December 1963 — VOL. 44, No. 12 — Saving Our Watersheds
Download
PDF version
No single factor has a more decisive
influence on human beings than water, and every drop we use
comes from our watersheds.
Limited comprehension about this has wasted millions of
acres of land, caused sharp drops in crop yields, raised the
crests of floods, starved cattle, spread deserts over the
face of the earth, destroyed recreation beaches, lowered the
quality of the water we drink and polluted it to the menace
of our health.
"Man," said William Vogt in his dynamic book Road to
Survival, "is the only organism known that lives by destroying
the environment indispensable to his survival." Parasites
tend to do this, but their destructive effectiveness is limited
by their lack of intelligence. Man uses his brain to tear
down; he glories in his relentless "conquest" of the wilderness
as if it were an enemy; the emblem of his species is the bulldozer.
Only recently have our nature scientists started to make
us realize that if we are to survive, much less improve our
standard of living, we must create for ourselves a healthy,
harmonious relationship with our total environment, animal,
vegetable and mineral.
Hitherto, we have thought of conservation as something a
farmer does to grow more and better crops; now we must start
to think of it as part and parcel of our individual hold on
life.
Sometimes we get excited about the short—run effects
of lack of conservation practices, such as dirty drinking
water, foul beaches, water shortages when lawn—sprinkling
is forbidden, and the like. But these things would not plague
us if former generations had known what we know and had done
something about it.
It is fifty years since a United States Secretary of Agriculture
issued a foresighted directive to the forest service: to pursue
their duties "for the greatest good of the greatest number
in the long run."
The history of dead civilizations tells tragically what
our future will be if we continue to abuse our water resources.
Throughout history, water has dominated human life. Nations
reached great heights and toppled and were entombed by the
drifting soil brought to their doorsteps because they had
cut away the trees and shrubs and grass that gave it anchorage.
In the heart of the Arabian desert is buried a big town
which may have been the home of the Queen of Sheba. It was
abandoned hundreds of years ago because something went wrong
with the watershed and the water supply failed. Erosion destroyed
or sapped all the Mediterranean civilizations past and present,
from Athens and Rome to the fertile plains of North Africa
where once flourished great Carthage.
"But that was long ago and far away," some may say. "It
can't happen here." Look, then, at the Prairie Provinces in
the 'thirties, and the pictures they presented of abandoned
farms, the skeletons of cattle, the sand—buried fences,
and the blasted hopes of men and women who had sought to make
their homes there. Merely to drive in the blowing dust through
parts of Saskatchewan in mid—1937 was to make oneself
physically ill, mentally depressed and spiritually sad.
We cannot be content to look back pityingly upon the mistakes
of ancient civilizations which have become part of the dust
created by their disregard of the laws of nature.
Today, we have more people on the earth, using water for
more purposes and in beyond—measure greater quantity
per capita. At the beginning of the Christian era this planet
supported a population of about 250,000,000; when the Pilgrim
Fathers stepped ashore in 1620, the figure had increased to
about 500,000,000; it was announced in October 1963 that the
world population was estimated at 3,180,000,000. By the year
2000, said Aldous Huxley in The Politics of Ecology,
6,000,000,000 of us will be sitting down to breakfast every
morning.
In the past three centuries Canada has grown from a number
of scattered settlements on the eastern seaboard and the lower
St. Lawrence, where 3,215 people lived under primitive pioneer
conditions, to a continent—wide nation of great wealth
and resources numbering nearly 20 million. This expansion
has come about with almost total disregard for conservation
of water, the resource most needed for life and agriculture
and industry.
What about watersheds?
Solomon and the ancient philosophers explained that springs
were fed from the sea by subterranean channels. It was not
until around 1650 that we started to connect the amount of
water in streams and wells with the rainfall on the watershed.
We know today that rivers cannot be studied without examining
the land through which they flow. It has dawned upon us that
good forests, good soil and good water go hand in hand.
This brings us to the drainage basin or catchment area,
now generally referred to as the watershed, the natural land
unit which continuously receives and stores and delivers our
water supply. It may be a few thousand or several hundred
thousand acres in extent. By managing it properly we may expect
it to produce a maximum regular flow of clear, clean, high—quality
water.
