transformations, patterns, seasons, rhythms

trying to come to terms with this river (i.e the Kemijoki, in Finnish Lapland) continues to be a challenge, even over a year after fieldwork.
it is clear that river managers of all sorts, including restorationists, fishers, flood-control experts, timber rafters and hydroelectricity producers, have quite well-defined ideas of what the river is in terms of particular utilisations and benefits, such as a habitat, a force driving turbines or a stream transporting material. while these ideas focus on rather different aspects of the river - and engender different implications of how a river is to be managed and transformed - they all deal with one fundamental aspect, namely rhythm. river hydrology and river use, along with many other phenomena in the catchment, display marked variations over the seasons of the year and over shorter and longer periods.
in the end it seems warranted to approach the river and life on its banks as a complex of interlocking rhythms rather than as a sum of different phenomena and "things" (like water, fish and people). successful river managers habitually take this into account, but the insight still has to "trickle up" to the mainstream conceptualisation of rivers, and sociocultural and ecological processes in general.