and black like a mosaic, and fish glinting across a green pool all add to the endless picture book of a river, a book that depicts a perfect place.
Passions run higher on rivers. Life seems more vital. On a river, it's easier to believe in the power of nature, in the water cycle, in the chain of life, in the flow of nutrients down to the sea, in the fact that we are made from earthly elements and when we die those elements go back to the ground and feed some other life. In a society that has become increasingly urban and alienated from the natural world, rivers offer an opportunity to return, to rejoin the pattern and the company of life on earth, to share in this archetype of creation. But that possibility exists only if the rivers are worth going to.
Rivers are central to heritage, history, and recreation, and they are universally visited and depended upon. To think that only anglers use a river is like thinking only hunters use the woods. Other people simply love the woods, and so it is with rivers.
William K. Reilly, before becoming administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, testified in support of a National Park Service program that was assisting local communities in protecting rivers, and recalled the Sangamon River of his youth in Illinois: "Its mud banks and smells, the occasional snake, the mysteries of its undergrowth and its capacity to roll and rise and spread in spring rains are for me an important childhood association. On many a lazy afternoon, only the river seemed alive and in motion, always available to play with or just watch." Many people will agree: the days spent along rivers are the days of heaven.
No one, in fact, can really get away from this thing we might call riverness. Streams pass through virtually every community. More common than mountains or seashores, rivers of one size or another are one of the most universal features on the landscape.
Modern news headlines report the cutting of tropical rain forests, global warming, and ozone shrinkage, and high-profile conservation initiatives have centered on wilderness and endangered species protection—all vital concerns. Yet these issues may seem distant or abstract from daily life. This is not so for rivers and streams. How far must anyone go to find a waterway in need of care? And because a stream's health depends on its watershed—all the land in the drainage—the stewardship of rivers becomes a holistic endeavor, touching virtually every aspect of our relationship to the earth.
The difficult global environmental problems require commitments for reform that must be rooted in a love of the earth. Local features such as rivers, experienced in our day-to-day lives, engender that love, much as the warmth of a close family instills the esteem needed to deal with less friendly people in the outside world.
When we fly over the continent, rivers are the dominant features seen from 30,000 feet. My last coast-to-coast flight disclosed the claustrophobically leveed Sacramento and then the bearishly rugged American River of California; the Carson, bound for irrigation ditches in Nevada; the comprehensively diverted Sevier and then the bow-tie loops marking the Green and Colorado rivers in Utah; the wide, shallow Platte of Colorado and Nebraska; the ponderous Missouri and Mississippi; and then, mostly obscured by clouds, the Wabash, Ohio, and Potomac.
Our highways often follow rivers, mimicking sinuous routes through hollows, valleys, and canyons. Even the interstate highway system—though striving to be as oblivious as possible to natural features—follows the lead of rivers: 1-91 along the Connecticut, 1-81 along the Shenandoah, 1-80 following the Platte, 1-5 along the Willamette and Sacramento. Virtually every time we travel, a stream or river is revealed to us.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lifelines by Tim Palmer. Copyright © 1994 Tim Palmer. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.