Why we must nurture our watersheds: Muskoka Watershed Council

By Peter Sale | Saturday, January 3, 2026

They say an earthquake is the most disturbing of all natural disasters (for those who survive uninjured). It disturbs profoundly because it shatters one’s faith in the stability of the universe. When the ground itself is shifting and heaving, any sense that our environment is a reliable place in which to live gets shattered permanently.

Fortunately, earthquakes are pretty rare in the Muskoka region.

This impression that the environment is static, even dependable, underlies our belief that we can live in and make use of our environment, mostly with impunity. It is the place where we live out our lives. Some of us believe our environment, and the resources it holds, is there in order to be available for us to use.

In this part of the world, our environment is conveniently divided into watersheds, in each of which water flows toward a single outlet. Most of us think of watersheds as parts of the geography in which we live, places with boundaries and topography, inert, unchanging, reliable, for us.

But water is not the only flow in a watershed, and most of the important features of a watershed have to do with the life that pervades it, including our own. Water, oxygen, carbon dioxide, nutrients and other chemicals vital to life all cycle continuously through a watershed, including through all the plants, animals and people living there. The cycling of those components defines the pathways that connect all living species to each other and to the inanimate parts of the environment.

Far from being a static place, a watershed is a complex set of transfers of substances and energy among living things — a highly dynamic, incredibly complex, biologically diverse, living ecological system. The food we eat, the oxygen we breathe, the carbon dioxide we exhale are all part of this complex set of transfers, and the things we do affect the behaviour of this complex ecological system.

It used to be the case that we could ignore these complexities, adopt a simpler perspective — watersheds are places with resources — and go about our business of living, thriving and doing. Much of our doing involved extracting resources — timber, fish, furs and produce from our farms and waters. Frequently, our doing also involved dumping of our unwanted stuff — household refuse, sewage, excess fertilizers and agrochemicals, and the no-longer-useful appliances, automobiles, building supplies, iPhones and other detritus of our consumerist society. And so long as the quantities extracted or discarded did not exceed what the ecosystem could manage to process, all was well.

As populations grew and impacts on environment increased, governments introduced “environmental management” to control our extracting and discarding, and keep them within allowable bounds. In that way, ecosystems continued to thrive, and so did we.

That was then — now, we are in a time in which the capacity of watershed ecosystems to accommodate our activities is, itself, changing rapidly. The ability to deal with our extractive activities or accommodate our tendency to discard what we no longer want or need is being challenged by changes to climate and to biodiversity (the biological richness of the ecosystem), caused indirectly by us through past actions here or elsewhere around the world. For example, our warming of the global climate seems to be altering lakes in complex, not yet well-understood ways that facilitate the occurrence of algal blooms. Simple management practices that keep nutrient runoff from fields, sewage or septic systems from entering the water are no longer sufficient to prevent such blooms.

In this new world, we are going to have to develop new ways to support our watershed ecosystems so that they can cope with the new pressures placed upon them. That is why we should learn to nurture rather than just manage our watersheds. And that is why the theme for Muskoka Watershed Council’s articles for the next few months will be Nurturing Our Ecosystems and why MWC is committed to building enhanced integrated management in this region. Stay tuned.

This article is the first in the new https://www.muskokaregion.com/ series from Muskoka Watershed Council (MWC), ‘Nurturing our Watersheds’. The series will explore bold, thoughtful, and sometimes unconventional ways to care for our watersheds and help them deal with a changing world. Today’s author, and the series editor, is Peter Sale, retired aquatic ecologist, Muskoka resident, director and past chair of MWC, and someone who believes that our watersheds are a large part of what makes life worth living, every day.