Watersheds at all scales are highly evolved geomorphic, hydrological, and biological entities that provide the most comprehensive and demanding benchmark for judging the wisdom of our past and future land use practices.

Cutting, clearing, burning, and draining have hardened the upland capillaries and aquatic arteries of the landscape.

Water is the defining element that unrelentingly determines a community’s ecological and economic carrying capacity.

Thinking Like a Watershed

by Brock Dolman

“It makes far better sense to reshape ourselves to fit a finite planet than to attempt to reshape the planet to fit our infinite wants.”     ——David Orr

Watershed, catchment, drainage, basin, cuenca—by any name they function the same, and everyone on the planet lives in one, sailors on the sea alone excepted. Watersheds at all scales are highly evolved geomorphic, hydrological, and biological entities that provide the most comprehensive and demanding benchmark for judging the wisdom of our past and future land use practices.

Thinking like a watershed opens up new and exciting perspectives in art and science that can nurture our hearts and spark our imaginations. I emphasize HEART here because as a global society, the quality we most urgently need is an open heart, a humility that allows us to perceive the Earth’s watersheds not as reservoirs of assets to be commodified but as living communities. In light of recent events and global climate trends, the current commodity path seriously threatens the continuance of our own and all species. The paradigms of corporate oil and community water do not mix. Solar power may fuel watershed processes, but it will take soul-ar power to restore healthy watersheds.

Bring your hands together and cup them, creating a vessel. Envision the rim of your hands being a water-parting divide with thumb and fingertip ridgelines spires. Fingers become mountain slopes, palms the hills and floodplains, each wrinkle and crease a watercourse conveying over-hand flow to the mainstem riparian ecotone of adjacent hands, spilling forth towards the mouth of articulated wrists. Soul-ar powered watershed regeneration rests in the hands and hearts of each one of us: the power to restore ourselves by restoring our relations with our home basins.

Effective watershed restoration must be based in watershed literacy. The word “watershed” has many different meanings and intentions. In 1878, Huxley first invoked watershed as a landscape entity or catchment basin, stating, “all that part of a river basin from which rain is collected, and from which therefore the river is fed.” This definition encapsulates the basic physical definition of a watershed today. Our challenge is to move beyond a static, hydrologic definition towards a dynamic understanding of the wholeness of watersheds and how they form the foundation of all human activities.

“Watershed” also refers to a significant event. Lodged deep within our collective psyche is a subconscious recognition of the profound meaning each distinctive drainage basin holds: new creatures, new places, new experiences, a new face of divinity awaits. A certain excitement of impending discovery—an archetypical intrigue—arises as you pass into a new “watershed”. Watershed as metaphor brings awareness to a critical transition or point of demarcation, as, for instance, “they reached a watershed in the peach negotiations.” What does it imply to “reach a watershed”? How does this resonate with the feelings of awe and apprehension at cresting a ridge and gazing down into a new, unknown, and promise-filled “Basin of Relation”?

The earliest descriptions of North America by Europeans evoke a vision of snow-capped peaks, forested ridges, wooded slopes, rolling prairies, flood plains, riparian jungles, beaver wetlands, and river mouth estuaries brimming with wildlife—an ecstatically pervious world that cleansed and cycled and savored its own water to the benefit of unfathomable biodiversity. Let us dive into that vision for a moment: Rain falling at 30 miles per hour is slowed and sweetened by outstretched leaves; these in turn drip nutrient-laden tea from the canopy to a forest floor of fluffy duff. Infused with humus capable of absorbing ten times its own weight in water, this protective sponge spreads the life-giving liquid over a flocculated soil shot through with nutrient-grabbing mycorrhizae, fungal threads connecting all the rooted plants. These vegetated landscapes of yore seeded and combed the aqueous clouds, re-humidified the downwind air, buffered their own climates, and passed on the surplus to recharge groundwater aquifers that sustained the flow of springs, creeks and rivers.

Now imagine this hydrological wonderland after some centuries of development. Cutting, clearing, burning, and draining have hardened the upland capillaries and aquatic arteries of the landscape. Clearcut logging, mining, overgrazing, plow agriculture, housing, commercial development, road building, and parking lots, all contribute to a drying out, or “dessication”, resulting in extreme imperviousness in a watershed. The synergistic effects of cumulative impacts present a daunting challenge to would-be restorationists.

The idea of sustainability begs the question of ability to sustain what? The critical answer is cycles. With the rapid decline of salmon populations, a cornerstone of the watershed’s ability to feed itself is also disappearing. Salmon return, spawn, and die: bears, eagles, otters, crawdads, coons and multitudes of aquatic macroinvertebrates eat them and go forth throughout the watershed dispersing marine nutrients through their excrement and corpses. Salmonids are a watershed keystone species, in that their presence disproportionately elevates the web of life. But salmon are not only a keystone species; they also represent the keystone process of nutrient cycling. Watershed starvation resulting from the near extinction of totem salmon is a reality of untold proportion.   

The challenge before us is to design development patterns based on principles of rehydration instead of dessication. Water is the ultimate resource, not the problem. Spread the water out, slow it down, and facilitate its proper percolation, instead of shedding the water away to flood your downstream neighbors with topsoil-laden, fish-killing toxic effluent.

There is an old bumper sticker that reads, “Minds are like parachutes, they only work when open.” Watersheds are similar in that they only work when they are open and porous, permeable, and pervious to the bounty of falling water. Restoring a “watershed state of being” means we open up our mind-sheds so they become permeable to new ideas. Our brains must absorb the idea that biological understanding holds the best promise of solutions for the seven generations to come.

Our fundamental connection as a community is directly related to our shared existence amidst each Basin of Relation. Water movement over and within the land is a watershed’s primary energetic commodity and our local currencies should carry the message “In Water We Trust”. Water is the defining element that unrelentingly determines a community’s ecological and economic carrying capacity. From living water all things spring forth: totem salmon, totem soil, totem forest, totem wildlife, totem watershed, totem planet.

(This article was originally published in ripples. Brock Dolman is the Permaculture program director at Occidental Arts and Ecology Center. He can be reached at brock@oaec.org.)

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