Mass Creek Revival

The Quashnet River in Massachusetts

How to bring a river back from the dead

Here’s a lovely story of small stream restoration in Massachusetts, well-written by TU’s Chris Wood. (“The Quashnet is a five-mile prayer of a river,” Woods writes, a line I wish I would have come up with myself.) 

I needed some good news with my coffee this morning, and this story did the trick.  I  reveled in reading about how a dedicated group of volunteers took it upon themselves to bring a river back from the dead. 

River restoration, dam removal included, can be an awe-inspiring lesson in the power of nature to heal, in an age when so many of us have lost faith in that power. But it’s also a way of reconnecting to one another, on every level from an afternoon planting willows with school kids to lobbying the state legislature to pony up the funds to complete a deal to save a creek, as happened on the Quashnet. 

Doom scrolling on your digital device is dangerous. It can lead to a false sense that the whole world is falling apart. Read this story, and ponder for a moment how many others like it are taking place today on creeks around your neck of the woods, your county, your state, your country, your planet. A lot of people are doing good work to put the pieces of their waterways back together again, because they know that on a river, the whole working thing will always be more than the sum of its parts. Thanks Chris and TU for starting off my Wednesday with some good news.

Steven Hawley and Miles Johnson of Columbia Riverkeeper will be discussing Steve’s new book Cracked: The Future of Dams in a Hot Chaotic World, Thursday at 7:30 pm, at the downtown Portland Patagonia Store, 1106 W. Burnside.

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