Floodlines
I’ve spent most of the last few weeks taking a break from writing books and advertising copy to work on another kind of big writing job: pulling together the final draft of the Wandle Catchment Plan.
It’s involved a lot of thinking about water, and how to meet the challenges of balancing too much against not enough…
… especially in a chalkstream catchment as highly urbanised yet horribly over-abstracted as the Wandle.
With the water rising noticeably in the river over the road, as well as up-catchment, this work has provided an excellent personal context for the recent national debate about water management and mitigating some of the most immediate effects of anthropogenic climate change.
Just in case you’ve missed any of it, here are some of the best (read: scientifically robust and rational) links I’ve noticed in the last month or so.
Keep checking this blog if you find them interesting. I’ll try to add more as they appear…
- George Monbiot’s opening salvo: Deep thoughts about catchment management and keeping water in the hills
- The Parrett catchment flood management plan
- Lord Smith’s robust defence of the heroic Environment Agency
- The River Management Blog: Scrambling to blame someone else helps no-one
- Would dredging have stopped the Somerset flooding? Three hydromorphology experts believe not…
- Charles Clover’s guest blog for the Angling Trust: Let’s not unlearn the lessons about dredging
- Floods and dredging: A reality check from CIWEM
- How intensive maize farming is contributing to massive soil loss in the upper Parrett catchment (and presumably gravel-smothering siltation lower down)… and what Monbiot found by digging deeper into soil management issues
- Tony Juniper says this could still be our finest hour…
- … and Charles Rangeley-Wilson gives twitter a maths class:
River Parrett is 60km long. R4 says 65 sq km is flooded. Anyone got a calculator?
— Rangeley-Wilson (@CharlesRangeley) January 28, 2014
My own call on this? There’ll be no overnight solutions to our current mess of sheepwrecked uplands, maize-silted rivers and concrete-covered floodplains, not to mention the perched-and-canalised problems epitomised by the photo at the top of this blog.
But if this winter’s jetstream propels us as a nation towards working in harmony with natural processes, rather than wilfully opposing them and actually believing we can conquer nature (nice deconstruction of the old-school Soviet Olympic strapline right there, Matt!) without getting properly slapped for our pains…
… I think that’ll be a start.
(Photo: Daily Telegraph)
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