Rivers Do Not "Waste" to the Sea!
by
Joel Hedgpeth & Nancy Reichard

Chapter Fifteen
CALIFORNIA'S Salmon and Steelhead:
The Struggle to Restore and Imperiled Resource
Edited by Alan Lufkin
University of California Press

American Bald Eagle Breaking Through Salmon Flesh Kleptoparasitized From An
American Osprey On A Wild California River's Outer Shore

Compiled by
Robert Roy van de Hoek
December 21, 2000
Winter Solstice
Malibu, California

Flowing rivers are part of the circulation system of our globe. They bring us nourishment to the land and to the estuaries in which they end asa they pass into the sea, where their last waters evaporate from the surface of the sea and become again the falling rain and snow that renews them. Their waters as athey flow are the life of the growing plants along their banks and of the fishes and other beings that live in them. They carry with them the sediments that enrich the land and help the waters carve their channels and their banks. Their ultimate effect is to wear down the mountains and level the earth.

The hydrologist Luna Leopold has estimated that there are about three millions miles of river channels in the United States, ......

Some years later, in 1853 on the distant western side of the continent, Chief Seattle made his famous speech of surrender to the ways of the white man, in which he said (according to the version in Joseph Campbell's Historical Atlas of World Mythology):

The shining water that moves in the streams is not just water, but the blood of our ancestors .... The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father.

The Rivers are our brother. They quench our thirst. They carry our canoes and feed our children. So you must give to the rivers the kindness you would give to any brother.