Picture this: A small coastal watershed, somewhere in the northwest. It's owned by six private landowners. Three are ranchers, one is a timber company, and two use theirs for vacation getaways. The watershed has chunks of both federal and state lands too. It has productive topsoils and many valuable uses. A host of regulators have some interest, each with a different regulatory role. Some big laws govern the quality of water coming from the watershed, most notably the National Clean Water Act.

Interests collide in this watershed. Everyone has different ideas what their stake is and how the others should honor it. Sometimes management and regulation is done just to make statements about who has what "rights" to the land. Not good. The watershed suffers, and becomes less productive, while humans argue and build walls.

Then something happens. A freak spring thunderstorm stalls a giant thundercloud over the upper piece of the watershed and dumps 5 inches in 2 hours- a very local, 1000-year storm in a small sub-basin. It gets everybody's attention. Big messes usually do. The topsoil is gullied over much of the watershed. Road stream crossings are blown out. The channel downstream is loaded with mud. All the landowners and managers meet to look at it, together, and everyone agrees that this kind of thing is undesirable. They don't agree about the influence of the land uses, but they find complete unanimity of opinion about the values lost. A door opens, wide enough for a communicator to put a muddy rubber boot into. A watershed association forms to discuss common values. The key to that door was discovering an agreement on values.

Agreeing on core watershed values is, I believe, the crux of integrated watershed management. There will always be a variety of interests among the owners, residents and managers of watersheds. Yet when we can discover the shared values, and focus on them, the walls that come between people over land use issues melt away. If everyone can agree that topsoil is precious, for example, good watershed management flows naturally from this. Nobody is bullied, and any agreements made have a real foundation.

How do we find shared values in watershed management? It doesn't have to take a disaster. We only need to discover those that are already present- there's always some - and try to instill any that are missing. Bring people together and help them discover their common values. Educate people to consider the values behind good stewardship. Let the walls come down, and build bridges based on values we can all share.

That's integration.