The unusual suspects
Excerpt from C-VILLE Issue #19.25
06/19/2007 – 06/25/2007
BY C-VILLE WEEKLY WRITERS
The Nature Lover
John Murphy
John Murphy’s big concern is sediment. “When the landscape around a river or stream is disturbed, the stream morphology changes,” Murphy explains while knee-deep in the Doyles River, just outside White Hall. “An affected river becomes less efficient at moving sediment, and more sediment in the water changes the biological makeup of the river.” Moments later, as if to illustrate his point, he plunges his hand into the river and plucks out a dead fish. “Madtom,” he says.
Murphy is the director of StreamWatch, and thanks to him and the nonprofit he founded in 2002 to examine the biological and sedimentary make-up of streams and rivers in the Rivanna watershed, more and more volunteers are sticking their hands in the water to see what they can find. He and StreamWatch’s program manager, Rose Brown, lead a group of volunteers who routinely collect data from sites throughout the 766-square-mile Rivanna Basin with the goal of improving the health of its streams and rivers. They do this by studying insect populations and sediment composition and passing their findings on to Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality and other concerned organizations and individuals.
In just five years StreamWatch has successfully tapped funding from eight partner organizations, including Abemarle and Fluvanna counties, the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority, the Nature Conservancy and a new partner, the City of Charlottesville. Still, StreamWatch can only maintain a staff of two part-time employees, hence its reliance on volunteers. At last count, as many as 65 had been trained through StreamWatch to help with the sample collection.
Murphy can certainly appreciate the value of volunteers; StreamWatch was born from his own volunteer efforts, which, as a budding environmentalist, eventually sent him back to school after two decades away to study environmental science. From there he founded StreamWatch to raise awareness of the area’s immediate environmental concerns.
“Environmentalism is no longer the province of tree huggers,” says Murphy, a native of California. “We face a difficult challenge of balancing economic needs with long-term environmental sustainability. If we don’t solve the long-term problems, our kids are screwed, but our economic systems are geared for the short term. We’re out on a limb, and we’re also between a rock and a hard place. We can extract ourselves, but only with great care.” And the StreamWatch volunteers, bug by bug, pebble by pebble, are working on it.—K.D.