From a scientific, economic and agricultural standpoint this is a very easy position to defend; we rely on rivers for transport and trade, to water our farms and supply drinking water to our cities. Since the dawn of settled human history we have built our civilizations around rivers for these very reasons. But there is more to the importance of rivers than just trade quotas and marine highway statistics. It is easy to quantify the importance of rivers, to throw out impressive numbers to prove how much we rely on them in a dozen different aspects of our daily lives; but few people fall in love with numbers. We do not love the rivers for their contribution to international trade or the annual allotted drinking water; it is something more, something far from the dry lists of numbers and research results, that keeps us coming back again and again and ties the rivers so thoroughly into our culture. Find the original article on Triad River Tours website, a company I got an opportunity in 2019 to run rivers in the Pacific Northwest, USA for 3 month. The west side of the North Cascades is a land defined by water. Rain starts in the mountains, slipping down over the foothills in Seattle’s famous gray clouds until it reaches the coast; then the ocean swirls it away, marking its own defining line along the edge of the Sound. Between mountains and ocean—source and sink—run the rivers. They are as woven into the rhythm of life here as the rain. They slip quietly through city parks, splay broad deltas along the coast, roar down the steep slopes of the mountains. It is here—in the quiet bends, the thundering wave-trains, the braided saltwater channels of the deltas—that we fall in love with our
From a scientific, economic and agricultural standpoint this is a very easy position to defend; we rely on rivers for transport and trade, to water our farms and supply drinking water to our cities. Since the dawn of settled human history we have built our civilizations around rivers for these very reasons. But there is more to the importance of rivers than just trade quotas and marine highway statistics. It is easy to quantify the importance of rivers, to throw out impressive numbers to prove how much we rely on them in a dozen different aspects of our daily lives; but few people fall in love with numbers. We do not love the rivers for their contribution to international trade or the annual allotted drinking water; it is something more, something far from the dry lists of numbers and research results, that keeps us coming back again and again and ties the rivers so thoroughly into our culture.
Find the original article on Triad River Tours website, a company I got an opportunity in 2019 to run rivers in the Pacific Northwest, USA for 3 month.
