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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] You don’t know what a stream looks like.

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  • From: Jay Woods <woodsjay@cox.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] You don’t know what a stream looks like.
  • Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2006 13:20:32 -0500

I've stopped hunting for squirrels and have spent time thinking about how to
include them in nut and fruit pit planting more effectively.

On Monday 11 September 2006 20:34, Keith Johnson wrote:
> You don’t know what a stream looks like. A natural North American stream
> is not a single, deeply eroded gully, but a series of broad pools, as
> many as fifteen per mile, stitched together by short stretches of
> shallow, braided channels. The banks drop no more than a foot or two to
> water, and often there are no true banks, only a soft gradation from
> lush meadow to marsh to slow open water. If soil washes down from the
> steep headwaters in flood season, it is stopped and gathered in the
> chain of ponds, where it spreads a fertile layer over the earth. In
> spring the marshes edging the ponds enlarge to hold floodwaters. In late
> summer they shrink slightly, leaving at their margins a meadow that
> offers tender browse to wildlife. An untouched river valley usually
> holds more water than land, spanned by a series of large ponds that step
> downhill in a shimmering chain. The ponds are ringed by broad expanses
> of wetland and meadow that swarm with wildlife.
>
> Until the arrival of Europeans in North America, this vision was, almost
> without exception, what streams looked like. They were transformed into
> the gullied channels we mistake for the natural state of streams soon
> after the killing of millions of beaver. Most European settlers never
> saw the original condition of our watersheds, because the trappers came
> before them, a deadly colonial avant-garde that swept relentlessly from
> Atlantic to Pacific coast and hunted the beaver to near extinction.
> Deeply gullied ravines had been the norm in an anciently beaver-cleared
> Europe, and they quickly became the norm here too. Removing the beaver
> drastically altered and simplified the landscape.
>
> (Read the rest of the story here)
> <http://www.permacultureactivist.net/articles/Beavers.htm>




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