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How To Protect Your Watershed
Watershed Management - A Sound Way to Protect Water Quality
When it comes to pollution, what comes around goes around (and around and around) your watershed. That's a region -- as small as your backyard or as big as any major river basin -- where all land drains to a particular body of water or common point. |
 | In a watershed, a creek that's clean at one end could be polluted downstream by drainage from other waters. What do you clean up first, the creek or the nearby lake it drains into and pollutes?
Instead of focusing resources on one particular water quality problem, watershed management is a holistic approach. Watershed management, integrating programs to manage lakes, rivers, oceans, and groundwater, provides a strong framework for future watershed protection. Decisions are based on all the water resources, all the water uses, and all the threats to water quality throughout a common geographical area, including surface water, groundwater and wetlands.
Of course, protecting and preserving water quality costs money. However, it makes little sense to build an expensive plant to treat a community's wastewater, yet fail to prevent pollution of a river by pesticides or highway runoff in the same watershed. Through watershed management we can evaluate needs and address the most serious issues first.
Limited resources can be tailored and allocated to match individual watershed and nonprofit sectors agree that watershed management is today's best approach for preserving tomorrow's precious water resources.
How You Can Help
Watershed management requires everyone's cooperation. You can help by:
- Educating yourself about water resources and uses in your watershed
- Talking to your elected officials about watershed management
- Making sure your area schools are teaching about watersheds
- Ensuring that hazardous materials are not disposed or dumped on your property
- Removing or replacing any leaking underground storage tanks on your property
- Reaching out to other communities and crossing political boundaries in the interest of watershed management
Everyone's in the Watershed Picture
Everyone shares a watershed with its own unique set of water quality issues. Problems vary between communities that are large or small, rural or urban, wet or dry climate. By looking beyond water quality in a local pond to include the bigger watershed picture, communities can deal efficiently with issues of water supply, water use, and water quality. And they do it cost-effectively, fairly and scientifically.
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