"Water is best," said the ancient Greek philosopher, Thales, summing up the simple science of his day. Just as science has progressed since 600 B.C., so has natural resource management. We can still say "water is best," in its role as general lubricant of life, agriculture, and industry in California. With respect to the management of forests, water supplies, and other natural resources, the time has come for us to recognize that "watershed is best." The goal of this management approach is to ensure the sustainability of both communities and the environment through recognition of forest watersheds' role as natural resource and community integrators. This approach requires more active and integrated management of the landscape, not less. The California Dept. of Forestry and Fire Protection (CDF) is committed to this goal and approach. Our state's natural resources deserve nothing less. The watershed - an area or region draining into the same watercourse - is the fundamental building block of the landscape, and thus, natural resource systems. Watersheds can be scaled up or down, aggregated or disaggregated, to analyize and address problems or opportunities of varying scope. For example, from the 14,000 square mile watershed of the San Joaquin River, we can focus down to the 700-square-mile Mokelumne River watershed, to the 75-square-mile Middle Fork of the Mokelumne watershed, or to the 22-square-mile Forest Creek watershed.

Watershed boundaries are inherently inclusive of most natural and social processes and communities. Political, administrative, and ownership boundaries are always artificial and typically drawn to exclude and separate, rather than include and integrate.

Forest watersheds integrate the water quality impacts of land management activities. Sediment generated by land management moves from the hillslopes to the intermittent draws to the small creeks, and on the main stem of the river. If you want to assess the potential water quality impact of a proposed activity, you must look at the whole watershed - upstream and downstream - to see what's already being put into the stream system. Add a time dimension to this spatial analysis - what's been moving through the stream in the recent past, what's going to be moving through the stream in the future - and you've completed, in the professional lingo, a water quality cumulative effects analysis.

Habitat changes occur across the watershed landscape as a result of land management and natural processes. These changes, which can be measured in terms of total amount of habitat types, occur over space and time. Likewise, the various fish and wildlife species have different spatial and temporal dimensions to their habitat needs. For example, salmon spend part of their life in freshwater streams and part of their life in the ocean. Certain deer herds move back and forth from higher to lower elevations as seasons and food sources change. Thus, the shifting distribution of habitat types across the forest watershed landscape over space and time determines the survival of individual animals, local or regional populations, and entire species.

Forest watersheds are also social integrators for people, providing a basis of community that transcends race, class, age, and ideology. For rural dwellers, especially, watersheds are an important part of their sense of "place". And, perhaps most important, people relate to watersheds, as both community units and natural resource units, with a native intuition. Just as we work to cultivate a sense of citizenship in our communities as arbitrarily defined by political subdivisions, we must cultivate a sense of citizenship in the social and natural resources of our forest watershed communities. We have a familiar word for this form of citizenship - stewardship.

These three integrating characteristics of forest watersheds - water, wildlife, and community - come together with a powerful synergy. Evidence of this is provided by the rising number of groups, organized on a watershed or landscape basis and concerned about the quality of their water or the general environmental health of their watersheds. At the same time, they respect the importance of producing timber or other commodities on their watersheds. These groups include the Mattole Restoration Council, the Friends of the Garcia, the Mokelumne River Watershed Project, the Plumas County "Library" Group, the Trinity Bioregion Planning Group, and, in southern Oregon, the North Applegate Watershed Protection Association.