Of Rivers and Man
16 December 2006
I don’t think I’ve seen so much water around as at the moment. Walking across the fields is like walking in a permanent puddle, the stock that remain outside are poaching the ground badly and driving over to the Lake DIstrict yesterday, I soon discovered that the road drains can’t cope either.
This doesn’t deter Rufus from swimming the rivers though, although I’m sure I saw a look of surprise on his face when the boiling flood water wipped him off downstream on his first crossing. This canine swimming usually takes place on a stretch of river where (for some reason and at great expense) the farmer has seen fit to straighten the course of the river, cutting through the meanders of ages that have left their mark in the valley. As a consequence the water is now eroding the river bank at a faster rate on his neighbour’s land, as well as making inroads into restoring it’s previous meandering path. Altogether a rather pointless exercise.
In huge contrast, I received this photo of an Ericson Skycrane fire-fighting helicopter over the Victoria river from a Yahoo Group buddy in Australia.
We spend millions on coastal erosion, which would also appear to be ultimatelty pointless, but to what ends do we go to peserve what we’ve built or reclaim from the sea, especially in the face of an increasing rate of climate change with attendant sea level rises? As with many of these issues, I think we are looking at things about face, we should be concentrating on moving with the changes and allowing plant and animal migrations, whilst at least trying to miinimise our impact upon any change and degradation of our environment.
Today, I see the announcement of the probable extinction of the goddess of the Yangtze . If this proves to be correct, the small, nearly blind dolphin known as the baiji will be “the first large aquatic mammal to have gone extinct since hunting and overfishing killed off the Caribbean monk seal in the 1950s”. It apparently couldn’t withstand the pressure of man’s use of it’s environment – I hear David Attenborough’s words at the end of BBC’s Planet Earth series and it’s morally high time to “cherish” what we have left.
On a lighter note, I love the New York Times’s review of Windows Vista by David Pogue, there are a few around, but it’s short, to the point and I like the Pogues.
YORKO Exhibition
