Watershed
6/12/25 - In praise of those who think like a river
Hello everyone:
As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.
Now on to this week’s writing:
For a million years and more we were creatures of place. We may have been strange tool-making, cave-painting, cerebral primates, but we were still threads in a local fabric of other lives. Now we think we are the fabric, served by those other lives. And where we were once each bound to very particular acres - village and valley, say - of an abundant Earth, we’re now travelers in our own abstraction. We move freely through “the world,” which is no longer synonymous with the Earth. We’re as detached as astronauts on spacewalk, tethered only by our appetites.
Our lives and language reflect the old centeredness less and less. It’s a recent drift, but when the old stories of living in relation to abundance are not kept alive, our memories become as erasable as slate. Far too many of us, like me, have forgotten our species’ ways amid forest and field; forgotten how we lived within an endless library of interrelated plants and animals; forgotten how to acknowledge the handiwork of beavers and bison, wasps and moths, serviceberries and figs; and forgotten our (ongoing) violence against all those peoples who did not forget.
On a cultural level, we don’t know how to live. Which means we don’t know how to enmesh ourselves in ecological community. In our current state of detachment, we’re in sync only with the speed of the tapestry’s unraveling.
discussed our separation in economic terms in an excellent long-form piece on the importance of place in a burning world:One of the larger projects of our modern society and economy is a project of dislocation and disconnection. The more we can untether people into individual units, the easier it is to mobilize them for maximal utility to the market. Most of us are not people of place, we are people of a market. Many move away from our hometowns, we follow opportunity to college or for a job to maximize our economic/career opportunities. Most people do not use their place-based identity as the prism they bend all decisions through, and most people do not integrate into the places they inhabit.
Thus it’s vital that we reset some Earthly frames of reference for ourselves amid the innumerable political and industrial borders that immiserate the land rather than connect us to it. Roads and parking lots are bulldozed through wetlands, factories squat on riverbanks, and border walls cut through habitats like swords through flesh. A glance at the unnatural, squared-off colonial geography so visible in the silhouettes of African nations and many U.S. states tells us how abstract our ideas of place have become:
Frame of Reference
Which is why I’m happy whenever I’m in the presence of people who think in terms of the land’s features, rather than by the conventions of the mechanical puzzle we’ve buried them under. The land provides sane and optimistic frames for doing the good work of conservation and rewilding.
I was honored recently with an invitation to speak to the annual meeting of a watershed-based conservation group, but because of a scheduling conflict I had to decline the offer. It was a disappointment, and I’ve been wondering ever since what it means to think like a watershed.
I started by looking at a piece I wrote a year ago, “How to Think Like a Forest,” and found this in the section titled “Cyclical and Wet”:
Perhaps our greatest failure from a forest’s point of view is our failure to manage water. Ecology and climate are really reflections in a raindrop. Our civilizations are as dependent on water as tardigrades are upon the moisture of moss, though we are far, far less resilient when that water disappears. And now that deforestation, agriculture, and development have broken small water cycles across the globe, influencing climate as profoundly as greenhouse gas emissions, we face a chaotic, dry, hot, stormy, flooded future that can only be helped by reestablishing much of the green world that’s been lost.
Attending to water, then, is at the heart of any better future we may make. And thinking like a watershed is both making a map of how water lives on the land and creating a measure of health for that land.
In simple terms, a watershed might be defined as “an area of land where all water that enters it, either through precipitation or springs, drains to a common outlet or outflow point.” A watershed can range in size and complexity from a small steep-sided seaside cove to the entire Amazon basin, which at 6.4 million sq km (2.4 million sq miles) is nearly the size of Australia. There are watersheds in extremis - deserts that dry all flow, or polar basins that lock it up as ice - but mostly water falls and keeps falling until it finds an aquifer or the sea.
Watersheds are defined by water, but it makes sense to think of them as living bodies which contain multitudes, a community of communities in motion. For one thing, most watersheds contain other smaller watersheds, everything draining toward a stream that, in turn, drains into the larger basin. And then, just as our own bodies are home to an ever-shifting array of microbial life we can scarcely name, much less understand, watersheds contain worlds in plant, animal, and fungal forms, each of which is linked to the others through the passage of water. The collective reality of watersheds is an analogue for both the blue-green Earth and our own watery selves.
