A Watershed Runs Through You: Essays, Talks, and Reflections on Salmon, Restoration, and Community
By Freeman House
Empty Bowl Press | 2023 | 312 pages
The last half of the 20th century was rich with innovative efforts to mitigate the increasing impacts of humans on natural systems. Such efforts have had challenges; many have failed in recent decades. Thankfully, some have not. A visionary and successful solution for the repair of ecosystems practiced for nearly 50 years lies in the 300-square-mile watershed of the Mattole River in Northern California. Based on attentive and physical community work, this solution results in ecological restoration that is even more pragmatic and relevant today.
“We need to invent strategies for acting our way out of the unthinkable,” writes Freeman House in A Watershed Runs Through You, a selected collection of his talks and essays edited by Jerry Martien with an introduction by Stephanie Mills. House gives an often lyrical consideration to how humanity can build resilience and reclaim its role as a valuable partner with nature.
In 1980 he dedicated his life to a unique “vernacular practice” that combined research with public education and hands-on engagement. His initial goal was to restore healthy salmon runs, which involved numerous activities by local residents to enhance the complex habitat supporting salmon, including in-stream structures and fuels reduction. He also initiated projects to cool water in estuaries ravaged as a consequence of logging. These activities fostered a keener sense of understanding and belonging for concerned residents who learned a greater appreciation of the life they shared with others. The watershed-based practices began small, endured as works in progress, and continue today with staff and volunteers.
A Watershed Runs Through You describes a healing process for a larger, grounded selfhood in landscapes that have long suffered from a society that gives little value to nonhuman life. “We can only aspire to ecosystem wisdom through daily engagement and experience, with all the attendant risk of making mistakes,” House writes.
Although House passed away in 2018, his ethical and scientific legacy lives on, beyond the countless watershed councils and community members across the United States and Canada who have already adopted his insights to better protect, restore, and heal the land.
Given House’s position as a homesteader activist, his essays yield a perspective of how ecological restoration evolved in the late 20th century—beginning as an outlier of conventional science and land use, quantifying natural systems to become more personal and site-specific, appreciating the diversity of place.
Although some of the essays in A Watershed Runs Through You date back as early as the 1970s—when his writing focused largely on working outdoors on streams and hillsides and with his community—today they are increasingly important. His takeaways from his life work carry a vital message for our divisive times:
I’m sometimes asked what is the best thing I’ve learned from working at watershed restoration. And I usually answer that I’ve learned how to listen. I’ve learned more from people who don’t agree with me than from people who do. The consensual process is not so much a political tool as it is a tool for community building.
House considered salmon a precious species, one that has provided life lessons for humans for thousands of years. In an earlier book, Totem Salmon, he writes that “salmon were also experienced as connection” by Indigenous people, who relied on them and performed ceremonies of gratitude in response. Connection as understood by House is crucial to wellbeing but difficult to realize.
He believed thoughtful physical work in watersheds with neighbors could avoid the abstract planning and political paralysis that comes from viewing nature as a lifeless resource to be exploited. Attentiveness, he writes, yields connection and transforms behavior, generating greater commitment, belonging, and beauty.
When writing of personal encounters with other lives in the watershed, House is eloquent and humble. He developed new ideas within the context of community actions: “We can only hope to understand some of the patterns in our minds that have put patterns on the earth that are tearing it up and threatening our health—as ecosystems, as communities, and as individuals.”
Numerous references and gratitude to mentors—including Raymond Dassman, Rachel Carson, Paul Shepard, and friends and community members who influenced his education and mission—have helped to further House’s awareness of, and influence on, ecological care and restoration.
A Watershed Runs Through You reflects a purposeful, wise ethic from a person who witnessed many ecological tragedies yet remained grounded in the pleasures of working with his family and community in nature. House and his friends built improved habitats to help salmon thrive just as they built a framework of ideas and practices to help other people learn how to live respectfully and securely within their own watersheds. Today’s ongoing challenges of human development and resource depletion require these essential insights.
Terry Lawhead worked in journalism and rural community development in Western states and Pacific Island countries. He also was a logger, farrier, and children’s librarian. Terry, who has assisted in salmon recovery and restoration, co-founded Two Magpie Press. He currently writes and illustrates stories for grandchildren, nieces, and nephews.
Header photo by Ramon Perucho, courtesy Pixabay.
