THE DREAM OF HEALING POLLUTED STREAMS AND RIVERS

By Dr. John Todd

Sunshine Powered Ecology for Fish and Algae Culture

As a young boy I walked several miles to and from school. For me the journey was better than the schooling. My route followed one or other of two streams that ran parallel to each other. They both flowed into Hamilton Bay at the very western end of Lake Ontario. One of the streams discharged a quarter mile east of our family’s house, which was situated on the water’s edge, while the other stream entered the bay, equidistance to the west.

The mouth of the eastern branch was a cattail marsh with channels that meandered through the maze of tall plants. Heading inland the stream passed through a culvert under a shore road then climbed slowly into rolling hills. The stream defined the western boundary of a golf course. Trees were sparse. The stream became a brook that diminished as it entered a canyon that in turn led to a bluff from which the stream originated. Up on the bluff the land was flat and supported intensely managed market farms with a number of greenhouses. The fields and service lanes shaped my course as I crossed the fields to the main road that linked the city of Hamilton with Burlington, then a town. My schoolhouse was located on the far side of the road on the edge of a suburban area.

The stream to the west was completely different. Its discharge was measured and steady. It passed through a marsh and bog complex and then meandered in dark shade up a narrow canyon with steep slopes until it reached the base of the bluff. Skunk cabbage, Jack-in-the Pulpits and marsh marigolds were well established along the lower reaches. The slopes were heavily wooded and the stream’s origins were a series of springs. Watercress was abundant. On top of the bluff was an agricultural area, mostly orchards including cherries and peaches. Further inland, beyond my school the orchards on the limestone escarpment were mostly apples. choice of routes to school was to a large degree determined by whim and time. The eastern or golf course route was a few minutes faster. As I got to know the streams I began to see them as having very different “personalities”. In anthropomorphic terms the eastern stream was violent and erratic. It was prone to flooding and drying up. It was dirty and filled with silt. Apart from spawning carp in the lowest reaches there were no fishes and bottom life seemed nonexistent. No snails, frogs or caddis fly larvae resided there. I spent hours looking and waiting for minnows to appear. But they never did.

The western stream, despite being comparably sized and in the same watershed had a polar opposite nature. It flowed steadily through wet years and dry. Its waters were crystal clear and its temperature remained steady. It was characterized by dappled light, deep shadows and organic odors that I still can smell to this day well over half a century later. The big hardwood trees and understory plants imparted in me a sense of jungle like bounty. And best of all, the stream hosted many creatures that I came to know. Most remarkable to my ten and eleven year old self was the spawning of the fish in the spring. Just after the flowering of the marsh marigolds, suckers,  fish with a big somewhat ugly looking sucker mouths entered the stream in large numbers. Suckers are distantly related to the minnow family, although they are classified in their own family Catostomidae. They moved upstream into the darkest reaches and thrashed about in a sexual orgy.  They remained oblivious to my wading amongst them.

More than anything it was vitality of the place that attracted me. There was an essential aliveness that in later years I began to understand. The western stream and its valley, despite its modest size, was an intact ecology. What existed there were the remnants of the wild. The place spoke to me. The other stream was neither wild nor a whole ecosystem. The deforested landscape could no longer absorb and hold water from the rains, the soils had washed away and the springs had died. There was an elemental sadness about the stream. Its “moods” were a reflection of exploitation, followed by neglect and then decline. The golf course for me became a symbol of the theft of wildness. 

A few years later, my father sensing my deep unhappiness at being surrounded by so much development and biological destruction, found for me a series of books that changed my life. They were Louis Bromfield’s story of Malabar Farm. They chronicled his return to Ohio from Europe at the outbreak of World War II and his settling on a worn out agricultural landscape.  Using ecological methods, combined with farming practices learned from French peasant farmers, he transformed, in just over fifteen years, the hilly landscape into a bountiful Eden. I was mesmerized by his ability to build the equivalent of hundreds of years of topsoil within decades. His integration of animals with plants seemed quite revolutionary. What struck me as miraculous were his tales of the return of the springs. These were springs that years before had dried up following the abuse of the woods and the overgrazing of the fields. What Bromfield taught me became my greatest lesson and my most enduring gift.  At thirteen I learned from him the fact that ruined lands can be restored. I discovered that in the teachings of ecology lie the foundations for healing, not just individual farms in the midwest, but possibly the whole world.

Ecological wisdom is the reading of life connected to life across great spans of evolutionary time. It is about complex relationships between species and their environments, and it is about self-organization, self-design and self-repair. It includes the perpetuation of diverse systems that are constantly co-evolving. It is an elusive dance that one can sense but never fully understand. Nevertheless it is real.