Honoring Our River

About me:

It is the mission of Honoring Our River anthology to engage the creative and reflective intellectual capacities of basin residents, particularly its youth, to promote and nurture respect for the Willamette River. Honoring Our River seeks to first educate students about the challenges that the Willamette River Basin faces. We provide all teachers in the basin with the opportunity to order a free watershed toolkit containing a wealth of information to supplement in-class or outdoor education about the river. After learning how human actions affect the health of our watershed, students have the opportunity to reflect upon ways that the river has affected their own lives and how others affect the life of the river through words and art. If they decide to submit their work to the judging panel of professionals at Honoring Our River, a panel of judges may select it to be published in the anthology, the tool by which the wider community may discover and reflect upon the multiple interactions and dimensions of the human relationship to our precious Willamette River watershed. An excerpt from Kathleen Moore's review about H.O.R: It follows that whatever harm we do to the river, we do to our children and their children in turn. Willamette River water pumped onto croplands will soon enough pump through our children's hearts. If there are poisons in the river, there are poisons in our children's bones, and in the chromosomes of their unborn children. If a time comes when there are no salmon in the river, the empty spaces will be in our children's lives. The shouts of our grandchildren will echo in the silence of a time without frogs. The faded rainbow light from oil slicks will swim in our children's eyes. On the other hand, it also follows that whatever we do to help the river will help our children too. The steps we take now to leave them clean water and healthy biotic and social communities are the most important gifts we will ever give to our children. At the very center of the anthology of children's writings is a poem written by a grown-up, Kim Stafford, the director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis and Clark College. In "A Thousand Friends of Rain," Stafford reminds us of the obligations rooted in our love for the children. I don't want to be a tyrant over my children, stealing their world before their hands are big enough to touch gently, leaf by leaf. This place must remain. . . . I want you to tell someone what you love, but not with words. Tell with what you do.

Video of Student Entry
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcKEv52bweU

Video of Adam Kerr reading his Honoring Our River poem for the 2009 anthology. Visit www.honoringourriver.org to enter!