Rivers
are mirrorsNavigating the site:
What can we find along a river?
"A working river never rests." Fraser River, near Kamloops, British Columbia, [JVS, 1988].
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Sacramento
River levee |
Stylized
river valley |
B - basin is characterized by the watershed, slopes, and adjacent bottom lands beside the river -- or riparian areas.
F - flood plain is the lowland or area surrounding rivers and their tributaries that is subject to inundation.
O - oxbow or water body cut off from the main channel by erosion; in Australia a billabong.
S - swamp or overlflow land, periodically submerged by rain and flood.
- What do we mean by riparian culture and cultural landscape in the studies of rivers?
- Many large rivers with yearly flows have their sources in high mountains where the accumulated snow melts and provides a year round source of water that peaks at a season corresponding to the river's flood stage. This is true of the world's greatest river systems: the Nile, Amazon, Yangtze, Hwang Ho, Danube, Rhine, Mississippi - Missouri - Ohio, Tigris, Euphrates, Indus and Ganges. Without snow and perpetual renewal of water provided by ice and glaciers the depenable flow --called stream-flow-- of the river is compromised.
The ecological history of rivers and their flood plains is allegedly the study of people's habits, livelihood, attitudes and inherited prejudices, attributes and customs that asks "How have rivers shaped our evolutionary development and our cultural understanding of natural areas?"
Riparian means stream side, living beside or along a stream of river and hence affected by its currents, flood patterns, and multiple resources.
"What is a river's relation to rivalry?"
If we say it is a number of persons forming competing groups we have to understand that the original rival is the person on the opposite bank of a river:
- 1. Upstream owners: Claimants to sources of wealth.
- 2. Downstream owners: Claimants to residuals of wealth.
A Linguistic approach is impossible to ignore;
"Rivers are more than flowing waters -- draining the uplands on their way to the sea. But "rivers as a riparian ecosystem" muddles the distinctions we need to make between functional and evolutionary units that equally influence the life along the river. That is because animals that use the river, such as beavers, otters, salmon or wading birds depend on a complex food web. A functionally intact river supports fisheries, birds and other animals because the capacity of the river to concentrate and disperse nutrients simultaneously.
Over generations animals adjust to the constraints because to survive they partition the resources that rivers make available. In dry seasons and in flood seasons the extremes condition species that make up the ecological communities. The food webs that these species depend upon adjusts to the quality, quantity, timing and distribution of water, oxygen and trace elements needed by all the populations nourished by the river and its adjacent swamps, floodplain and forests. The more each of these related parts of the river are functioning units the greater ability populations have to adjust to changes in the river over time. The concept here is resiliency, without adjacent wetlands and forests, rivers are less capable of supporting large populations and there exists a greater threat to species whose descendents depend on the river's bounty.
"Rivers
as resources" is a phrase that also ignores the intrinsic, or inherent ways that
landscape 
shapes
the watershed laced by rivers and streams and how rivers and streams
bring life to a watershed.
In Egyptian mythology the river is the origin and continuous source of
life, in the alluvial mud of the Nile Delta, Isis finds the parts of
her lover Osiris dismembered body and she there reassembles his remains
breathing life back into the corpse through intercourse. The river reconnects
the fragmented region represented by Osiris scattered remains.
Hence, the oldest meaning of the the term river reveals a profound hope, a bitter warning and a commitment.
The river literally and figuratively holds for us a promise, in the Bible it is the twin promise of redemption and sustenance, the promise to a desert people that the land is renewed by divine grace.
The historical understanding of the term river in human ecology
1, rivers as the site of settlements: from hamlets to metropolises
2, rivers as sources of agricultural, fishery and wildlife resources (Mitchell, Marsh, Baird, Bache)
3, river as a system of transportation -- 1820s to 1890s (Ellet, Powell)
4, conservation of rivers as watershed (1890s -1930s) relational and place based comprehensive riverine management (McGee, Pinchot, Roosevelt)
5, rivers as a self-organizing microcosm (1910s - 60s) Leopold metaphor of Round River (1940s)
6, rivers as agents of flood control (1920s - 1970s) Floyd Dominy, differences in patterns of flow and change
7, rivers as text ? (1860's to now) Twain, Faulkner, Hughes,
8, rivers as (1970s - present) material nature split into sources, storage and sinks of nutrient exchange, flow and reuse and banks of wild biodiversity
Evolution or development of a river from youth to maturity implies a geologically significant life span in which watersheds give birth to rivers, the rivers scour a deep bed moving silt and debris, as the river shapes the drainage patterns of the river basin and their adjacent valley floors.
The context of the way we use words, phrases and terms is critical to determining the meaning of what we are saying. Watershed is a critically important concept. That is because it embodies the entire topography and underground geology through which water permeates and reinvigorates the terrain we settle, use, or leave alone as refuges..
Diagram of a cross section of a watershed contrasted with the Lake Tahoe basin in winter, [JVS, 2003]
When using words such as forest, river, or swampland we ought to be aware of the ecological community, by using very precise language. Often, our words do not portray nor do they convey the evidence for the salient and defining features of a system; an ecosystem nourished by a river has special attributes that words can easily obscure. The words we use will become fused in our imaginations with the very conditions we describe. And if we are not careful, some people will confuse our descriptions with the reality of rivers that run through us and the lives of all creatures in the riparian region.
Lesson: Our language reveals the importance
of rivers, forests and wealth.
Meaning that:
Forests are sources of rivers because as vegetative landscapes they give rise to springs.
Weald is the English word for forested area.
Forests and streams differ for many reasons some physical, others biological and some acquired by the ecological and evolutionary contingencies that they are subject to over the course of the life of the watershed.
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| Inherited | Acquired |
| biological | learned |
| instinct | practiced |
Animals living in estuaries, the river mouth or along the river inherit and acquire adaptive means of adjusting to the flow of conditions.
Riparian tidal shoreline in cross section, is where water flows in opposite directions:
As the river floods or the tide rises the vegetational response to periodic inundation or flooding indicates to what extent and for how long the submerged land remains water logged, limiting the kinds of plants along the shore. Characteristic plants indicate a riparian zone along the edge of any stream, creek or river. The cross section of this tidally affected creek shows how regular flooding selects for grasses that can tolerate prolonged submergence, although along some rivers shrubs and riparian forests grow. The Amazon river forests stand submerged for up to five or six months in thirty feet of water because the annual flood of the river fed by the snow of the Andes Mountains, the longest chain of mountains on earth, is considerable and prolonged.
A
significant acquired concept
Rivalry is the Latin word derived from rivas, those on opposite sides of a river.
In this photograph of a portion of the watershed from the Himalayan Mountain foothills taken in the 1990s the lighter patches are areas where forests have been cleared by rival owners. Where removal of vegetation causes loss of topsoil and increased siltation downstream, the affect of the upland owner is to degrade the capacity of the river to sustain life downstream.
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