Ancient Wisdom
I spent much of the past week out in the woods foraging mushrooms, raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries and attended way too many meetings. I caught quite a few fish as the fish are foraging on schools of baitfish.
Later, as I was putting my foraged bounty in the freezer, I thought that what I was doing was similar to what others have done around lakes for a long time. It reminded me of a column that I wrote over a decade ago when we were just opening the brand-new Maine Lakes Resource Center (a.k.a. 7 Lakes Alliance Building) in Belgrade Lakes. For over a decade, the nonprofit conservation organizations in the new center have been helping to develop new science and practices for better caring for our lakes. But like all science, we try to learn from the past. The rest of this column is from one of my favorite Watershed Wisdom columns from 2011 that I originally titled, “Ancient Wisdom.”
Mother Nature’s watershed design is based on maintaining upland forests and vegetated wetland buffers to protect water quality. We strive for responsible development to avoid excess stormwater runoff that can cause erosion and deplete groundwater supplies. These are not new ideas. Consider this observation from over 2000 years ago:
There are mountains in Attica, which can now keep nothing but bees, but which were clothed, not so very long ago, with fine trees producing timber suitable for roofing the largest buildings….while the country produced boundless pasture for cattle. The annual supply of rainfall was not lost, as it is at present, through being allowed to flow over a denuded surface to the sea, but was received by the earth, in all its abundance, into her bosom where she stored it.” — Dialogue of Critias, Plato, 360 B.C.E.
Plato could just as easily be talking about modern day America. Cutting down forests in the uplands and clearing the native vegetation results in too much impervious surface, which in turn results in excess stormwater runoff. Instead of recharging the groundwater aquifers and filtering slowly into streams and lakes, this runoff flows quickly down the hills, resulting in flooding in the lowlands and excessive erosion and phosphorusladen sediments flowing into our lakes.
The LakeSmart program emphasizes the importance of maintaining native vegetated buffers along the shorelines of our lakes, rivers, and streams. Over 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519) gave the same advice:
The roots of the willows do not suffer the banks of the canals to be destroyed; and the branches of the willows, nourished during their passage through the thickness of the bank and then cut low, thicken every year and make shoots continually, and so you have a bank that has life and is of one substance.
A few hundred years later, Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862) built his home next to Walden Pond and observed:
My house was on the side of a hill, immediately on the edge of the larger wood, in the midst of a young forest of pitch pines and hickories, and half a dozen rods from the pond, to which a narrow footpath led down the hill. In my front yard grew the strawberry, blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and goldenrod, shrub oaks and sand cherry, blueberry and groundnut.
Thoreau clearly understood the importance of diverse vegetation and a healthy vegetated buffer. Interestingly, even before the advent of shoreland zoning rules, he built his house a half dozen rods back from the water, almost exactly the 100 ft setback requirement of Maine’s current Shoreland Zoning law. With his narrow meandering footpath, I’m sure Thoreau would have qualified for a LakeSmart Award. He certainly understood the beauty of healthy lakes with forested shorefront areas:
A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows.
We have discussed the importance of watersheds and managing our lakes on a watershed basis instead of arbitrary municipal boundaries. There are two places in Maine where this takes place — the Cobbossee Watershed District and the Penobscot Nation in the Penobscot River Watershed. It is no coincidence that Cobbossee Lake is the only major lake that has been taken off of the official DEP list of impaired waterbodies and the Penobscot is Maine’s only river with a relatively healthy run of Atlantic Salmon.
Native Americans have long recognized the importance of taking care of our lakes and rivers. Chief Seattle (1786 – 1866) was not a Penobscot, but I think they would agree with him:
The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. The rivers carry our canoes, and feed our children. If we sell you land, you must remember, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any brother.
More recently Luna Leopold (1915 – 2006), the son of the great 20th-century conservationist Aldo Leopold, who was the Chief Hydrologist of U.S. Geological Services (USGS) and a Professor at the University of California, summed it all up when he said, “Water is the most critical resource issue of our lifetime and our children’s lifetimes. The health of our waters is the principal measure of how we live on the land.”
The 7 Lakes Alliance continues to work to make conservation a tradition in our watershed. We try to implement some of the wisdom of past generations to preserve this special place for future generations. We need to take advantage of Mother Nature’s built in systems and figure out ways to modify man-made systems to mimic natural systems.
We have implemented many state-of-the-art best management practices into the design of our new center. Come visit and learn how to live lightly on the land for the sake of the lakes. We want our children and grandchildren to have memories like E.B. White (1899 – 1985):
For me the golden time of year was summertime, when we all went for one month to a rented camp on the shore of Great Pond, one of the Belgrade Lakes in Maine. This Belgrade era began, I think, in 1904, when I was five years old. It was sheer enchantment. We Whites were city people — everything about Belgrade was a new experience: the big freshwater lake, the pines and spruces and birches, the pasture with its sweetfern and juniper, the farmhouse where we took our meals, the rough camp with its sparsely furnished bedrooms… the boating, the swimming, and the company of other campers along the shore. The month of August was four solid weeks of heaven….
The delicious smells and sounds of Belgrade are still with me after these many years of separation. I spent much of my time in a canoe, exploring bogs and streams, netting turtles…. At Bean’s store* [in the Village] Father would treat us to a round of Moxie or birch beer, and we could feed the big bass that hung around the wharf and then head back [in the launch] across the lake… (There was a new drink out called Coca-Cola, but Father assured us it was a cheap imitation of Moxie and without virtue.)
—Letters of E.B. White, Childhood memories, age 5
This final bit of wisdom from Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax is especially important.: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
*Webmaster’s Note: That’s “Bean” as in “L.L. Bean.” The founder of the eponymous Freeport clothing and sporting goods store owned a cottage on Great Pond, and his brother Ervin was proprietor of the aforementioned store in Belgrade Lakes Village. You can learn more from the Belgrade Historical Society.
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