Follow Your Current: Rivers, Resilience, and When to Swim Upstream

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Episode 69

Guests: With Matthew Best & David Stormer of Riverkeeper

Hook

For four billion years, rivers have moved with one quiet genius: they follow their current. So what happens to us when we stop following ours — and start building levees against our own lives? This week, Resilience Gone Wild traces the deep story of rivers, and uncovers when to flow with your current and when, like the salmon, to swim purposefully upstream.

Episode Overview

Jessica Morgenthal travels the long arc of rivers — from the chaotic, sediment-laden flows of an early Earth to the great waterways that built civilization, to the modern story of dams, levees, and recovery. To navigate these waters, she’s joined by two river champions from Riverkeeper, the organization that helped bring the Hudson River back from the dead: Matthew Best, a fish biologist whose love of migratory species reveals rivers as living circulatory systems, and David Stormer, Riverkeeper’s Habitat Restoration Director, who is literally returning rivers to the courses they’ve always sought. Together they offer a vision of a river that remembers her path — and a resilience practice for the parts of us that remember ours.

What You’ll Learn

• How rivers built (and were built by) life on Earth — and why their architecture mirrors a healthy circulatory system.
• What makes the Hudson “Mahakantuck,” the river that flows two ways, and why her recovery is one of the great environmental comeback stories on the planet.
• Why levees, concrete channels, and obsolete dams concentrate damage rather than prevent it — in rivers and in our own lives.
• The difference between going with your current and being swept away — and when to swim upstream like a salmon.
• Three practices for restoring your own flow: find your dams, give the flood its floodplain, and know the difference between purposeful upstream effort and habitual resistance.
• How dam removal, habitat restoration, and citizen action are bringing rivers back — and how to take part.

Meet the Guests

Matthew Best — Fish Biologist, Riverkeeper Matthew Best is a fish biologist with Riverkeeper whose work centers on migratory species and the health of the Hudson’s tributaries. He thinks of dams as “blocks to a circulatory system” — and the fish he studies, from river herring to juvenile striped bass, are showing him just how quickly that circulation can return when barriers come down.

David Stormer — Habitat Restoration Director, Riverkeeper David Stormer leads Riverkeeper’s Habitat Restoration program, returning Hudson tributaries to their natural courses through dam removal, shoreline recovery, and nature-based community resilience. After 25 years away, he came home to a Hudson clean enough to swim in — a river that now supplies drinking water to over 100,000 New Yorkers along stretches he wouldn’t have dared enter as a child.

Tools, Frameworks & Practices Mentioned

• Defend, Retreat, or Adapt — David Stormer’s frame for how communities (and people) respond to forces they can’t fully control.
• The Four R’s of Dam Removal — Remove. Reduce. Restore. Return. A roadmap for rivers and for inner restoration.
• Levee or River? — A resilience prompt for moments when you feel yourself hardening against something natural.
• Find Your Dams — Name the obsolete structures you’re still maintaining.
• Give the Flood Its Floodplain — Allow difficult emotions a bounded space to move through and recede.
• Going With vs. Swimming Upstream — The salmon test: is this resistance purposeful, or just habit?

Closing Insight

“The river didn’t need to be re-engineered. She needed the barrier removed.”

True resilience isn’t the capacity to hold everything together by force. It’s what becomes possible when you stop spending yourself on resistance that was never going to work — and let your natural current carry you toward what actually matters.

Call to Action

When nature wins, we win. Subscribe to Resilience Gone Wild wherever you listen to podcasts, and let’s grow stronger together — https://pod.link/J4yd77

Resources & Links

• Riverkeeper — https://www.riverkeeper.org
• Waterkeeper Alliance (active in 46+ countries) — https://waterkeeper.org
• Riverkeeper Sweep — the annual river-wide cleanup every May from the Adirondacks to the Battery
• Tree-planting & post-dam-removal habitat days — ongoing volunteer opportunities via Riverkeeper
• Subscribe to the show — https://pod.link/J4yd77
• Explore more episodes & the newsletter — https://www.resiliencegonewild.com
• Connect with Jessica — jessica@ResilienceGoneWild.com
• Visit — https://ResilienceGoneWild.com

#FollowYourCurrent #ResilienceGoneWild #Riverkeeper #HudsonRiver #DamRemoval #NatureBasedSolutions #WhenNatureWinsWeWin

Resilience Gone Wild — resiliencegonewild.com 

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Sign up for the Resilience Gone Wild newsletter at resiliencegonewild.com Produced by Kai Sorensen of Balancing Life’s Issues (BLI Studios)