Agraria Journal Winter 2021

Beavers built a dam along Yellow Springs Creek in the Glen Helen Nature Preserve over the last year, transforming the ecosystem in the process. AMY HARPER 8 AGRARIA JOURNAL 2021 the lake association. Perhaps for you the lake is sacred but for your next-door neighbor, it’s value-enhancing scenery with a shoreline that’s real estate to manicure at will. Debating questions of littoral use and stewardship can be watershed politics at is liveliest. In A Sand County Almanac , Aldo Leopold proposed biotic citizenship . For longtime inhabitants of a creek shed or pond basin to work at keeping their shared water body drinkable, swimmable, and capable of sustaining as many of its full suite of native aquatic and riparian organisms as remain, amounts to such citizenship, could lead to community watershed governance. A hands-on cultural shift towards cooperation and conservation for the sake of something more than just survival might not be such an impossible proposition. The world is willful, diverse, and out of control. The human family can be fractious. In light of the manifold threats of the moment, from climate change and biodiversity collapse to cyberterrorism and rogue Artificial Intelligence, from economic distress, political violence, and disarray to our collision with resource limits, uplifting bioregionalism’s watershed ethos may seem a mite ecotopian. The hope that we’ll come together and work within physical, knowable, living systems for the good of all may be a frail reed to lean on. Reeds, though, are fond of water, can be supple in tempests. Enough of them together can roof a dwelling. Plant or animal, for biomimicry, who’d be your watershed totem, role model, or genius loci ? Would you consider the beaver—a dam builder, and restorer of wetlands, maker of meadows and patron of ponds? Would you admire the primordial sturgeon, going out into the great wide salt or sweetwater seas to grow, then uncannily finding the way back to home’s flowing waters, where the next generation can begin? Would you be as generous and particular as wild rice, a grain requiring no cultivation that simply grows in clean, gently moving water? Would you be as elegant and ancestral as a freshwater mussel, nestled in stream gravel, siphoning minute morsels, producing a lovely simple home with just elements and metabolism? What are the longtime life ways of your watershed? And with nature, are not the possibilities boundless? Stephanie Mills is an author, bioregionalist, speaker and activist. She is a fellow of the Post Carbon Institute, was featured in the 2010 PBS documentary EarthDays, and is a former recipient of Agraria’s Arthur Morgan Award.