Shaping the Future
Narrator
The Tualatin River is one-of-a-kind, but it portrays the future for many of our nation’s fresh water supplies. America’s growing population is creating an insatiable thirst for clean, fresh water. Yet knowingly and unknowingly, we are poisoning this limited resource with the pollution of a growing society.
Natural resource experts say the Tualatin—and fresh water supplies across our nation—are sending an indisputable message about the way we live our lives. It is a message that experts say we can no longer ignore.
 Judi Li, Oregon State University
There are long-term consequences of things we do for the immediate gain of individuals or communities. Some of these systems have a very hard time recovering and there are limits to the ability of any biological system to return.
Roger Wood, Oregon Department of Environmental Quality
If our use of the landscape, our use of watersheds in order to make them productive, in order to enhance our standard of living, our quality of life—if that is the benefit we’re getting from our land management practice, then part of the price we have to pay for that is to be attentive to controlling pollution from nonpoint sources.
Stan Gregory, Oregon State University
The question is, "How do these ecosystems function and how are they configured when they are most healthy and can we use that to help design the future landscape?" And so it’s not to say we’re returning to an old landscape, but we’re designing a healthier and more functional future landscape.
Ron Miner, Oregon State University
I think it’s going to require us to change the way we design urban and suburban developments. Maybe we don’t need 50-foot wide paved streets in all of our housing areas. Maybe we can, in fact, promote mass transit and other forms of urban life that require less impervious soils. Maybe we can incorporate wetlands as part of the urban drainage schemes.
 Benno Warkentin, Oregon State University
The education has to be there, we have to make sure we have economic solutions to these things, we have to make sure that our laws don’t interfere, for example, with buffer strips along streams. All of those things have to come together and it is a fairly slow process.
John Jackson, Unified Sewerage Agency
We’re finding that a lot of citizens and these stream groups are really becoming very possessive of their streams. And we are definitely encouraging that because the outcome is going to be a very positive protection, restoration, or enhancement of that stream or wetlands or lake or pond—whatever it might be.
Judi Li, Oregon State University
We may expect that our city governments and planners will ultimately take the reigns and implement policy. But that won’t happen unless there are people who understand why that has to happen and encourage their political system to do something about it.
 Roger Wood, Oregon Department of Environmental Quality
It’s important that people learn how to sit down together and talk over the issue—define their roles, define what their partnership can be, and forget about pointing fingers at the other group and blaming them for something that they did do or something that didn’t do and should have. We all have responsibility for this.
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