Sara writes:
I did not know when I decided to come to live in southeastern Missouri that this is part of a unique bioregion of great watery significance! It turns out that the Ozarks Bioregion is one of the oldest land masses in the world having first risen from beneath primeval seas some 600 million years ago.
Since 300 million years ago it has remained a continuous land mass neither covered by glaciers nor ocean. The ancient dome-shaped plateau evolved into a hilly landscape with thousands of rivers, caves, underground rivers and springs as a result of millions of years of erosion.
Most likely terrestrial life had its early beginnings here although the fossil records have long since eroded away. The abundance of clean fresh water and the unusually varied landscape created the diversity of this bioregion which includes parts of Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma.
For more see Water and Bioregionalism by David Haenke. Here is an extract:
'Some cartographers consider the relatively small area of the Ozark/Ouachitas to be a biogeographical province... a bioregion like the Ozarks is wonderfully exemplary: clearly defined by both rivers and land forms, and divided up by watersheds. But what always brings us home is water, and the watershed. Anyone who can't define their bioregion can identify their watershed, because everyone on Earth lives in one. The watershed, and water, is the heart and center of bioregional understanding, even as water is the center and of all the nested jewel boxes of life on Earth. At the same time, the fluids wind and water sculpt and form everything we see in our watersheds and bioregions. The Ozarks [is a] mile high plateau worn down to its present beautiful contours mostly by the action of the water of its watersheds. From that identification of the watershed as home, all the ecological understandings, principles, practices of bioregionalism can be brought home and applied in that place. ...Some day if there is a future for humans on Earth ... the full identity of the health of our human bodies and families with that of the watershed, its water, and all its life, along with the necessity of doing all things ecologically, will I believe be such a part of life as to be just like breathing, and not even a subject of discussion or thought. Just a part of the autonomic system of the human part of the watershed's life. No doubt people will always find something to fight and argue about. But if we are still here 250 years from now, it won't be about any of this. No matter what, a river does run through it.'
My first home in the Ozarks was beside 'Spring Creek, North Fork of the White River Watershed, Ozarks Bioregion'. Now I live on a land trust that borders the Jacks Fork River in the same Watershed.
And you - what is your nearest body of water and watershed?
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