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Water Quality as a Collaborative Force in the Ozark Plateau, Missouri and Arkansas: The Long-Term Dimensions of Action through Common Interest
Citation:
Grindstaff, S., B. Groskinsky, M. Nash, AND R. Lopez. Water Quality as a Collaborative Force in the Ozark Plateau, Missouri and Arkansas: The Long-Term Dimensions of Action through Common Interest. Chapter 3, Societal Dimensions of Environmental Science: Global Case Studies of Collaboration and Transformation. CRC Press - Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, Boca Raton, FL, , 57-77, (2019). https://doi.org/10.1201/9781315166827-3
Impact/Purpose:
This is a story about the people with their lives interwoven with the landscape of the Upper White River Basin. It is a story about people and water; a people who are filled with pride, a strong work ethic, and resourcefulness. It is a unique culture in the lower Midwestern United States, where an ancient plateau has eroded itself under the elements of time, sculpting some of the world’s most beautiful forested hills, hollows, and glades across a significant expanse of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. A place, much like the lives built on them, where the hills stand out in inspiration and the valleys cut deep, as the water falls, and then again rises, with the urgency of the communities it sustains across the expanse.
Description:
The Upper White story is about people steadfastly protecting their water over a period of great change – a common theme that spans all of time and life, across the world. It is as if the people of the Upper White River Basin are playing instruments in an orchestra, at a watershed scale. They are on stage, individually and collectively playing an epic and memorable composition, full of movements and immersed in all of the elements of music. Every person, from all walks of life in the Basin, is performing their part for a moment, destined for the millennia. Each musical element represents the opportunity to cherish, remember, and learn. These efforts they exert are the celebrations that are part of a continuum, in recognition that what people have is good and that the most valued assets of their lives, what gives it meaning bridging past, present and future is the watery landscape itself. It is a feeling of a place, water’s life-giving place among it, and the emotions it can evoke. It is a place people call “home” and a home they call their "place," among the hills. Listen now, to the story of the western edge of the Ozark Plateau, home the large watershed known as the Upper White River Basin.
URLs/Downloads:
DOI: Water Quality as a Collaborative Force in the Ozark Plateau, Missouri and Arkansas: The Long-Term Dimensions of Action through Common Interest