Water binds us all, naturally and necessarily. The threads of a watershed - its innumerable temporary rivulets, slow swamps and marshes, ponds and lakes, streams and major rivers - bind the land together. Forests and meadows breathe while the rivers pulse. Minerals, organics, and migratory species move down and out, while every plant and tree tapped into the moving water grows up toward the light. Water begets water, soil is the womb, and vegetation is the midwife, as Millan Millan said, and as Rob Lewis reminds us.
The Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study in New Hampshire has been conducting long-term watershed-based research for more than sixty years, “focused on improving our understanding of the response of northern forest ecosystems to natural and anthropogenic disturbances.” It’s invaluable work, which of course means that it’s not valued enough by the culture known primarily for its disturbances.
Thinking like a watershed demonstrates respect for the entire body of life. Those who work in service to rivers and their watersheds are tapped into both past and future, connecting to the old ways and charting a new path forward.
Tipping Point
But every node in a watershed is a place for us to pay attention and to do the right thing. Protect the pond or stream near you, clean up and slow down the run-off from your paved neighborhood, replace pavement with vegetation wherever possible, act as guardians for the amphibians who are forced to cross roads, or monitor the health of the forests between veins in the watershed.
Spencer Scott describes the vital link between living locally and thinking globally in a hotter world. We need to think of a place as home before we defend it:
I think we will have a very difficult time integrating the realities of climate change into our cognitive system until we can respond to those stimuli in a way that feels like a net positive. Becoming a person of place allows you to be hopeful, be angry, be defensive, be overcome with fear, and flooded with courage, defiance, and strength. Becoming a person of place will grant you the reinforcing framework to sustain climate-positive behavior and will fortify you with the resilience of a restored connection to the world that needs our attention.
To make his case, Scott cites poet Gary Snyder, from “Sustainability Means Winning Hearts and Minds,” an essay found in Back on the Fire. Snyder introduces us to the phrase “watershed consciousness”:
I believe that more people staying put, learning their place, and taking on some more active role would improve our social and ecological life… But note: there's no limit to how big the place can be. The size of the place that one becomes a member of is limited only by the size of one's heart. We speak of watershed consciousness, and the great water-cycle of the planet makes it all one watershed. We are all natives to this earth.
I recommend this older Resilience essay that explores the idea of watershed consciousness, and offers among its bits of wisdom this useful summary:
The logic of watershed protection must travel upstream to the divides and follow the watercourses all the way down. We must understand, and assume responsibility for, our households’ and settlements’ effects on the waters of the world.
A watershed is a tipping point. Literally, it’s defined by its high borders from which all arriving precipitation tips inward toward a central drain. But it also serves as a symbol for change in these precipitous times, as the hot mess we’re making of water cycles disrupts all of life and affects the well-being of the waterways right before our eyes. When the rivers aren’t right, nothing is right. And then, as we tear down dams or clean up rivers, we work to initiate a social tipping point for our communities to reconnect to the land they occupy.
The passage of water may be the primary organ in the body of a watershed, but it is one of many. Soils store water temporarily, sustaining the microbes that sustain everything else. Plants and animals shape the waterways, adding or borrowing nutrients from the flow, building on the diversity that is essential for all life. And forests pump into the atmosphere some of what the watershed has collected, seeding clouds and powering the cycle that is always home.
This happens locally and on a continental scale, as in the Amazon rainforest sending rain across South America and the Congo rainforest gifting rain to the Sahel. Both now face Anthropocene tipping points in which deforestation and a hotter atmosphere alter or erase these continental-scale gifts.
Is a River Alive?
It’s worth noting, as I did in “Reimagining Rain,” that the water we see passing by is only with us a short time. The flow of a river feels eternal, but any water moving across the land is as ephemeral as music, “the song of a thousand voices,” per Hesse’s Siddhartha, singing its way to the sea. The only phase of the water cycle that is shorter is in the atmosphere as vapor and rain:
Rain breathes, and breathes the world into being.
