What The Future Holds
Excerpted from "Encouraging Communities to Think Like Watersheds:
Practices on the Mattole River of California"
by Seth Zuckerman, Mattole Restoration Council Chair
| Restoration has taken root in the culture of the Mattole watershed in the last 16 years. School kids have incubated native salmon eggs in their classrooms for over eight years, and have helped release fingerlings into the river so many times, says Council cofounder Freeman House, "that it has become just another boring thing adults do." The native stock hatchbox program envisioned in 1980 as a four to eight year stopgap measure, will likely be retired in 10 years, according to Gary Peterson, the Salmon Group's fisheries biologist. The drop in salmon runs seems to have bottomed out, at least for the time being. With luck, and if external conditions such as ocean fishing and weather patterns cooperate, the hatchbox program will not be needed after that. People call the Restoration Council for advice when storms take away their river banks or their roads threaten to fail. People continue doing as best they know how, listening to the watershed around them for their cues, striving to improve as our base of knowledge and experience grows. "After a decade and a half," says Freeman House, "we have only two things to point to: (1) a possible improvement in salmon numbers and (2) cultural transformation. Without cultural transformation, those improved fish populations won't last." Effecting the cultural transformation is the biggest task before us - but also the most rewarding. |
|
Partnerships |
 |
|