RiverMerrimack is an educational, research and advocacy effort that focuses on the ecological value of the Merrimack Watershed – its value to the planet, and its value to wildlife, its value to us.

Why We’re Different: Forests to Fisheries: Protecting the Ecology of the Merrimack Watershed

The Merrimack Watershed is among New England’s most important natural resources. More than 9,700 miles of brooks, streams and rivers are the life blood of the watershed’s ecology: within these waters lives an engine of enormous biological diversity and productivity.

When we look at the Merrimack watershed from an ecological perspective, it becomes clear that its value to us is much more than just recreation, water (for drinking and power), and a cheap and convenient place to dump our wastewater (roadway, neighborhood and urban runoff (a.k.a. “stormwater”); and semi-treated and untreated sewage).

From an ecological perspective, the Merrimack watershed provides – in human terms – food security, jobs, and a safe place for wildlife to thrive. It’s plain from the
record left by New England’s first inhabitants and later colonists that these are the original values of the Merrimack Watershed to humanity, without which
they would have perished.

The Clean Water Act – which so greatly improved our waters – included an attempt to preserve the rights of subsequent (post-colonial), 19th-century industrial water “uses” — and here we’re pointing at power generation and wastewater in all its forms – that we now know have broken or damaged the fundamental ecological processes that were provisioning our basic needs – food, drinking water, wildlife. Almost every day science is showing us how the damage we are doing to the ecology of the Merrimack Watershed is far more significant than we realize.

RiverMerrimack believes that we are overlooking these problems in exactly the same way that society has overlooked the Climate Crisis. We know that this damage is occurring, but we minimize, deny and deflect, not doing anything about it; by “we” I mean that our environmental agencies aren’t doing anything about it, and our political leadership is not doing anything about it.

We are ignoring these problems at our peril.

We’ve come to a time in the human journey where we need to restore and preserve those damaged ecological services.

It’s time for an upgrade. We can do better than this. We must.