<
https://psyche.co/ideas/what-does-water-want-most-humans-seem-to-have-forgotten>
"Walking across spongy tundra, among bonsai shrubs on fire with autumn colours,
I came upon a river too wide to cross. Gazing up the valley from which it
flowed, I saw that the obstacle blocking my path was just one strand of a
broad, braided system spread languidly across a floodplain in Denali National
Park in Alaska. I watched the McKinley River’s fluid columns shift apart, then
twine together. Although at that time I knew little about hydrology, the
science of water, on some instinctual level I understood that this was a
free
river. Every other river I’d known was markedly subdued.
What does it mean for a river to be free? Today, most water is not in its
natural state, especially in industrialised countries. It sounds obvious, but I
hadn’t before given it much thought. Humans have filled in or drained 87 per
cent of the world’s wetlands. We’ve dammed and diverted two-thirds of the
world’s largest rivers. What many of us think of as ‘river’ is a restricted,
straightened canal that no longer wanders across its floodplains, depositing
nutrient-rich, land-forming silt as it goes. The streams and wetlands that
first attracted us to settle and build cities have long since been encased in
pipes or filled with trash and dirt. In fact, the area of land, streams and
wetlands covered by cities’ pavement has
doubled since 1992. In rural areas,
too, we’ve uncurled creeks, drained and filled wetlands and lakes, and blocked
off floodplains to create more farmland or real estate for new developments.
These attempts at control affect not only where water flows, but greatly
increase the speed at which it moves. Water is sped through our cities, and
prevented from sinking underground where it could refill aquifers and cycle
through local ecosystems.
The scale of our efforts to control water is vast. But control is illusory.
Water does what it wants, as we are seeing increasingly often, as people around
the world grapple with severe floods and droughts."
Via
Future Crunch issue 193:
https://futurecrunch.com/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
