Sunday, September 25, 2022

Celebrate Rivers! Water Is Life!

Today is World Rivers Day. Here in the US, we have an abundance of rivers but less and less an abundance of clean water, and, with climate change, many of our rivers are running dry.

US Rivers
US Rivers

Yesterday I promised some resources on Minnesota’s rivers. Here they are:

Watersheds often form the core of a bioregion.

Rivers and watersheds are the responsibility of an extremely fragmented array of governmental entities, making holistic management almost impossible. As our environmental crises continue to become more serious, fragmented approaches will become more problematic in adapting to and minimizing those crises.

In the US, the American Rivers organization and Trout Unlimited are doing an abundance of good work to protect, restore, reconnect, and sustain our rivers and streams.

In Minnesota, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency is responsible for the water quality in our rivers and streams. There’s lots of room for improvement. The screen shot below identifies in red the rivers and streams that fail to meet water quality standards.

Minnesota’s Impaired Waters
Minnesota’s Impaired Waters


The River Now


Hardly a ghost left to talk with. The slavs moved on
or changed their names to something green. Greeks gave up   
old dishes and slid into repose. Runs of salmon thin   
and thin until a ripple in October might mean carp.
Huge mills bang and smoke. Day hangs thick with commerce
and my favorite home, always overgrown with roses,   
collapsed like moral advice. Tugs still pound against   
the outtide pour but real, running on some definite fuel.   
I can’t dream anything, not some lovely woman   
murdered in a shack, not saw mills going broke,
not even wild wine and a landslide though I knew both well.   
The blood still begs direction home. This river points   
the way north to the blood, the blue stars certain   
in their swing, their fix. I pass the backwash where   
the cattails still lean north, familiar grebes pop up,   
the windchill is the same. And it comes back with the odor   
of the river, some way I know the lonely sources   
of despair break down from too much love. No matter   
how this water fragments in the reeds, it rejoins   
the river and the bright bay north receives it all,   
new salmon on their way to open ocean,   
the easy tub returned.


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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.

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