It's tough being a stream in Metro Vancouver.

There's pollution to deal with, from oil and gasoline that runs into ditches and creeks, to fertilizer runoff, to straight-up dumping when someone doesn't want to properly dispose of some waste.

Then there's all the paving. We keep building impermeable surfaces – roads, buildings, parking lots – and that means water rushes off of those and plunges into the creeks instead of trickling in slowly through wet ground. It means that gravel beds vital for salmon spawning can get scoured away.

We've also drawn down our local reservoirs for wells and water for farms, which can lower water levels in creeks that depend on natural aquifers for their flow.

Finally, there's the fact that we've made our planet hotter. It's not just glacially-fed streams that are drying up, those in lower-lying areas are simply evaporating during our increasingly hot and dry summers.

It's tough for fish of course, but not just fish. The trees and other foliage along streams depend on water flow, not to mention the bogs and wetlands that are intertwined with them. Everything from small mosses and toadstools up to red and yellow cedars are impacted when we disrupt local creeks.

Then there's the amphibians, mammals ranging from tiny flying squirrels up to black tailed deer and bears, and countless birds.

Despite their fragile state, we have a tendency to keep digging up bits of our local streams. The Trans Mountain Pipeline's proposal to trench across the Salmon River in 91Ô­´´ is only the most recent. It's for a good reason of course – replacing a bit of old pipeline that could be unstable in a quake.

But there's always a good reason. There's a need for a new bridge or culvert, for the construction of much-needed housing, for commercial or industrial development that will create new jobs.

There are provisions in place to protect our waterways. But each of them has exceptions, and eventually those exceptions get used.

There are relatively few streams in the Lower Mainland that still host spawning populations of salmon – compare that to a century or two ago, when every creek with a little gravel had its own population. 

If we don't take preservation of our rivers seriously, the next generation won't ever see a salmon.

– M.C.