What watershed do you live in?

This article originally appeared in our newsletter, Landmarks, Spring 2008

Land protection is water protection

The map below shows some of the 770 miles of waterways – creeks, streams, and rivers – that thread themselves through Santa Cruz County, the way blood vessels lace our body. Water, like blood, is a life force. We drink it, bathe in it, and play in it – and it nourishes all the life around us. Redwoods, oaks, wildflowers, birds, coyotes, rows of crops, the starfish clinging to shore rocks – every living thing in our world is nourished by water. When we look for life on other planets, one of the first things we look for is water.

At a recent gathering of resource managers – the people who work to protect our water – participants were asked to identify themselves by their name, the organization they were with, and the watershed they lived in. All but a few newcomers to the work knew the answer – because water is their business and a watershed is as basic to water protection as acreage to a farmer or square footage to a homebuilder. It is fundamental to understanding the intimate relationship between water and land. Public surveys show most of us don’t even know what a watershed is, much less which one we live in.

A watershed is a drainage basin. Within a watershed all water runs to the lowest point – a stream, river, lake or bay. On its way water travels over the land -- across farm fields, forests, lawns, and streets – or it seeps through the soil into underground aquifers.

If you live in Santa Cruz County you live in a watershed. Most people live in one of the four main watersheds – the San Lorenzo River watershed, the Soquel Creek watershed, the Aptos Creek watershed, or the Pajaro River watershed. All of these rivers and larger creeks have smaller creeks and streams flowing into them. Carbonera Creek in Scotts Valley joins the San Lorenzo River, Valencia Creek joins Aptos Creek. Along the North Coast a half dozen creeks drain directly into the ocean.

All of the county's watersheds, except one, are entirely located within the county – unlike, for example, the Sacramento River watershed which drains almost one-fifth of the entire state. Our exception, the Pajaro River, is also a multi-county watershed. The Pajaro River watershed is mostly in San Benito County, but also includes parts of Santa Clara and Monterey counties, with a small portion of it in Santa Cruz County. This 832,000 acre watershed is three times the size of all of Santa Cruz County and almost ten times the size of the San Lorenzo River watershed. The 1995 Pajaro River flood surprised a lot of people in the Pajaro Valley because it hadn't been raining that heavily there, but had been pouring upstream in San Benito County.

Not all the water directly drains into the bay, some of it percolates down into underground aquifers and much of that groundwater eventually resurfaces as stream water during dry periods. There are four main groundwater basins in Santa Cruz County and all of them are overdrafted – which means we are pumping more water out than nature replenishes every year. One result of overdrafting is salt water intrusion, which can happen when the water level in the aquifer is below sea level. Salt water intrusion is already occurring in the lower Pajaro Valley groundwater basin and the aquifer in the Soquel area is below sea level and thus vulnerable.

A thousand points of pollution

In Santa Cruz County all watersheds drain to Monterey Bay and the Pacific Ocean – into the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, a place so rich in marine life that we have taken extraordinary steps to protect it. Protecting the Sanctuary doesn’t just mean prohibiting offshore drilling or the dumping of waste from ships, it also includes protecting the ocean's water from contaminants in the water that drain from the land. What we do on the land shows up in the water that drains into the Bay.

Just as water threads its way throughout the county, so do we – the quarter million people who live here. Our county is laced with 770 miles of waterways and 1,870 miles of roads.

Land sheds the water it doesn't absorb (hence watershed) and that water carries with it what we put on the land. Land covered by roads and parking lots sheds oil and rubber. Land sprayed by pesticides sheds pesticides. Land without plants sheds soil. And this shedding of our stuff inevitably reduces the quality of water that is in our streams, our groundwater basins, and our bay.

An impressive array of agencies works to minimize the impact of our activities – and it is complex work. We used to think of water pollution as the factory spewing pollutants into the nearest river. That's one reason factories were located on rivers – to easily dispose of waste. That kind of "single-source pollution" is relatively easy to address – you figure out how to clean up that factory's pollution.

In Santa Cruz County, our water pollution is mostly what is called "non-point pollution" – but is really pollution from hundreds of thousands of points. Urban runoff is generated on the 30,000 acres of land that is developed in our county – land which is mostly covered by impermeable surfaces like parking lots, roads, and roof tops. There are 100,000 house and apartment roofs in our county, 1,870 miles of roads, and uncounted acres of parking lots for the 240,000 vehicles registered in our county. There are 5,200 public parking spaces in downtown Santa Cruz alone. The water running off these surfaces drains unfiltered into streams and the bay.

The development of Scotts Valley with acres of impermeable surfaces has reduced groundwater recharge by 50% in that city. Urban runoff is partly to blame for the 50-100 days a year of beach closings in Santa Cruz County.

Farm runoff is generated on almost 800 farms and 40,000 acres of farmland. The average farmer will tell you that they go to a lot of trouble to reduce runoff and are subjected to a multitude of regulations. But farms, like cities, still generate runoff that impacts the quality of our water.

Addressing the endless points of water pollution means addressing things that, by themselves, seem small. We can't dump our used motor oil in the backyard. We can't farm on steep slopes. We can't clear the creek side vegetation by our house to get a better view. The county's Integrated Regional Water Management Plan includes scores of water quality projects ranging from storm water management and street cleaning to grazing control and timber harvesting regulations. Rules and paperwork are the price we pay for both living here and protecting the quality of our water.

As green as Santa Cruz County is (Country Home magazine selected our county as one of the top 10 green places in the country), there are a quarter of a million people here, almost one person per acre, and that many people have inevitable impacts.

What we're doing

A few years ago the Land Trust thought about changing its name to the Land and Water Trust – because what we do on the land so profoundly impacts water. We're aware of it every day. Our Byrne Forest drains into Corralitos Creek, which drains into the Pajaro River, which drains into the bay. Antonelli Pond drains from Moore Creek on the West side of Santa Cruz into the bay at Natural Bridges State Park. The farmland we're protecting drains into the Pajaro River. The forests we're working to protect mostly drain into the San Lorenzo River and into countless creeks and streams. The Sandhills property we will acquire in June drains into a tributary of Bean Creek, a tributary of the San Lorenzo, and into the high permeable Santa Margarita groundwater basin, an overdrafted source of water for thousands of people.

At the Land Trust, we believe that protecting land is a first step to protecting water. Our careful timber harvesting practices at Byrne Forest minimize soil erosion – and sustainable timber harvesting is a way of saving our forests from "rural sprawl," which brings impermeable surfaces into our forests. Careful management of creeks like Moore Creek helps protect the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary. Saving the Sandhills will help replenish the underground aquifer. Protecting farmland from development will keep the Pajaro Valley from turning into another stretch of impermeable suburbia.

Most people might not know what a watershed is or which one they live in, but they seem to intuitively understand the profound connection between what we do on the land and the water that sustains all life. Polls and focus groups consistently show, in the words of one research firm, that people "closely link land conservation with protecting water." So do we. •

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