Nola Cressman

Oct 7, 2019 at 12:52 PM by Nola Cressman

I live in the pacific ocean watershed. It drains everything on the west side of the rockies into the pacific ocean. The Fraser, the Columbia, and the Yukon are all rivers that drain into the pacific along the watershed. A big issue with watersheds is that they don't follow state boundaries. When say British Columbia has water restrictions set Washington doesn't have to follow and so they take more water then us. We can't control the whole watershed because we aren't the only ones using it which means implementing things like restrictions ends up being challenging. The cumulative effect, the effect produced by something happening over a long period of time, impacts our oceans. We are currently experiencing the cumulative effect from our solution. Our solution is getting into the oceans and ending up in the food we eat so in tern we ingest this pollution. We never realized the effect of our actions because we didn't see the results right away but now we do and nothing is being done to fix it. We in BC have a great watershed because we have the trees of the forest all around us. The trees around the rivers help give homes to many animals which feed and drink of the rivers making sure the rivers don't over populate with fish. I don't remember exactly how it works but I know theres a cycle of the nutrients from the dead fish going into the trees then back out into the river and this would not work in a more dessert like landscape. A river in a more dry climate would not be as reliable as a river here and would not be home to as many different ecosystems. Here in BC we are very fortunate for the environment around us and I hope it is able to stay this way as long as we fix our climate change issues.