Flooding fix needs more than sandbags
Flooding has hit British Columbia again. News reports overflow with stories of property owners sandbagging their homes, their farms, their businesses. Oliver, Kaleden, Tulameen, Cawston, Cache Creek -- the chorus of afflicted communities swells day by day.
Meteorologists tell us that the Mission Creek watershed has the highest snowpack ever recorded. Municipal crews remove ancient willow trees along the banks of Mill Creek to facilitate flow. Mudslides close highways. Culverts wash out. Hundreds of homes are ordered evacuated.
And I haven’t even heard about what might be happening farther east, in the Kootenays. Or farther north, along Highway 16.
I heard a politician pontificate, “It’s a one-in-70-year event.”
Really? Weren’t we saying the same thing during last year’s floods?
Connect the dots, people! Connect the dots!
If you clear-cut the forests on high ground, you destroy the root systems that hold the soil together. Mudslides are inevitable. You also remove the shade that sheltered last winter’s snowfall from spring sunshine. Snow melts faster.
Fly over the high ground, especially in winter, and you’ll see a patchwork quilt of white and dark. White where the land has been laid bare, dark where massed conifers still stand. In some areas, it looks like half the land has been methodically scalped
Without a network of roots to retain moisture, spring meltwater rushes down every gulley. Of course we have floods. Where forests haven’t been clear cut, they’ve been burned. Once upon a time, warring nations applied a scorched earth policy, burning everything that might benefit an enemy. Today, we too have a scorched earth policy -- caused largely by human carelessness. A tossed cigarette, a neglected campfire, an industrial spark, kills off thousands of kilometres of vegetation, causing flooding in following years.
And where the earth hasn’t been logged or burned, in urban areas, it’s built up as sub-divisions. Tier upon tier of roofs and roads.
If you cover half of every lot with a roof that sheds water, that rainfall has to go somewhere. If you pave the roads and driveways with impermeable asphalt, the rain that falls on them has to go somewhere. So we build storm drains and sewers to flush rain into already overloaded streams. No wonder we have floods. I feel, sometimes, that our society hates trees.
When developers take their lofty plans to municipal councils for approval, they promise to protect the native foliage. To maintain natural contours.
But, as soon as the excavators and bulldozers hit the ground, promises evaporate like puddles in the noonday sun. Trees become obstacles to efficiency and profit. Everything gets flattened. The surface of Mars looks more hospitable to life.
And this is presented as progress! Growth is good for us, we’re told.
Of course, after people move into these new subdivisions, they can plant their own trees. And lawns. Which they will have to water. Because the natural water that used to keep soils moist and fertile has all been channelled away.
First we damage our environment. Then we try to repair it.
It seems to me beyond argument that we humans have affected what happens to the rain after it falls. But there’s controversy over whether humans affect rain before it falls. Is increased rainfall an anthropogenic effect, to use the technical term?
A scientific consensus now rates anthropogenic activity -- including exponential population growth -- as the root cause of global warming, climate change, and species extinction. To say nothing of plastic pollution in the seas and toxic chemicals in our air and water.
Against that consensus rises a vociferous chorus of denial. It insists mere humans can’t possibly have that much influence over natural matters. Humans are too insignificant, the deniers insist. And besides, some add, even if we do affect our environment, it’s all part of God’s plan. So it’s God’s problem, not ours.
I don’t buy it. I’ve read the arguments about wobbles in the earth’s axis, about solar cycles, about volcanoes and tectonic shifts. I see nothing there that has changed dramatically in the last 200 years. But the environment has. I have absolutely no doubt that we humans have a direct cause-and-effect relationship on local floods. But I don’t know how to draw a distinction between local effects and global effects. Between micro and macro.
Where does “local” end and “global” begin? Are micro and macro the same thing?
I’m increasingly convinced that “local” actions have a cumulative effect, shaping