Imagination needed to tackle floods crisis

BECAUSE of international stock markets, ordinary people who never owned a share in their lives, still accept the present capitalist culture, that money rules this world, so we pour more money each year into flood defences, still without reaching an intelligent appreciation of the world in which we live. The rain which falls in North Wales does not arrive to flood Worcester until ten days later. If we planted trees on slopes where the rain runs straight to tributary streams in that huge catchment area, that would impede the flow of rainfall, to spread the period of discharge more evenly. One colossal advantage would be that trees are machines for manufacturing oxygen, to compensate for other idiots who are burning the Amazon forests in order to get more money.

The hills of South Wales used to be covered with trees, but we chopped them down to make pit props, so the rain flows over the grass into short rivers, to flood the towns quickly. There are many possibilities to impede or divert that flow of precipitation. Until recently, snow was one huge benefit, when snow only melted slowly, to respond to gravity as liquid. There are huge aquifers, which might contain millions of gallons of water. We could create large ponds at upper levels, close to streams, useful to extinguish forest fires, if we create the forests, and control the flow in and out towards the rivers. Peat moors are a useful sponge, and trees and humans are mutually dependent, just to breathe.

Go to France, and see that every farmer has now dug a reservoir, so that winter’s rain irrigates the drought-struck crop of summer.

The features of this world which we inhabit lend themselves to the imaginative mind. Financiers will never learn.

CN Westerman, Brynna,

South Wales