Amazon Headwaters

From Eugene Neighbors

1 Amazon Creek Headwaters Preservation
2 Commentary
3 Get Involved
4 Related Pages

[edit] Amazon Creek Headwaters Preservation

White Paper on the Amazon Headwaters (PDF)

[edit] Commentary

The big picture has probably never been so clear. Our species has wracked up debt on a planetary scale, drawing down Earth's natural capital to a degree that threatens biospheric stability worldwide, through the twin crises of global warming and habitat destruction.

In the past we have created such devastating imbalances on islands, or regions, with terrible regional impacts. The power of our industrial machinery is such that we have now created such imbalance... everywhere. From pole to pole, from open ocean to deep rainforest, tropical and temperate alike.

We know that wild streams and wetlands provide priceless ecological services, and that intact ancient forest is both invaluable habitat and a precious continuing carbon absorber.

Because we know these this, we decry the channelization of free-flowing rivers. We decry the industrial conversion of prehistoric trees into anonymous lumber and fiber.

In fact, it is not radical environmentalism, but simply the hard realism of scientific consensus*, that says our natural debt is too high already. To find a point of balance, of sustainability, where our generation is not in effect killing our own children's children's children, killing the elephant, the great tuna, the polar bear, the frogs and flowers and millennial conifers as quickly and blindly as another exterminated the buffalo - we need to not just slow and mitigate the rate of our continuing impacts.

We need to actually reverse many of our current impacts.

That is the idea behind the Living Building standard for green building, put forward by the Cascadia chapter of the US Green Building Council (USGBC), as a proposed extension to the current LEED standards for certified green building and development.

The current LEED standards, from basic, to Silver, Gold, and much-vaunted Platinum, have been significant in advancing the state of the art of building best practices.

Yet if we continue to level ancient woodlands and to channelize headwaters streams for new housing development, and then build all the new houses in those developments with the high greenness represented by LEED certification, where will that lead us?

It would lead us to continued worsening of both of the dual global crises - simply at a somewhat slower rate of worsening.

To get to where we need to be - to start restoring the global natural balance - first we need to stop making things worse. One component of Cascadia's Living Building standard is no more greenfield development. Realizing that atmospheric pollution and habitat loss are already beyond-critical, what additional greenfields should we be paving over? Headwaters streams and forests? Downstream wetlands and estuaries? Irreplaceable Class One farmland?

Perhaps somewhere there still is undeveloped open space that is environmentally expendable, in the big picture. I don't know. But I do know that the tiny remaining fraction of the Amazon Creek Headwaters is not part of it.

Although the great Willamette River runs dramatically through the middle of Eugene, it turns out the lay of the land is such that the vast majority of Eugene south and west of the Willamette - about 60 percent of total Eugene land area - drains not into the big river, but into our own little Amazon Creek.

In other words, our watershed, our ecological province, for most of Eugene, is the Amazon Creek Watershed, threaded through and organized by Amazon Creek itself.

Looked at from a watershed view, our Amazon Creek Watershed is a scrappy survivor, battered and impacted but still loved and still partly functioning ecologically. It is a prime candidate for the kind of reversal-of-destruction, or restoration, that is so desparately needed around the world.

With the help of dedicated environmentalists, flexible business leaders, and local, state, and federal agencies, our city has already made some progress by protecting a significant part of the West Eugene Wetlands.

Yet equally important as the western wetlands to the health of the watershed, the creek, and everything that depends on it, are the southern headwaters from which Amazon Creek first springs. And these headwaters still hang in the balance, mostly unprotected. In the case of the two essential areas known as the East Fork Amazon Creek Headwaters and the Amazon Creek Headwaters Keystone, our headwaters are intensely and immediately threatened.

To slow the rate of destruction, to hang on to what is left, to begin the slow process of restoration and global recovery, Eugene needs to save these headwaters. To lose the intact woodlands and native waters of these headwaters to subdivision would be, in effect to decapitate our own watershed.

— Kevin Matthews 16:10, 5 September 2007 (PDT)

[edit] Get Involved

"Save the Amazon Headwaters" lawn signs are now available again! Please contact Lisa Warnes, 484-2210.

Letters to the editor of the RG (especially) and the Weekly seem to be especially important, still! Please write them a few words on how you feel about the watershed view of headwaters preservation.