As a Salem resident, that question has become increasingly important to my work and advocacy for healthy and sustainable communities. Mill Creek offers a compelling place to explore it. From the Cascade foothills, it passes through farms, neighborhoods, industrial areas, parks, and downtown Salem before reaching the Willamette River. It serves as drainage and irrigation infrastructure while also providing habitat for river otter, beaver, herons, raptors, fish, and other wildlife.

 Mill Creek is neither an intact natural system nor simply human infrastructure, but a heavily modified landscape where human uses, natural processes, and wildlife overlap. I want to understand what ecological capacity remains, what limits it, and what we could realistically do to increase it.

I am starting with Waller Dam and efforts to improve salmon passage, but the inquiry quickly becomes larger than the dam. Why rehabilitate degraded streams? What does successful rehabilitation look like when we cannot simply return a landscape to an earlier condition? And how can we make more room for wildlife while maintaining necessary human uses?

These questions extend beyond Mill Creek. Streams, riparian corridors, floodplains, and wetlands are environmentally significant lands that weave through human-dominated landscapes. Because they are often constrained for development, they offer opportunities to retain and reconnect ecological space that would be much harder to preserve on otherwise buildable land.

Through Mill Creek, I am exploring a larger question: how much room can we make for wildlife in landscapes already shaped around human needs? More simply, how can we successfully cohabit with wildlife?