How low can you go?

Of course, there’s more to these rivers than water. The magnificent poplars that escort the Oldman River through the grasslands, the trophy brown trout that draw fly-fishers to the Bow River and the whitefish harvested by the people of the Peace-Athabasca Delta are as much a part of our rivers as the water itself. We need water for life, but we need rivers to live.
We cherish our rivers.  We hope and expect they will always be what they are now.  But will they? Tragically, rivers that were once as beautiful as ours have been damaged or destroyed. The Colorado River, once fed a bountiful estuary of native cottonwood and willow, an oasis in the Sonoran Desert where the river reached the Sea of Cortez.  Now, the Colorado River seldom reaches the sea.  The forests are gone.  The Cucapá Indians, who once fished and grew maize there, are gone too.
Surely, we are too committed to preserving our rivers to commit such a blunder.  But are we smart enough to avoid the kind of damage that causes abundant species to decline and other species to disappear – the kind of damage that could make our rivers less than what they are now?

(c) Dave Burkhart/WWF-Canada
Last week, WWF-Canada released Securing Environmental Flows in the Athabasca River, a report that urges our governments to implement a low-flow threshold below which water withdrawals would cease – an Ecosystem Base Flow. This sensible precaution guards against taking water when doing so could do real harm.
Just how low a flow will protect the aquatic environment is a difficult question, but we can establish some level of provisional protection.  The alternative of doing nothing or waiting endlessly for certainty won’t protect our rivers.  Let’s establish an Ecosystem Base Flow for the Athabasca River.