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independent fishers are forced our of business. The Atlantic salmon 

 fishery suffered the same fate two generations ago. It doesn't take a 

 great leap of the imagination to realize that when waterways won't 

 support salmon it is only a matter oi" lime at the current rate of 

 degradation before the same waterways will not provide water for 

 essential human uses. 



i would like to spend my time today talking to you about 

 why I believe that a localized community approach to this strategy is 

 essential to its success. There are several reasons why this is true. 

 The health of ecosystems and their reaction to excessive 

 development is a phenomena made up entirely of details; details of 

 population fluctuations, of weather patterns over the long term, of 

 land use history. Not to mention the idlosyncracies of individual 

 landowners. We also need to remember that we,are entering into a 

 timetable dictated by nature; an undertaking where trying to 

 imagine short-term fixes will almost inevitably result in the waste of 

 public funds. The natural recovery of damaged ecosystems proceeds 

 at its own pace. If we are wise, we will attempt to time our 

 restoration programs within nature's timetable in the hope of 

 augmenting and hastening natural processes rather than attempting 

 to impose technological solutions, in the Mattolc watershed, we have 

 guessed that we are engaged in an undertaking that will demand the 

 attention of residents and landowners for another twenty to thirty 

 years. 



So we have to ask ourselves how we can cost-effectively 

 fill the requirements for intimate everchanging detailed observation 

 combined with the need to maintain a high level of commitment over 

 a period oi" lime which may be longer than ihe life of the current 

 generation. I have been able to imagine no other solution to this 

 problem than to rely on the people who are already immersed in the 

 acosytemfi with which we are concerned - the residents ;md 

 landowners of watersheds. 



Further, we need to encourage the development of non- 

 profit inhabitory entities which assume as their goal the restoration 

 of watersheds to historical levels of health and productivity. This is 

 not 10 exclude the patterns of vested interest that exist in every 

 natural area, but to provide these same interests with an overarching 

 visum which provides for our collective needs. 



