This development causes significant problems for water quality. In a way the river's serenity and beauty have become its own undoing. Too many people want to get away to live near its banks or near the fading rural character of its watershed. Some of the nation's best farmland is being sold in small lots for subdivisions and industrial parks. The irony is that those who move there may be destroying what they moved there for.
Growth affects the river in many ways.
Take one unintended consequence of the seemingly innocuous suburban lawn. Lawn fertilizer applied even some distance away eventually makes its way into the river, harming fish and other aquatic animals. When fertilizer runs off lawns after a rainfall, it feeds the river's algae. This algae growth cuts off sunlight to the bottom, which in turn kills the plants that generate the oxygen that fish need to breathe. Dams along the river complicate the situation.