To: Permaculture ibiblio <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>, openpermaculture <permaculture@openpermaculture.org>
Subject: [permaculture] You don’t know what a stream looks like.
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 21:34:17 -0400
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.
--
Keith Johnson
Permaculture Activist Magazine
PO Box 5516
Bloomington, IN 47408
(812) 335-0383 http://www.permacultureactivist.net
also Patterns for Abundance Design & Consulting
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[permaculture] You don’t know what a stream looks like.,
Keith Johnson, 09/16/2006