The title of this post is inspired by the stubborn insistence of various government municipalities on commissioning expensive “flood studies” again and again (which invariably seem to lead to huge, high-dollar “solutions” centered on concrete and steel; which “solutions” tragically tend to end up monolithic, rigid, and fragile) … when all we need to know is the PATTERN of how it works.
And that pattern, we already know. The broken water cycle. Leading to the “drought, flooding, wildfire” go-round, lather rinse repeat ad nauseam.
For many years, experts from a widespread range of disciplines — from farming to arboriculture to hydrology to horticulture to environmental sciences, to history and social sciences and the arts and more — have been pointing out the patterns.
And not only subject experts / professionals, but also everyday lay-people, have been pointing out the patterns that they have observed even over the slice of history that is their own lives.
Green Dreamer Kamea (Kaméa Chayne) on substack is someone I have shared extensively on this blog — as well as on my DEEP GREEN socials pages, person-to-person with colleagues, and elsewhere.
She, together with her podcast guests, routinely articulates things in a way that uses just the right words but not too many words. She is poetic and scientific. She seems to strike just the right note, engaging our rationality AND our heart (something that many of us ecosocial activists, however well-meaning and long-toiling, have failed to do).
Again this is just my opinion. But don’t take my word for it; check out her latest entry. Along with sharing the link, I’m going to quote her on here too. As much for my “clip and save” reference as anything else.
PS. Tech note for fellow ecosocial content creators who are struggling to get traction for their messages: Creators who offer capsule summaries of quotable points, and do so in PLAIN TEXT, make their work much easier to share. And, this inclusion of “bullet points” is one of the less exhausting ways to add value to our labor.
Furthermore, in this age of concern about the horrifying ecological impacts and community burdens of giant data-centers, we do want to be as low-bandwidth as possible, and you can’t get a whole lot lower-bandwidth than plain text.
And now without further ado, the link and the quote.
BTW her guest on this installment is Zach Weiss of Water Stories. Water Stories is another organization I have referenced extensively on this blog and elsewhere. If you need visual talking-points for your HOA, local government, neighborhood tree-hater, etc., visit the Water Stories page on YouTube and grab a couple of links to their beautiful and easy-to-understand 2-minute animations of the water cycle.
The substack post with the link to the podcast:
https://kamea.substack.com/p/green-dreamer-zach-weiss Restoring watersheds, revitalizing community, ft. Zach Weiss
Podcast Ep470 | Green Dreamer w/ Kaméa Chayne
And my favorite text quote (I have added boldface to some text for emphasis):
“Highlights I’m still reflecting on…
“This part on the watershed death spiral…
“Green Dreamer Kaméa: This GRIST article reads, ‘Total water storage losses on land, of which groundwater is the largest component, account for 44% of global mean sea level rise, compared to about 37% from Greenland, and roughly 19% from melting in Antarctica.’ This means almost half of sea level rise can be attributed to the loss of water that is being held or at least slowed down in the pores of the land.
“So I want to just start here and invite you to share about this watershed death spiral. And I know the specifics look different in every context, but broadly speaking, how would you introduce people to this picture of how more water is being lost than replenished on land?
“Zach Weiss: It’s like a bank account. If you’re always taking out from the bank account and never putting back in, we all know how that goes. […] The way this manifests itself is what we call the watershed death spiral.
“We’ve lost 87% of the world’s wetlands, deliberately drained and dredged. So we’ve removed the storage capacity of the landscape. We’ve hardened the landscape. We’ve heated the landscape through its exposure to the sun. All of these things make the land reject the rain when it does arrive.
“So that rain comes in, it falls, it runs quickly downstream, leading to a flood somewhere downstream, and then also leading to drought in that area because the water that used to soak into that landscape and slowly flow is just quickly running downstream.
“In some places, the landscape then gets so dry that you start to have big, massive wildfires… because we’ve desertified the landscape, sent all the rainwater away, caused the drought, dried all the organic material into tinder for fire, then the landscape burns and you get these cycles of flood, drought, and fire that we’re seeing increasingly everywhere around the world.
“What’s really disastrous is then as all that open exposed earth absorbs more temperature, absorbs more heat, its ability to hold heat increases exponentially. And so it starts heating up more and more, faster and faster, making these high pressure heat domes that resist the incoming precipitation. So now you get longer periods of drought, the pressure in the system building, and bigger flooding events and hurricanes than ever before.
“I’m fortunate to work all around the world. No matter where you are on the planet, almost, if you have a disturbed ecosystem in your backyard, you are experiencing bigger rain events than normal with longer dry times in between with all the issues that result from both of those things.”
— And, Green Dreamer / Kaméa Chayne goes on to bring up another important and all-too-rarely addressed aspect of things: The necessity to move climate discourses beyond the fixation on carbon. All well worth a read (and a listen if you choose), so I hope you will visit the link.
Please utilize these resources in your ongoing efforts to save us crazy disconnected murderous industrialist capitalist humans from ourselves! And thank you for being part of the solution, the real solutions. Back to nature (no matter how urban you are, which I am very very urban and always will be).
Yours with solidarity and love, jenny