A watershed that is well cared for will hold water throughout
the year. Its tree and plant roots, its dead leaves and topsoil,
hold a great deal of water in their spongelike mass. Some
water stays in the subsoil, but much goes still farther down
to form hidden rivers and lakes.
On a watershed where 24 inches of precipitation reaches
the soil a plot only ten feet square receives and disposes
of about 6.25 tons of water a year. An acre receives 2,718
tons. In the orderly disposition of this huge amount of water
every piece of ground, a square foot, an acre, or a square
mile, performs a vitally important function.
Yet water is the commodity most taken for granted, most
abused, most wasted. Many a city and town that only a few
years ago had adequate reservoir capacity always comfortably
full of water now finds that its expansion is limited by shortage.
Farmers have to dig deeper wells.
Breaking the cycle
Never before has the hydrologic cycle been badly dislocated
in the presence of so many hundreds of millions of people.
This is the most damaging impact of civilized man on his environment.
In the wilderness of Canada, before the coming of Europeans,
there had been built up a mutual society of balance among
the waters, soils, grasses, forests and all animal life.
How it operated is well told in Canadian Restoration
by E. Newton—White: To this society each member contributed
its powers of control and protection, and was in turn itself
controlled and protected. As a result, the streams and rivers
ran clear, cold and constant, and carried away, with little
disturbance, the surplus water left after all the demands
of the natural reservoirs and animal and vegetable life had
been satisfied.
But we have broken off our contact with nature, hiding behind
our mechanistic contraptions with a sense of security that
is false. We harvest grain, grind flour, and bake bread by
machinery and electric power, but disregard the fact that
the materials of a pound loaf have used up almost two tons
of water. We use square miles of corn either to eat on the
cob or to feed our livestock, without remembering that an
acre of corn in its growing season transpires 3,000 tons of
water, equal to about 15 inches of rainfall.
It is legitimate to bake bread and to eat corn, and the
change from a scattered population to the present day mass
population consuming great quantities of these things could
have been effected without damage or loss, if made wisely
and carefully. Instead, we have removed natural barriers so
that the precipitation does not reach the ground—water
reservoir, but runs so fast down our hillsides and across
our wheat and corn fields that it fails to penetrate to the
roots. Instead of nourishing our crops it picks up soil and
carries it away out of usable reach.
Delaying the runoff
The age old law of hydraulics is easy to understand. Man's
job is to control, so far as lies in his power, a flow of
energy emanating from the sun. This flow, or cycle, is seen
concretely in the water chain: from cloud to rain to headwaters
to river to sea to cloud, ad infinitum.
When rain falls upon a barren hillside it eats away channels
for itself, racing to plunge itself into a watercourse headed
directly for the sea. There is the first place to catch and
retain it. The amount of water stored in the ground is dependent
upon the condition of the soil and the grass and the forest
cover of the watershed. When forested hills are denuded by
burning or cutting, when upland ranges are overgrazed, when
cropland becomes eroded, the rainfall runs off the hard surface
of the ground without performing its proper function.
It is legitimate in this plight to think along the lines
of the tank—building kings of ancient Ceylon. They resolved
that none of the rain falling in the mountains should reach
the sea without paying tribute to man on the way, so they
built great tanks and passed the monsoon rains from one to
another far out into the plains. The only way to get ample
water is to intercept it in the run—off.
It seems ridiculous to think of Montreal harbour having
to move somewhere else, but the prospect was mentioned by
Jacques Simard at a conference of the Community Planning Association
in October 1963. The majestic St. Lawrence can one day become
feeble and sick, incapable of meeting navigation requirements,
hydraulic power needs, and the mass of industrial and domestic
demands of a corner of the continent in full economic development.
In this drainage basin "we have two nations, eight states
and two provinces," said André Gagnon, chairman of
Cadres Professionnels Inc., "grouping myriad cities and enterprises
for whom it is a question of life or death ... we have
hardly 40 years left to find new sources of water."
