For most of the last two thousand years--from the Chinese and Egyptian and American Indian fishermen--down to Isaac Walton and to us, fishing has been the story of hooks and line, rods and reels, creels and nets, and of fish--from carp to crappie, from bass to bream, from salmon to smallmouth, from tarpon to trout. And for most of two thousand years the fisherman never had to think about the water, the ocean, the streams, the rivers. Wherever there was water there were fish and they could always be caught. About a hundred years ago, a few people began to recognize that something was wrong--there were fewer fish, some had disappeared entirely, and the crystal streams ran foul with mud. Now we know that logging caused much siltation, too much sunlight warmed the water, agricultural and industrial products ran off into the streams. Today tens of thousands of miles of streams are polluted and weakened by everything from direct dumping--what we call point source pollution--to very indirect pollution that slowly seeps through the earth into the waters. And today, every fisherman must be an environmentalist as well as a fisherman. Water quality concerns us all, and we know water quality begins far from the stream.
Only in adventure stories, fantasies, and romances do rivers begin at a "source" or origin or "head" water. In fact rivers do not have point-source beginnings. The source of every river is its watershed. The origin of a river is the perimeter of its watershed. Rivers begin at the tips of tree leaves, at the eaves of the house, at the crack in the sidewalk, at the crown of the road. Rivers begin where any dog stops at a stump, any cow pauses in a pasture. Rivers begin where we water the lawn and wash the car and pour out our stale cola in the parking lot. Rivers begin wherever water touches the earth. Because rivers do not have a point source, they may become polluted anywhere throughout the hydrologic cycle from ocean to air to soil. The integrity of rivers begins with the integrity of the earth itself. Air and ocean and land pollution are not separate ecological problems. They are but the parts of the same problem and the seam that joins them is rising, falling, moving water. Rivers spring up from the oceans, fall from the sky, and seep through the earth. Rivers are the threads that run through our world, and there is nothing that is not part of rivers. To save the waters, we must heal the earth.
The lead image for this section is not a mistake. When we look at a road map or topo, the fully branched system of all the rivers and streams is usually shown in fine light blue lines. On the old road maps, roads were shown in red, black, or dark blue lines. Decades of this kind of cartographic and environmental education has kept most Americans from recognizing the critical elements of watersheds. For every mile of American road there are two miles of intermittent streams that collect water--along with chemicals, trash, and all of the breakdown products of the wearing out of America [hundreds of thousands of tons of tire tread, for instance]--and then dump this water into the nearest stream. All roads must be seen as part of the tributary system of the nearest stream. We must learn then to see all of the lines on the map as part of the stream system.