https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-08-02/to-swim-in-the-seine/
"As I curl up on the couch drinking in the sounds of a Missouri thunderstorm,
I’m thinking of the rivers in my life. Outside, the rain collects in the
gutters and streets before being shed into an artificial ecosystem of concrete
culverts, water retention basins, and channels. This infrastructure sits in the
watershed of South Creek, the nearest urban stream in my neighborhood and one
of the most hopeful places I know. South Creek is one of the most nature-rich
areas in my city, a place of restoration, regeneration, and if not wilderness
then certainly wildness.
The creek is seven years into its stream restoration project and now has banks
densely vegetated with grasses, flowers, reeds, and shrubs. Over a hundred
trees were planted along this restored stretch of urban stream. What used to be
a concrete channel echoing the notorious Los Angeles River is now an urban
oasis with a path winding along it. For those of us seeking reconciliation
between the natural world and this human world we’ve built for ourselves, this
place offers a vision for what the future can look like. As I collect stories
of rewilding that give me hope, the story of South Creek is one of my
favorites, but it’s far from the only one.
There is a new urban paradigm germinating among cultures all over Earth, where
the connections between human and Gaia are slowly growing. If the past few
hundred years saw an attempted divorce of ourselves from the natural world,
except where the mines took and the smokestacks gave back, then this
perspective sees a great remarriage, a restoration of our biological bond to
Earth, a rewilding. South Creek is my closest example of this, but as my study
abroad this past spring took me to Paris I got a front-row seat to a new urban
river restoration, where a metropolis is actively healing the water it depends
on.
The Seine River is the heart of Paris. As a student with extremely good fortune
in apartment placement, I was lucky enough to stay on the Île Saint-Louis, the
heart of the heart. That’s the smaller of the two islands in the middle of the
Seine. The larger Île de la Cité with iconic Notre Dame was just across a
bridge. Living here was a front-row seat where I could observe the relationship
Parisians have with the natural world, and how that relationship is reflected
in the recovery of the Seine."
Via
Future Crunch issue 189:
https://futurecrunch.com/
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
