London's Lost Rivers

Every Londoner immediately recognises the River Thames on a map or aerial photo—not least because it's in the title sequence of one of Britain's most popular TV shows—but not everyone knows about the many tributaries to the Thames which have been buried over the years. London being a mixture of the Thames's historic floodplain (most of the centre) and rolling hills (most of the suburbs), in a famously rainy part of the world, it has a lot of small rivers. Their historical importance shows up in place names all over town, but many of them are entirely or partly hidden from view.

I've written before about how London has many admirable attributes of a sustainable city entirely by accident, and this is one of the things that would look very different if the Victorian builders of most of London's infrastructure had understood what the consequences would be.  Each section of river that was built over or diverted into a culvert must have seemed like progress: one less inconvenient barrier to cross; one more road passable to carriages.  But the whole is much less than the sum of its parts, and modern Londoners suffer from having lost the flood control that a naturally functioning watershed provides, and want the wildlife habitat and public amenities that they could have if the rivers were restored.

Today there is a significant restoration effort in progress, which has been very encouraging to watch.  When I was in London in June I visited a few interesting sites, and over the coming week or two I'll write about a couple:

Daylighting the River Quaggy in Sutcliffe Park

Some of the surprising places where you can see long-concealed rivers

And some thoughts about similar work going on here in Seattle

The Sound Stewardship program

Sustainable Seattle is in the process of adopting a habitat restoration site on Seattle's Duwamish estuary. As we get to know the site, we're hoping to post photos and reports from there, but this first post will just be about the restoration program itself. It's a very successful way of mobilising volunteers for long-term commitments, so it's worth sharing.

People for Puget Sound is the organisation responsible. They have access to a large number of habitat restoration sites around Puget Sound, as part of the broader effort to restore the severely impaired marine ecosystem here. As is so often the case with restoration projects, the initial work is much better funded than maintenance, so they need a great deal of volunteer help to maintain the sites and ensure that the initial investment is not lost. Because these sites are mostly small pockets of shoreline in heavily disturbed environments, such as Seattle's industrial waterfront, they need at least 10 years of active maintenance and monitoring to become settled, and if they're ever completely abandoned they will become overrun by invasive plants.

People for Puget Sound's solution to this is the Sound Stewardship program. This invites people to get training in a range of topics including a history of the Duwamish River, introduction to ecology, native vs. invasive plant identification, weed control, and planting techniques. The training is free, but in exchange trainees must pledge to volunteer 40 hours over the coming year at one of the restoration sites. Most people keep their pledge, and most of them are able to keep coming back to the same site so they get to know it well and become deeply committed to taking care of it.

The really impressive part is what happens next: once people have had the training and the chance to become invested in a site's well-being, many of them stay on board for years. These people not only continue to volunteer at their sites, but become the strongest advocates for habitat restoration, and the best recruiters of future volunteers - an outcome any volunteer project must envy.