Bob Zimmerman brought that message from Boston and his experiences in trying to improve the water quality of the Charles River in eastern Massachusetts. Zimmerman spoke Friday at the third annual Statewide Watershed Conference at Catawba College.

The N.C. Watershed Coalition’s conference gathers national, state and local speakers to share ideas and encourage partnerships for the state’s rivers. North Carolina has 17 different watersheds, and the Yadkin-Pee Dee River Basin is the second largest.

John Wear Jr., director of the Catawba College Center for the Environment, heads the coalition. Peg Jones serves as its executive director. Major sponsors include the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation and Salisbury’s Fred Stanback.

Zimmerman serves as executive director of the Charles River Watershed Association, a private, non-profit group of 3,000 members that works to protect the health, beauty and accessibility of the Charles River.

Agencies in the Boston area have made great strides in cleaning up the river, which used to run in colors such as pink, white and green over its slow, winding 80-mile path that empties into the Boston Harbor.

Toxic fish kills weren’t uncommon and mixed with raw sewage and storm water. While dramatic improvements had already occurred, Zimmerman’s organization joined forces with a scientist in 1993 to learn exactly how the watershed worked.

The group established 37 monitoring sites for taking raw water samples, and 90 volunteers began work that has provided four years of data on the river as a whole system. Until then, Zimmerman said, monitoring was haphazard at best and only done every five years by the state.

The results surprised the river association. It found that point-source pollution — discharges coming from known locations, such as pipes — were the basin’s No. 1 pollution problem, despite earlier assurances that they were well controlled.

The new information revealed the dramatic impact of storm water runoff on the river’s quality and demonstrated the need for credible data.

And it demonstrated, Zimmerman said, the importance of partnerships with state and federal environmental agencies. The association found legitimate ways to measure its success, or lack of it, through the intensive monitoring, something state and federal agencies don’t have the money or manpower to do.

“We need to measure all the time,’’ Zimmerman said.

The study also revealed, Zimmerman added, how the natural water cycle has been replaced by a man-made water cycle and how “pollution cocktails” are filling city storm drains.

The way towns and cities handle wastewater treatment and storm water runoff sends the water off to other places, Zimmerman said. Water should be kept “local,” and 65 percent of a river’s flow should come from the ground, not the sky.

But much less than 35 percent of a region’s rain penetrates into the ground these days because of development. Sewers tend to “dewater” regions, Zimmerman added, suggesting that cities might be better off maintaining septic systems that put water back into the ground instead of shipping it off through sewer pipe.

Storm water, too, should go back into the ground and not be sent off to a river, as a way to recharge and improve local water supplies, Zimmerman said.

Zimmerman also suggested that regions wringing their hands about urban sprawl and lack of open space should turn to environmental zoning. Buy and preserve land that helps sustain an area environmentally. Then, rezone these as important “recharge areas,” Zimmerman said.

Too often, community leaders today base their future planning on transportation and demographic issues and worry about the environmental impacts later, Zimmerman said. Allow things such as roads, houses and people to follow the environmental realities, Zimmerman said.

Derb Carter, senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, reviewed some setbacks that watershed protectors have suffered in the past year in North Carolina.

Carter said the state has given millions of dollars in incentives — he called them subsidies — to Nucor to build a new steel mill on the Chowan River and to Wisconsin Tissue to erect a new paper mill on the Roanoke River.

These economic development efforts followed years of concentrated efforts to clean up, establish wildlife refuges and buy land along these threatened rivers, Carter said.

On the Roanoke River, the clean-up efforts restored the striped bass population. Now the paper mill is being built in the middle of the bass’ spawning area.

Carter also sounded an alarm about the unauthorized drainage of at least 20,000 acres of wetlands in the Cape Fear coastal plain areas of New Hanover and Brunswick counties.

Wetland ditches are being used to drain the areas for future subdivisions and golf courses that are destroying important salt marshes, bottom land hardwoods, forests and pine plantations, Carter said.

Part of the session Friday included an hour for residents in the different watersheds to meet and discuss common concerns.

About 16 people attended the Yadkin-Pee Dee River Basin session, where participants said no real leadership has surfaced to tie the whole basin’s interests together.

The basin has many groups working independently of one another, and the state’s recent basin-wide management plan prompted the formation of Upper Yadkin and Lower Yadkin groups to study non-point source pollution.

But those groups have met sporadically, leading to outdated mailing lists and frustration.

“It’s more or less collapsed, and that’s a shame,’’ a man from Iredell County said.

There have been some individual successes. The Yadkin-Pee Dee Basin Association, headed by Salisbury Assistant Utilities Director Barrett Lasater, recently received a $2.3 million grant to purchase conservation easements along Grants Creek in Rowan County.

The state considers Grants Creek an impaired water because of non-point source pollution, mostly from agricultural lands. The easements will help create buffers to filter the runoff going to the creek.

The association has 29 members that include municipal and private industry dischargers who are permitted by the state. It hired an independent lab to monitor the basin’s waters in 100 different locations, as part of each member’s permitting requirements.

Lasater said his group focuses on non-point pollution as a means of reducing nutrient levels in the Yadkin River — something members have to be concerned with as point-source dischargers under state permits.

Andrew Fahlund, policy director for hydropower issues of American Rivers in Washington, D.C., told the Yadkin-Pee Dee group that it has a great opportunity in making watershed improvements by becoming involved in the Federal Energy Regulatory Agency’s relicensing of the Yadkin Inc. reservoirs.

Yadkin Inc., a subsidiary of Alcoa, must renew its license for its power-generating reservoirs, including High Rock Lake, with the federal agency in 2008.

To avoid delays in obtaining that license renewal, Fahlund said, Yadkin Inc. will be looking to stakeholders in the river basin for input and help.