"'The creek' was fascinating. It ran behind our house in Tara Hills where I grew up. But I can't say I knew it well or that it was a part of my life, because it was on the other side of a chain-link fence.

"It was the 1950s and '60s, and the creek was cut off from us, just something to be fenced off, driven over as it ducked under the road in a culvert, avoided because it was probably polluted.

"It was a big deal when the boy next door threw my toy Jeep into the creek. I recall my father clambering over the fence to look for it, and thinking he'd probably be arrested because we weren't supposed to be on the other side of that fence.

"During winter rainstorms, the creek would rise dramatically, pale brown and muddy. We always wondered if it would overflow, but it never did.

"Over the years, 'the creek' accumulated all kinds of trash, including the occasional shopping cart. I did learn eventually that the creek had a name: Garrity Creek.

"The 1970s came and went, and people talked about saving whales and oceans. But somewhere along the line, a bunch of people took the 'think globally, act locally' directive to heart.

"I couldn't help but notice it when I came back to work in West County last summer. The creeks have more than names; now they have friends.

"There are groups with names like Friends of Five Creeks, Friends of Baxter Creek and the delightfully named SPAWNERS (San Pablo Watershed Neighbors Education and Restoration Society).

"They map the creeks, test water quality, monitor creekside development and educate themselves and others about anything that has to do with creeks.

"Apple Szostak, program coordinator for Friends of Baxter Creek, says her sense is that all the various groups started to spring up about 15 years ago. They're starting to coordinate their efforts now.

"It's not hard to understand what draws people to their local creeks. 'It's like discovering your own neighborhood again,' Szostak says.

"I thought back and realized that it also was about 15 years ago that I started noticing wildlife in Garrity Creek: a mother duck with little yellow fuzzball babies trailing in her wake, a majestic white egret flying down the waterway, its neck gracefully folded back and its long legs trailing. Who knew?

"I hadn't remember the birds. Maybe they moved back because habitat elsewhere was disturbed or destroyed. Maybe they got used to being around people.

"Or maybe, somehow, they knew they'd have friends."

"Small streams remove more nutrients such as nitrogen from water than do their larger counterparts, according to researchers who have applied sampling methods developed in a National Science Foundation (NSF) Arctic area ecological study to waterways across the nation.

"The finding could have important implications for land-use policies in watersheds from the Chesapeake Bay on the East Coast to Puget Sound in the West.

"The findings, to be published in the April 6 edition of Science, are based on data collected initially from streams in NSF's Arctic Tundra Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site in Alaska. Excess nitrogen can cause ecologically damaging effects in large waterways, including algeal blooms, because the nutrients are transported downstream and collect there.

"'There's a very strong relationship between the size of a stream and how rapidly that stream removes nutrients,' said Bruce Peterson of the Ecosystems Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass.

"'The smaller the stream, the more quickly nitrogen can be removed and the less distance it will be transported down the stream.' Peterson is one of more than a dozen researchers who contributed to the Science paper.

"He noted that the findings are unique because they were produced by research teams working in a coordinated and identical fashion nationwide under the same research protocol.

"'In terms of ecosystems studies, it's very rare to get people from this many sites to agree to do this kind of controlled experiment,' Peterson said. 'Many people study nitrogen cycling, but they all tend to do their own experiments. Collaboration is the key to developing a general understanding of ecosystems.'

"Peterson notes that, collectively, the new studies provide a radically different picture of the role of small streams in contributing to existing nutrient loading. 'Traditionally, streams have been thought of as transport systems moving substances from catchments to downstream points,' he said. 'It's been difficult to understand how dynamic the stream system itself is.'

"By placing tracers in smaller streams, the researchers discovered how quickly nutrients were assimilated and processed by organisms that live on the streambeds.

"Peterson argues that the finding could have important implications for land-use policies. In many agricultural areas, for example, small streams are often covered to allow ease of access for tilling and working fields. The covering, in effect, creates a dark pipe that inhibits the stream's ability to scrub excess nutrients.

"While excess nitrogen has many sources, including runoff from residential lawns and byproducts of automobile combustion, taking greater care to ensure that small streams can work effectively to clean the water will reduce the overall nitrogen load that makes its way into larger bodies of water.

"'It doesn't mean that you can ignore your sewage treatment plants, but if we can do better with our small streams and do some restoration activities, it's going to have some benefits,' he said. 'What it means is that you have to take care of the streams on the landscape.'

"For more information about the Arctic Tundra LTER, see: http://lternet.edu/sites/arc."

"Barry: The Amish . . . have succeeded simply by asking one question of any proposed innovation, namely: 'What will this do to our community?'

"That, to me, is an extremely wise question, and most of us have never learned to ask it. If we wanted to be truly progressive, if we were truly committed to improving ourselves as creatures and as members of communities, we would always ask it. The question isn't often spoken outright, but it lies behind a lot of these grass-roots movements to save forests and rivers and neighborhoods and communities and so on.

"Fisher-Smith: Much of this environmental action seems to focus on legal remedies: lawmaking if there's time, or lawsuits if there's not. In the long run, our attempts to control the effects of economic activity on culture and on nature seem to result in a body of regulations and an expensive bureaucracy to manage them. Is there an alternative way of controlling what is done for profit?

"Barry: The alternative is revival of the idea of community.

"I don't think you ought ever to give up on the law and on the public effort to improve law and to improve the effectiveness of it¾to try to see that the government acts truly and effectively in the interest of the people. But that kind of effort obviously isn't enough.

"The real way for these bad innovations to be prevented is for the communities to refuse them, and that's happening to some extent. Communities do refuse bad innovations. There's a lot of scorn now toward people who say, 'Not in my back yard,' but the not-in-my-back-yard sentiment is one of the most valuable that we have. If enough people said, 'Not in my back yard,' these bad innovations wouldn't be in anybody's back yard. It's your own back yard you're required to protect. Of course, it's better if you defend your own back yard with the understanding that in doing so, you're defending everybody's back yard. Or with the understanding that you may need help in defending your back yard, or that you may need to help others defend theirs. But the not-in-my-back-yard sentiment is an altogether healthy and salutary and useful one, and I'm for it.

"However, a community has to understand that if it refuses the public proposal, then it has to come up with something better. And if the government or a corporation comes in and says, 'We want you to have this obnoxious installation because it will employ your people; it will bring jobs,' then the community has to have an answer to the question, Where are we going to find jobs? Sometimes it won't be an easy question. Sometimes it will be a devastating question, but the community nevertheless has to begin to look at itself. It has to look to itself for the answers, not to the government¾and not to these corporations that come in posing as saviors of the local community, because they don't come in to save the local community.

"So the communities have to begin to ask what they need that can be produced locally, by local people and from the local landscape, and how it can be produced in a way that doesn't damage the local landscape or the local community. And by local community, obviously, you can't mean just the people. You mean the people and the natural communities that are supposed to exist there¾the trees, the grasses, the animals, the birds, and so on. Everything has to be included and considered. . . .

"Fisher-Smith: Thus this question, 'What is possible here?'

"Barry: What's the nature of the place? The proper approach to any kind of land use begins with that question. What is the nature of this place? And then: What will nature permit me to do here?"

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