While remedial measures are being taken to build up the
St. Lawrence watershed, it has been suggested that we might
divert the Harricanaw River from Hudson Bay to Lake Huron,
at an estimated cost of $200 million. This would feed the
Great Lakes with 13,000 million gallons of water a day, six
times more than the amount drained away by Chicago.
Where to start
A key factor in conserving water is our forest.
There are three stages of forest history in an industrial
country. The first is marked by energetic and often ruthless
exploitation of virgin forests. This is generally followed
by a period of increasing dependence on foreign supplies,
such as the United States is now suffering. Then comes the
third chapter, in which an effort is made to rehabilitate
or partially restore the forest resources.
In addition to the problems posed by this purely commercial
cycle, we are now coming to realize the effect our treatment
of the forest has on climate and stream flow. E. W. Zimmermann
said bluntly in World Resources and Industries: "Forests
exercise a decisive influence over the distribution of water
and are a necessary means of safeguarding the national soil
resources. Mountainsides denuded of their natural forest products
are a national menace." In other words, forests not only offer
an opportunity for private profit but they also vitally affect
the life of society.
The violation of natural laws governing the extent of forest
cover is one of the most tragic examples of human folly in
the face of nature's wisely ordered system.
We have pushed back the forest with fire and axe and bulldozer;
we have used the hoe and the plough where only trees should
grow. We have ignored the fact that forests are living societies
of trees, shrubs and other forms of plant cover, playing a
necessary part in evolution, of which we think of ourselves
as being the highest form.
Our destiny is wrapped up with that of the forest. We in
Canada have been supplied by nature with the kinds of trees
best suited to meet human needs. Because our climate provides
growing conditions so satisfactory that in most regions, if
fire is kept out, there need be no fear of not securing a
second growth after cutting, we may have ample trees for all
our needs if we prove ourselves to be good stewards.
Ninety per cent of Canada's forested land is owned by the
Crown, and operating companies are required by law to prepare
management plans for leased lands. This is important, because
of the time element in the regrowth of trees. A man who cuts
down a tree is limited in his outlook by his own lifetime,
and may have no interest in whether another tree replaces
it in fifty or a hundred years, but the outlook of governments
is for the lifetime of the nation.
Governments are interested, too, in other functions of the
forest besides providing commercial products. In their broad
view the conflicting uses of forest land must be reconciled
so that harvesting of wood for marketing shall not menace
watershed protection. Their broad view enables them to plan
so that excess forest, with its great capacity for storing
water, shall not interfere with the summer flow of water necessary
to irrigation and the development of electric power. Instead
of forest, they may decide that part of the watersheds shall
bear grass or shrubs, which have relatively low water requirements
and disperse less into the atmosphere by evaporation, and
at the same time protect the soil from erosion.
Watershed management
We must respect the basic principles and laws governing
the whole living community if we are to be successful in maintaining
human life. The trees, the grass, the shrubs, the soil and
the living creatures that inhabit them are parts of one vast
living organism. That is the principle on which watershed
management rests.
Natural laws impose limitations and obligations on us. Whether
it is convenient to us or not, whether it is politically expedient
or not, water is going to run downhill, and its destructive
force is going to increase with the rate of runoff; water
is going to become impure if we pour impurities into it; water
tables are going to sink if we pump water out of them and
turn aside the replenishment that is their due.
To know about these things we need a norm, something against
which to measure the state of the earth after we have changed
some part of it. This is why nature and conservation associations
and those who engage in the professions having to do with
natural resources are urging the maintenance of certain parts
of the country as "wilderness areas." These would preserve
wild land in its primitive condition, without roads or other
man—made installations not necessary to their protection.
They would exhibit the whole community of life at work. Study
of them would provide the basic rules for watershed management.
Management is necessary if we do not wish to balance the
supply of water by rationing it. Instead of putting meters
on our taps to cut off our supply of water after we had drawn
enough for two percolators of coffee a day and one bath and
one washing per week, we would be wise to increase the supply
by providing the proper water conservation environment in
our watersheds.
