NEWFANE — Often it's tough to know the value of water until you can't drink it, you can't swim in it, you can't fish in it, it can't support the creatures and plants that are supposed to live in or around it, it's too muddy or warm or cold, or it's simply not there anymore.
Especially in the humid East, we assume it's just there and will be there as it's always been there, until it's not.
But when it comes to improving water quality and conserving and preserving water habitat, we tend to think a lot more about costs than benefits.
Benefits are shared by everyone. The costs are borne by someone: a property owner, a town, a business, a farm, a hydro facility.
Costs - for controlling erosion, or nutrients, or waste, or managing flows - show up in someone's accounting as personnel hours, materials, and equipment, or perhaps as land taken out of agricultural production, or trees not harvested, or water not flowing through turbines.
On the other hand, we tend not to think about the costs of water sweeping through our communities, or our homes, or our businesses, until it does. If we do think about the costs before the waters rage, it tends to be in the context of flood insurance, and often how to get around paying it.
When the waters do rage? We ask who will pay.
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So this is why we plan.
We need to do more to bring all of this together, and raise consciousness about how flood resilience, water quality, and habitat quality interrelate.
About how emergency preparedness, quality of life, and peace of mind interrelate.
About how decisions by one property owner or one municipality add up to cumulative effects within a basin or watershed.
This is what regional plans and town plans and hazard mitigation plans and zoning bylaws and flood hazard bylaws can help us do - if we have the interest, and if we have the will.
Ultimately protecting and restoring our waters is about being good stewards of a resource that none of us really own, but from which we all benefit. We need to share the costs as a community, and we need to be more mindful about first doing no harm.
I'll leave you with this thought from Wendell Berry from his essay “Watershed and Commonwealth” in his book Citizenship Papers:
“Such pondering on the facts of gravity and the fluidity of water shows us that the golden rule speaks to a condition of absolute interdependency and obligation. People who live on rivers - or, in fact, anywhere in a watershed - might rephrase the rule in this way: Do unto those downstream as you'd have those upstream do unto you.”