Here in the Tualatin Valley, we spend tens of millions of dollars to protect and improve fisheries and water quality, for all the obvious reasons. Even the hard-core right-wingers will acknowledge that we need good water, and the MAHA movement is all about it. So with everyone actually on the same page, and tens of millions of dollars of public and private money being available for the work, why is water quality flat-lining in the Tualatin Valley (and everywhere else in the Willamette Basin)?
Water quality is not improving because we are attacking the wrong problems. The problem is not so much the quality of the water, it’s the quantity of water that we need to address. There’s not nearly enough of it. And we easily have the means to conserve way more water on the landscape, but we’re not getting real about making it happen.
The easy solution? Plant willows! and let the beaver impound the water for us. And at the same time, restore fisheries, provide wildlife habitat, pump up groundwater, sequester carbon, and filter out phosphorous, the major chemical pollutant in the Tualatin River. Where will we do this? On swampy farmland where farmers are currently losing money growing stuff like grass seed. What water will the beaver impound, you ask? Well..the water that is gushing off farm fields and into ditches and streams, laden with P, sediment and agrochemicals right now, at this very moment. In all, tens of thousands of acre-feet of water…all because we have punched thousands of holes in the bottom of the bucket…is pouring out of the system and rushing out to the Pacific, carrying our refuse and filth with it as you are reading this post.
All this filthy water didn’t start out filthy. It was, until it hit the streets, rooftops and farm fields of the Tualatin Valley, about as pure as it can be (never mind the nano-plastics and PFAS). In our effort to dry up the valley floor for farms and houses, we have built a drainage system to conduct all of that beautiful water out to the Pacific as fast as possible. And boy, is that system effective! I’ll re-share a graphic from an earlier post:
So by the time we get to August, the summer water remaining in the 2020’s, compared to the same time of year before the White Man showed up here, is the little blue squares. All the rest – the empty squares – is the water that used to be here in late summer. But we have drained nearly all of it away, along with all our filth, in the months leading up to the dry season, via a network of tiles, drainage ditches and canals constructed and maintained over the past one and a half centuries. Sort of like flushing the toilet, continuously, all year long, for a hundred and fifty years.
And then we wonder why fisheries aren’t coming back, and why we have problems with overheated water and cyanobacteria. What is wrong with us? Are we really that stupid?
We don’t have a water quality problem. We have a water quantity problem. And willows and beaver are the solution.
Do I have something to sell you? Yes I do! We have over 300,000 willows and other beaver-associated plants that could help power this transformation. But I also have something to GIVE you. Again this year, I’ll offer up a third of that total FOR FREE to people developing new beaver projects this winter. That’s 100,000 willows, alders, spiraea and other plants that could power a real transformation of water resources in the valley. All you have to do is buy the other 200,000 (or whatever you can swing, proportionately).
Let’s go folks! It’s not that hard..
’til next time,
-George