Professor calls for holistic approach to managing watersheds 

By Gordon Hoekstra, Vancouver Sun, December 28, 2011, p. A6

Decades of logging and ranching had stripped Murray Creek’s banks of any vegetation and plugged it full of silt, leaving it uninhabitable for fish.

It had been 20 years since anybody had a drink of water from the creek, located in the Nechako Valley, near Vander-hoof in northern B.C.

But thanks to a local rehabilitation effort, the creek is being restored to its original state.

The change has caught the attention of University of Northern B.C. health scientist Dr. Margot Parkes, whose work focuses on the importance of managing water for the health of people, as well as for a healthy environment.

Her research is aimed at an emerging area of science that says it is important to man-age ecosystems – the complex relationship between plants, animals, land, water and people – at the watershed level. Watersheds are the drainage areas of rivers.

The New Zealander likes to use a metaphor to describe the idea: As blood is to the human body, water is to the land and the people.

While it may seem straightforward – that water and health are connected, and should be managed as such – often people do not make that connection, says Parkes, a Canada Research chair at UNBC.

“The problem we face with watersheds is they are both complicated and complex. It’s not just water coming out of a tap, or the water flowing in rivers,” said Parkes.

“Whether it’s drinking, farming, mining development, pollution, forestry, sediments, the spawning pulse of salmon – you cannot avoid water flows and their effects.”

It’s why it makes sense to take a broader, connected management approach at the water-shed level, she said.

The problem is that this hardly ever takes place, says Parkes, who was a medical doctor before she pursued her postgraduate studies.

Instead, when health is examined or imagined, it takes place at the family, neighbourhood, city, regional, provincial or national level and it’s disconnected from the fact the drivers of health, and the very places people live, are in the natural world, noted Parkes.

You wouldn’t think of blood as separate from the health of a human body – separate from the oxygen it provides, for example – but that’s how water is viewed. “It’s absurd,” said Parkes.

The underpinning to the use of water as an overarching management tool is its scarcity.

While it is common for people to imagine Canada as a place that is water rich, that notion needs to be put into proper context, says Parkes.

There is an important distinction between water stocks and water supply. Water stocks are the fresh water in lakes, which is not the same as the flows of renewable water each year known as water supply.

While Canada has 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water stocks in its lakes, it has only 6.5 per cent of the world’s renewable water supply.

Where water flows is also important to how much is avail-able for people to use.

In Canada, 60 per cent of the country’s fresh water flows to the Arctic. It means less fresh water is available for use in densely populated southern Canada.

Despite the obvious importance that water plays in people’s lives and the emerging idea that it makes sense to incorporate watersheds in planning healthy communities, it is difficult to get water onto the planning radar screen, said Parkes.

That is, in part, because governments or agencies work separately and do not communicate with each other. Health authorities, provincial departments and regulators, federal agencies and communities all have different pieces of the responsibility for health, water and development, noted Parkes.

But the rehabilitation of Murray Creek is a good example of the potential in managing watersheds from a broader perspective, she said.

The Murray Creek effort was started by the Vanderhoof Fish and Game Club, but it has grown to include cooperation from provincial and federal agencies, the municipality of Vanderhoof, companies such as Rio Tinto Alcan and groups such as the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation. More recently the Northern Health Authority has become involved.

Critical vegetation areas were restored along the creek, and fencing was put up to keep cattle out. The aim is to restore populations of rainbow trout and coho salmon. Chinook salmon, which appear to be using the stream as a rearing environment, have already been found in the creek.

At some point, the water may be safe for drinking again.

Parkes’s outlook has already inspired Wayne Salewski, who headed up the Murray Creek rehabilitation effort.

The project is now being scaled up to encompass 32 creeks and streams that flow into the Nechako River.

The hope is to market cattle from the region as salmon-safe or salmon-friendly, per-haps charging a premium, says Salewski, a longtime resident of the logging and forestry com-munity of Vanderhoof.

The end result of the environmental effort is expected to not only create cleaner streams that support fish, but provide economic benefits that will create a healthier community, said Salewski.