This past fall, the Conservation Services Crew worked with partners at the Memphremagog Watershed Association (MWA) to complete a restoration project on a severely eroding tributary of the Clyde River. This involved building numerous woody structures to improve the health of the brook, including check dams to stabilize an eroding gully and over thirty beaver dam analogs to enhance and restore the wetland floodplain, reduce phosphorus, and improve habitat for existing native brook trout and landlocked salmon populations.
Conservation Services Crew Leader Alice Weis reflected on the restoration strategies employed in this project and the ways this work mirrors their human experience:
“When water is in deep, straight channels, it moves quickly. It picks up sediment as it flows, causes high rates of erosion, and is far more likely to cause flooding. With a project like this, we are slowing, sinking, and spreading the water, making a system of pools, trickles, and braided streams. Complex stream systems like this provide better habitat for fish, and are less susceptible to extreme flooding and eutrophication.
On a site visit earlier this season, our MWA partner Gabryel Gianoni exclaimed, ‘We’re making a mess! I love it.’ After work that day, I couldn’t stop thinking about that, about how making a complicated, intentional mess is an act of healing the land and its watersheds.
I think that what our watersheds need in order to heal is perhaps not so different from what we need to heal. My brain feels tangled and messy, and my life has not moved forward in a straight line, but out in various directions that have come back to meet each other. This work has presented me with the possibility that this way of being is not only okay, but beneficial.
For me, ecological restoration is a place of self expression and self reflection, as well as a place of imagination and worldbuilding. Above all, this work is an act of hope. When I am making these ‘messes’ of the water, changing its flow to be slow, woven, and variant, I am drawing a picture of the world I want to live in.”