National Post (National Edition)
A flood of misery in B.C.
If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? So goes the question that invites teenagers to start philosophizing — and hopefully enjoying it.
If a river floods through the wilderness where no one lives, it is a disaster? Or is it simply just what rivers do?
The floods in British Columbia are rightly considered catastrophic, and the urgent work at hand leaves little time for philosophizing for those on the ground and under the water. From a distance though, the great floods invite a reflection on what it means for man to live in nature. There is no other place where he might live.
The image of a garden hacked out of a jungle is often employed to describe the work of ancient peoples to cultivate the land, or homesteaders clearing the prairie, or even people today building a cottage on a lake. It is a metaphor for the human project, the singular task of that creature who, unlike the foxes with their holes or the birds of the air with their nests, must wrest from nature a habitat for himself. The hacking and planting and cultivating are hard work, and the jungle is always ready to come back. It is eager to encroach upon the garden. Of course it could be said that the garden is the original encroachment. Or, more sympathetically, the original expansion.
In our hyper-political times, the waters were still rising in B.C. when the whole matter was inundated by climate debates. Stand back though and the story is the same over the long sweep of human history.
Earthquakes in the Great Rift Valley are not unusual. Geologically speaking, quite common, in fact. The same plates that bring the earthquakes brought the fertile valley, cradle of civilization, in the first place. For most of history an earthquake was only that, hardly noticeable to our ancestors who roamed there, or the great animal migrations that traversed it.
When the first aqueduct went up, bringing fresh water to new cities, permitting centres of culture and commerce to develop, the stability of the earth became a rather more urgent matter. Now an earthquake might mean a fallen aqueduct, a catastrophe for those who depend upon it for themselves, their livestock and their crops.
If there is an earthquake across the land and there is no aqueduct to fall, does anybody notice? When the water supply is cut off, everybody does.
In the ancient world, the waters were a place of peril. It was necessary to set out upon the waters for food, for trade, for transport, but it was dangerous. We have long since tamed the waters, so much so that we consider them places for recreation and relaxation.
But the waters cannot be entirely tamed. When the jungle comes back it does so at the speed of photosynthesis; the waters do the same in a flash.
I was a teenager in Alberta when the Coquihalla Highway was built in the 1980s. In the days of family driving vacations, the trek to the west coast was a common enough thing, and places like Hope and Merritt and the various towns of the Okanagan were familiar destinations, or stopping places for gas or even motels with a pool! The Coquihalla did not get built until the 1980s for a reason; it is exceedingly difficult to build a highway through the mountains, which have corresponding valleys and consequent rivers. A lot of hacking had to be done.
A few generations earlier Sumas Lake in Abbotsford was drained to create the high quality farmland that is now underwater. What happened in the Fraser Valley is no different than what transformed Florida swamps into everything from orange groves to amusement parks, or what enabled the great city of New Orleans to grow up in the Mississippi River delta. Keeping the waters back was one of the first tasks of the earliest civilizations. The pharaoh built his cities near the Nile, and it was thus necessary to attend to the waters.
The waters came flooding back this week in British Columbia, wreaking havoc and human misery in their wake. It is an ancient story but no less devastating to human constructions and human hearts for that reason. It is the occasional consequence of human ingenuity in going where no man has gone before; the Coquihalla is not space exploration but it was crossing a new frontier.
Not every frontier should be crossed, to be sure. In recent years the decision was taken not to rebuild flooded homes in some parts of the Ottawa River floodplain. That is not the case in the B.C. interior and Abbotsford. Much of the province is a rather a lovely garden, which is always the combination of natural beauty and human creativity. A garden is a daunting thing to keep. The work is ongoing and, on occasion, begins anew.
THE WATERS CAME FLOODING BACK THIS
WEEK IN BRITISH COLUMBIA, WREAKING
HAVOC AND HUMAN MISERY IN THEIR
WAKE. — RAYMOND J. DE SOUZA