Mostly it sleeps: in lakes and mountain glaciers for decades, in shallow groundwater for a couple centuries, in the ocean for millennia, in deep groundwater for 10,000 years, and in Antarctic ice for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Its time in the atmosphere, in contrast, is a lark that lasts only nine days.
And speaking of beautiful things arriving… one of the new books I’m most excited to read this year is Robert Macfarlane’s latest, Is a River Alive?. Macfarlane is one of our finest writers, and in this book he explores with his usual depth and intensity one of the ideas generated by the rights-of-nature movement: How do we determine whether the great flowing rivers of the world are merely powerful or endowed with a presence that deserves legal recognition?
In a thoughtful review in Atmos, Macfarlane notes the failure of imagination that has led us into the catastrophe of a disrupted Earth, and is inspired by the “moral imagination that we call the rights of nature movement.” And in an excellent interview in Emergence, he reminds us that we are all attached to the lives of rivers and the communities they nurture:
as you know, since rivers run through everyone, when you begin a subject like this, everyone has a story to tell. Everyone has a river to speak of and sing of. And that’s wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. It is torrenting.
Is a river and its watershed alive? It is full of life, certainly, and it is central to the health of all life. That to me seems like more than enough reason to establish a higher order of value, and to enclose a watershed within the circle of our empathy. The only reason to deny rivers such protection is to maintain a delusional level of self-interest in which we imagine that we can sustain Anthropocene culture without being nurtured by the natural world.
The Overview Effect
It is ironic, I think, that the astronauts in my metaphor for our detachment from Earth are actually some of the most articulate people working to revitalize our attachment to it. They’ve experienced firsthand the “overview effect,” in which viewing the Earth from space wakes us up to the beauty and fragility of life, and wakes within us an urge to protect it. Sometimes I wonder, though, if for many people seeing the technological achievement of the Blue Marble photo or more recent satellite images merely reinforced the feeling that the Earth is ours, captured as much by our genius as by the photographs.
But it is impossible to deny the force of feeling that former astronaut Ron Garan expresses in this Big Think video about his epiphany while in orbit. Here on Earth we prioritize the economy over society, and society over the Earth. We have it backwards, he says. There’s no economy visible in the overview effect, just the beautiful planetary watershed, occupied by societies which are in turn far too occupied with their economies.
We need enough distance from the civilizational minutiae of our lives - political, economic, cultural - to see where our lives are actually taking place, and what a miracle the Earth and our presence upon it truly is. But we don’t need to go into orbit. We don’t even need to climb a mountain (though I certainly recommend it). We only need the moral imagination to trace our local water cycle, from source to sea to sky and back again, and to understand that all the life we love is contained within it. Thinking like a watershed, it turns out, provides a low-altitude overview effect.
Finally, I want to note the fine coincidence of
and Street Smart Naturalist publishing today an essay titled “We All Live in a Watershed.” David is responding to Robert Macfarlane’s new book, and does so by detailing his watershed (or what remains of it) in Seattle. It’s a marvelous idea. What is your watershed? Is it part of a larger basin? Where are its upper limits and who are its rivers? Where do they greet the sea? And just as importantly, who is working to protect the watershed?Taking my cue from David, then, I’ll say that I live on a peninsula drained primarily by the Pemaquid River, and by dozens of small streams flowing into the estuary of the Damariscotta River on one side and into Muscongus Bay on the other. (It is a small comfort that all of those names predate the colonial era.) Close to the house, a few small unnamed streams run down to the bay not far away. As on most of the coast, the watersheds here are small, mere capillaries on the edge of the endless sea.
Those thinking like, and speaking for, the watersheds here are the good folks at Coastal Rivers Conservation Trust and, a little farther afield, Midcoast Conservancy. The work they do is invaluable, generous, noble, and worth supporting. If you don’t know who speaks for your watersheds, find out. Connect with them, learn from them, and think like them.