This goes far beyond narrow emergency measures. It seeks
to control and distribute the storage and distribution of
water according to the needs of our increasing population.
It becomes the sum of all the grass stems, tree roots, and
the leaves of shrubs; it counts in all the trickles of water,
the snow banks on the high peaks, summer storms and marsh
drainage. It is total receptivity, adequate storage and elimination
of waste. It takes account not only of present yield and profit,
but also of inventory and deferred benefits.
In a well—managed watershed forests and grassland will
be preserved or augmented according to need. Cutting of timber
will be done in such a way as to cause the least possible
damage to the forest floor and to keep ample timber growing.
Farming will use methods that prevent erosion and increase
the absorptive quality of the soil. Industrial use and sewage
treatment will avoid pollution. Watchfulness will subdue fires
started by natural causes and the law will prevent the setting
of fires by human beings who are malevolent or careless. Grazing
will be regulated so as to avoid destroying the plant cover
or compacting the soil.
Whose job is it?
To protect our watersheds must be, because of the magnitude
of the task, a job for governments working together. Quebec
and Ontario need to act jointly on the Ottawa River Valley
problems; interprovincial and national co—operation is
necessary for such river basins as the Fraser, Columbia, Saskatchewan,
Nelson and Saint John. The St. Lawrence watershed involves
international as well as inter—provincial action.
Smaller watersheds, we might call them "local", require
the co—operative action of individuals, of municipal
and county councils. The concept of the local watershed approach
to water resource conservation and development is just beginning
to be effectively understood and applied. The farmer who plants
a woodlot on a hillside and terraces or contours his fields
is not only contributing to his own welfare but is discharging
a duty to everyone between him and the ocean. When he bands
together with neighbouring farmers to form an integrated plan
he makes his neighbourhood a better place to live in, improves
his social and economic conditions, and gives the higher authorities
an example they will be ashamed not to follow.
Major works, such as large dams or levees or big reclamation
projects are beyond the scope of local watershed management.
Although the British North America Act retained for the federal
authority jurisdiction over certain aspects of water use,
responsibility for regulation and development rests largely
with the provincial governments. This does not mean that political
views should intervene. Only by shifting attention from the
merely political to the basic biological aspects of the human
situation regarding water supply can we mitigate and shorten
the times of troubles into which our present course is leading
us.
Huxley referred in his paper to two menaces under which
we live: sudden destruction by scientific war and the more
lingering destruction by biological agencies. He went on to
say: "Only when we get it into our collective head that the
basic problem confronting twentieth—century man is an
ecological problem will our politics improve and become realistic."
Then he added emphatically: "Or, preferring to be wantonly
stupid, shall we choose to live like murderous and suicidal
parasites that kill their host and so destroy themselves?"
Responsible individuals
Water is so important in life that its conservation and
distribution must override the geographical boundaries of
private property, counties and provinces; the political boundaries
of federal and provincial jurisdictions, and the economic
domains of agriculture, forestry and industry. If jurisdictional
disputes prevent effective action, our heritage will be lost
by default, because above all boundaries is the supreme natural
law whose edicts are indisputable.
All that is to be done must start in the minds of citizens.
"We may well ask," said John H. Storer, renowned lecturer
on the natural world, in his book The Web of Life,
"whether man will develop understanding before he destroys
himself by destroying his environment." To which may be added
what was written by Marya Mannes, United States writer and
commentator, in her book More in Anger when she referred
to "people who conserved their convenience at the expense
of their heritage, and whose ephemeral prosperity was built
on waste."
The least we can do as responsible individuals is to become
informed about the problems and make our voices heard in demanding
conservation of our most priceless material resource, water.
Perhaps it is right to say that we should approach this
enterprise in the steps of the Taos Pueblo Indians, who wear
soft soled shoes so that they may feel the earth.
Published by RBC Financial Group. All editions from the RBC
Letter collection are available on our web site at www.rbc.com/responsibility/letter.
Our e-mail address is: rbcletter@rbc.com.
Publié aussi en francais.
[ Return to RBC Letter
home page ]
|
