(From “Diaries...) Little Strokes Fell Great Oaks February 8: There’s been no sign of any human habitation in my two hours of wading and walking along this river reach. I’m reveling in the privilege of experiencing, up-close and personnel, one of the state’s last free-flowing, completely un-dammed rivers. Then, I round another bend and see it: a 20-foot-high concrete monolith spanning the stream from bank-to-bank. I guess it could be worse; its just the owner’s “little summer swimming hole” I learn later. But this spells trouble for native fish. The dam’s “notch” (for the summer “stop-logs” necessary to seal it up) is clogged with debris. This necessitates a formidable jump for any adult fish attempting to swim to upstream spawning areas. And if this isn’t bad enough, in less than a mile, I encounter its similar but smaller brethren, with the second dam sporting a big, shiny new irrigation pump smack in the middle of the impounded pool. This is one of my earliest surveys. So little do I know now that these two dams I find today will soon become just a fraction of the ever-growing inventory of hundreds of incremental, development-related impacts to the river that I will eventually discover and chronicle. I will also learn that more often than not, such impacts are happening without any regulatory oversight, planning or the required permits. Or, when the impacts are properly ‘daylighted’ within legal and regulatory frameworks, they are routinely being allowed without adequate mitigation–to fully offset their adverse effects on the river. And so, I will find, a familiar beat goes on. A travesty is underway. Inch by inch, like successive strokes of an ax against a tree, these multiple small impacts are slowly and surely accumulating. As they do, they are sucking the lifeblood from the river ecosystem. The bottom line will not be felt tomorrow or even next year. But unless the bleeding is halted soon, in 20, 30, or 50 years, we’ll be counting the remaining adult steelhead in the river by the dozens, not the hundreds. Coho salmon will have no chance of ever returning. And the destruction we will have wrought to the river ecosystem–as with so many other California anadromous salmonid streams and rivers–will become irreversible.