Thanks for sticking with me.
In other Anthropocene news:
From Alternet, as the Musk-Trump feud played out last week, the most important news in human history was quietly ignored. CO2 levels in May averaged just over 430 ppm, likely the first time since the Eocene or Oligocene epochs, roughly 30 million years ago.
From the Guardian, the second-most important story of our lives might be this: Insect populations are crashing worldwide, even in the most remote and intact ecosystems on the planet. Pesticides and habitat loss have been driving the decimation in human-dominated areas, but the hotter climate regime we’re creating everywhere is dismantling entire living communities across the tropics. Those communities are dense and rich and finely tuned to heat and moisture, and we are as oblivious and self-involved as a bulldozer.
Or maybe, from the Times, this is the second-spookiest story of the moment: “super marine heat waves” are becoming more common - and perhaps the new normal - and are upending life in the oceans, from plankton up to the humpbacks. The Times piece uses excellent graphics to demonstrate the frightening speed with which these heat waves are growing.
From
and The Climate According to Life, “A Robin,” a very short lyrical piece in admiration of a robin, her beak, and her charms, which are the charms of all birds. If nothing else, I’m grateful to Rob for offering us this quote from Black Elk:Birds build their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours.
From
and Between Two Seas, “the world becomes silent,” a sad but wonderful essay on our cultural amnesia about the ecological abundance that previous generations enjoyed. As I noted in my recent essay, it’s known variously as shifting baseline syndrome, ecological amnesia, extinction of experience, etc., and describes how quickly the real world slips away from us because we grow up normalizing the losses around us. Rebecca offers a more lyrical description:What it means is that, with every generation, we slip further and further into crisis, and we barely even notice.
Notch by notch, the world becomes a little more silent.
Notch by notch, we become surrounded by desert, and we call it wilderness.
From Inside Climate News, “A Song for the Cahaba,” a lovely ode to the longest free-flowing river in Alabama, the unique lilies that inhabit it, and a local band who has written a song about it.
From Grist, the pervasive problem of noise pollution in a fossil fueled world, how (to some extent) it can be eased by shifting to electric machines, and the people who are actively working to make that happen.
From
and The Crucial Years, “Buzzzzzzzzzzzz,” a good diversion from his usual direct focus on climate chaos and the crushing stupidity/venality/cruelty of those in power who threaten all of life on Earth for another fossil fuel dollar. Here, McKibben looks at the steep decline in insect populations all around the world, even in areas untouched by habitat loss and pesticides, and then looks at the wonderful data emerging from the habitat created by solar arrays around the globe, where plants can thrive and (locally) boost the populations of insects and insect-eating birds.From
and the Climate Water Project, how the massive (and under-reported) effort to reforest the Sahel and stop the southward expansion of the Sahara should include protection of the great Congo rainforest, from which much of the moisture that arrives in the Sahel originates:To truly succeed in restoring the Sahel and halting Sahara expansion, focusing solely on local efforts isn't enough. It's equally critical to halt destruction and actively support restoration programs within the Congo Basin, recognizing its indispensable role as a rain provider for the Sahel. The understanding of, and acting on these atmospheric connections, helps to heal the interconnected systems that sustain life across the African continent.
And in very related news, from
and Biotic Regulation & Biotic Pump, “Green Oceans of the Blue Planet,” an excellent interview on Makarieva’s research into the large role played by forests in driving moisture long distances across continents, and how climate science is not yet incorporating this essential idea into their models.From Inside Climate News, the aquifers beneath the Colorado River basin are being diminished even faster than the river itself. The culprits here are the culprits everywhere: overuse and a hotter world.
You have convinced me to order McFarlane’s latest book. I have loved his last books — very thoughtful and deep discoveries of our world… What’s left of it.
“Thinking like a watershed, it turns out, provides a low-altitude overview effect.” I love this—and in many ways, could replace “thinking like a watershed” with “adopting animism” with the same effect. When I tap into the interconnected life force in everything, how even these words I write now are carried on pollen and shared breath, it’s nearly impossible to not feel awe.