Watercourses tie together the headwaters and the estuary, the land and the water, the forests and the farmland and the cities. For these reasons, the watershed has become the most practical unit for an ecosystem approach to resource issues. Watersheds naturally create workable units that bring various interests together for solving complex social concerns. The activities of people upstream have an impact on lives downstream. Everyone in a given watershed depends on watershed health for drinking water, flood protection, protection from toxics, sustainable resources, and other quality of life elements.
Political boundaries are often arbitrary.
So many of the issues that confront us, especially environmental issues, cannot be resolved within the limits of a city, county, or state. Living in a watershed gives us all a kind of citizenship that is based on real things water, soil, geography. The quality of drinking water is unrivaled as an environmental concern, and that drives us toward a watershed perspective. A watershed approach is also valuable because it binds together people from different walks of life loggers and miners in the headwaters, farmers and ranchers in the rural valleys, recreational and environmental interests, businesses, and water users in the cities. Approaching problems from a watershed perspective requires us to find common ground among people who see things very differently.