Typically, dry conditions equate to very clear water conditions while wet conditions, especially in afforested landscapes, equates to extreme soil sediment inputs into regional rivers and lakes. A river that remains muddy during a drought is not a good sign, and an obvious symptom of human manipulations upstream. Tragically, state and federal natural resource ‘man’-agers are incompetent, trained reductionists, brought-out by industry, and at best, 20 years behind leading science. Humans have cared for this land and water for 50,000 generations, in ways that maximized diversity and ecosystem function, based on maximum power laws, turning sunlight to steam. Trust your gut (DNA) and not DNR “experts” or hired corporate ecologists.
Currently, in wet years, rain washes tons of soil, sediments, and nutrients into regional rivers and lakes. This erosion contrasts sharply with how rain fell on the land before, when the ecosystems were unadulterated and highly evolved. For example, humans using fire to maximize edible vegetation for themselves and the animals they love retained 100% of soils and nutrients. The erosion began following white peoples’ eradication herbivores (circa 1700s) that starved cultural fire into reservations. Trees were released from their symbiotic relationships with herbivores and fire, and they grew up and expanded like cancer. White people called this “forest” and the intense shade, muggy, buggy, pestilence infested (ticks, biting flies), eutrophic conditions destroyed the edible vegetation which liberated soils and nutrients to the water.
White people say soils and nutrients washing out of forest is normal, but forest is a European term used by the forest industry to suppress the Indigenous term Savanna, e.g. groves, barrens, parklands, openings, and meadows. Forest is not normal here; at least not when people cared for the land with fire to enhance edible vegetation for themselves and the animals they loved.
So now, in dry years you have white man oil pipeline drlling and spilling and fouling your waters, and in wet years you have white man “forest” soiling and eutrophicating your waters. What are the fish and manoomin to do? I do declare, Colonial-Imperial ecology is alive and well, hiding behind green curtains, pulling levers to kill the last deer, fish, and flower. This is what we can call “white man-infestation destiny.”
Full disclosure: I am a white man, but by the wisdom of many humans before me, I have come to understand our fallacies associated with “command and control and the pathology of natural resource management” (Holling, 1996).