In 1992, Garth Brooks co-wrote a song called "The River" that climbed to the Number One spot on the Billboard Country Music chart. The opening line is, "You know a dream is like a river, ever changin' as it flows and a dreamer's just a vessel that must follow where it goes. Trying to learn from what's behind you and never knowing what's in store makes each day a constant battle just to stay between the shores."
Those lyrics always hit home with me when I think about the current situation in our world, now emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic. Staying the course is never easy to do in normal times, much less as we come to terms with what is, arguably, a new normal.
Rivers are mysterious to me. They can contain great force that can carve canyons like the Grand Canyon and be as powerful as Niagara Falls, or can even be small trickles starting from a lake in Minnesota and becoming the mighty Mississippi. But, in a small way, I find comfort in rivers, because they seem safe to me. They are never the same from one minute to the next, yet the peaceful feeling I get when I sit by a river in the woods calms my soul. There is one particular spot beside a river where I used to enjoy sitting. The location remains elusive to me, as I no longer remember where it is located, although I am certain it is somewhere in New Mexico.
Near my house, in the small Colorado town I currently call home, flows a creek that changes with the seasons. It can be high following a rain or when the snow melts on Pikes Peak. It can also dwindle to a trickle in an unusually dry spell. It flows through town and under buildings and bridges, connects with another creek and, through a series of waterfalls, eventually joins storm drains as it moves through the adjoining city and joins up, I would assume, with an even larger river somewhere else that eventually flows to the sea. Like the book of Ecclesiastes says, "All the rivers flow into the sea, yet the sea is not full."
When I visited the headwaters of the Arkansas River in Salida, Colorado, people were enjoying the water in a variety of ways, from kayaking to wading to fishing. It amazes me that the river flows through four states and joins with the Mississippi half way across the continent to its namesake state. Here in Colorado, the Continental Divide causes some rivers to flow East and others to flow West. There are also many places where you see the dry beds of rivers that long ago vanished.
But, as much as I enjoy rivers and streams like this, there is an ever present thought that rivers are becoming an endangered species around the globe. Arguably, the development of a nation depends on its rivers and they have been polluted and cleaned over the years and some have even been dammed to provide water for growing cities sprouting out of the desert. The statement has always been that flowing rivers will ultimately cleanse themselves. Yet, the argument remains, "Don't drink the water from the river or stream."
The rivers of Chilean Patagonia cascade from snow-capped mountains through sheer rock facades and rolling hills, radiating bright turquoise, deep blues and vivid greens. The Puelo. The Pascua. The Futaleufú. Each is as breathtaking and unique as the landscape it quenches.
But, these rivers, like many worldwide, have been threatened by dam projects that aim to provide power for distant cities and mining operations. Only one-third of the world’s 177 longest rivers remain free flowing, and just 21 rivers longer than 621 miles retain a direct connection to the sea.
When I lived in Massachusetts, I visited the remnants of a town that was flooded to build a dam to provide drinking water for Boston. Although necessary, it was a sad sight to see for sure, as only a small church remains to remember the town. Damming rivers affects both people and ecosystems. More than 60 million people in developing countries depend on lakes and rivers for their livelihoods. An estimated 80 million people have already been displaced by dam projects worldwide.
If we are to arrest global climate change, prevent the toxifying of freshwater sources and do right by all those who depend on rivers for survival, we must return more rivers to their natural state. For decades, rivers have been an afterthought in global climate talks. Rivers help regulate an increasingly volatile global carbon cycle by transporting decaying organic material from land to sea, where it settles on the ocean floor. This draws an estimated 200 million tons of carbon out of the air each year. Hydroelectric dams, when they are built, flood large areas of vegetation. This fuels decomposition and releases carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.
United Nations estimates that around one million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction - at least in part - because of damming, river pollution, diversion for industrial agriculture and overfishing.
The master key unlocking these healthy aquatic environments is “flow.” Well-connected river ecosystems allow an essential exchange of water, nutrients, sediments, and species that not only fosters enormous biodiversity, but also regulates sediment levels, flooding, pollution, and water purification.
When infrastructure like dams, dikes, and levees is built without thought for the river basin, it inhibits and alters flow, disturbing natural processes from seasonal flooding to fish spawning.
It is hard to imagine a world without rivers. The continents would be higher, colder and more rugged, and we humans might still be hugging the coastlines. Our iconic cities, situated along rivers, would not have been built. Global trade and travel might never have developed.
Around the globe, rivers are becoming more and more fragmented as they succumb to the impacts of human development: roads, levees, and dikes transecting floodplains; dams constructed to generate electricity; water diverted for drinking and agriculture. Combine these, and the world is losing its free-flowing rivers at a dizzying pace. Opportunities to protect the free-flowing rivers that remain are fast disappearing, too.
Rivers are the veins and arteries of the Earth, sustaining people and wildlife and playing an essential role in the world’s water cycle. By depositing nutrient-rich silt on floodplains and deltas, they have produced some of the world’s most fertile agricultural land. Just about every civilization can trace its origins to a major river: Mesopotamia’s Tigris-Euphrates, Egypt’s Nile, and China’s Yellow and Mekong rivers among them.
In their natural state, rivers are the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. Then, there are the margins where water meets land - the floodplains, wetlands, and riparian zones that are hot spots of ecological diversity.
Call me a Romantic, but I believe the world is more alive than we can currently understand, and that our society’s project of de-souling and de-animating it is the root cause of the sense of loss - the great ache - that seems to underlie so much of the modern project. Theologian and ecologist Thomas Berry presented the modern dilemma as a break in age-old speech: "We are talking to ourselves. We are not talking to the river, we are not listening to the river. We have broken the great conversation. By breaking the conversation we have shattered the universe."
When humans talk only to themselves, they shatter the universe. It is quite a claim. But human-centric poets refer to it as a diversion. The diversion is an act of forgetting, that, in the words of conservationist Aldo Leopold, ‘mountains have secret opinions.’ Mountains, hawks, hares, great diving beetles, tardigrades, walnut trees, cloud banks. What else? We have to write to find out for certain. Rivers have the same impact: they are wild and blue, raging and unchanneled, if left alone. A blog is inadequate in the face of a river, but words come roaring out of me like water through a sluice. Wild places tend to have that effect on me.
Writing now seems like an experiment in trying to re-start the long-stalled conversation that nobody ever taught me how to have. I, as the narrator, hear the river’s secret opinion about me. It Is hard to know how to reply when a river speaks to you.
Humans - modern humans, anyway -often enjoy listing the qualities that make them ‘unique’; different from "the animals". This list has been shrinking enjoyably for the last century or so, as scientific discoveries force us to remove qualities or activities - language, song, art, agriculture, tool use, group mourning, slavery, war, genocide - which we had previously imagined in which only homo sapiens indulged. We still have a few features which are looking fairly safe from encroachment though. Clothing, for instance. Fire. Writing.
Now, as I write this, I suddenly wonder if these are all words for the same thing.
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