A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 10
Tenth of a series
“They both listened to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, of perpetual Becoming.”
- Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
Economics. Environment. Esthetics
Human activity is the single greatest threat to the rivers on which all life depends, and that dependence is not going to change. We can’t stop drinking their waters, nor eating the food they provide. We will continue to demand the power they generate, the transportation they make possible, and the recreation they support. But we must stop reducing streams and rivers to their utilitarian functions and calculating their value solely in economic terms.
For beyond economic – and even environmental – issues is a third dimension that is too often overlooked. Esthetics. As with science, beauty is rooted in the particular – the play of light on the water, the caddisfly in its tiny case, the sound of flowing water, the scent of riparian plants in the early spring. It leads us to enjoy the stream directly, as we walk along its banks, raft its reaches, and fish its pools, feeling at these moments the solace of solitude and the paradoxical sense that we are not alone.
“I came to the River for science,” wrote biologist David Campbell who spent 30 years studying the deep wilderness of the western Amazon basin, “but I stayed for the beauty. My memories of the species I found – each an invocation of sunlight and water and minerals – and of the play of light in the canopy, the night sounds, the aromas and textures of the forest, the time and space shared with friends on the frontier – make up a tapestry of experience so rich that now, years later and thousands of kilometers away, it imbues my papery life with dimension and perspective.”
In A Land of Ghosts Campbell found that knowledge enhanced his appreciation of beauty. In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain found something else after he had achieved his childhood dream: becoming a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River:
“Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river. . . . All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty’s cheek mean to a doctor but a ‘break’ that ripples above some deadly disease. . . . And doesn’t he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?”
A river is not just a collection of resources for humans to exploit, but a community of which we are members. Beauty pulls us out of our individual selves and connects us with a world of immeasurable – and infinitesimal – things.