<
https://orionmagazine.org/article/daylighting-underground-water-management/>
"A FRIEND ONCE TOLD ME about the experience, both hilarious and heartbreaking,
of watching her son realize that, where there are buildings now, there once
were plants. “Were there plants where our house is?” he asked, wide-eyed, a
little horrified. “Were there plants
everywhere?”
Years ago, growing up on a perpetually soggy plot of land, in a town named for
a brook I had never seen, I asked my parents a version of the same question.
Had there been water where our house was? Their straightforward, adult
answer—yes, it was wetlands—was still enchanting, hinting at the hidden paths
of water in my own backyard.
Now, whenever the rain holds steady for more than a few hours, I recognize
rivers and streams, with direction and purpose, running through the streets of
New York. Over time, I’ve spotted more and more of them: gushing down the
cement steps of a nearby park hill, snaking through the crooked streets of the
West Village, filling the Prospect Expressway, and pouring into restaurant
cellars and basement apartments. In a city that, like others, is currently
raising shorelines and planning floodwalls to defend itself from rising waters,
it is alarming to see these glimpses of an underwater New York—a vision of the
city’s future, and also its past.
Yes, there were plants everywhere, and there were rivers and streams too,
running through urban areas that have now erased most evidence of them. Many
are now buried below city construction or hidden in sewer systems, where urban
planners diverted them to clear the way for construction. After centuries of
stewardship by Indigenous nations, these urban waterways—which once formed the
basis of life in cities around the world—have largely disappeared. But they
remain alive in collective memory, safeguarded both by Indigenous ancestral
knowledge and subcultures of eagle-eyed city dwellers who track evidence of
them. And many of them still course along the same pathways, only now
underground.
In recent decades, these rivers have also rallied a growing chorus of advocates
in the fields of restoration, architecture, and city planning who champion an
idea once seen as extreme or even dangerous: to bring them aboveground again.
This idea is known as daylighting, the exhumation of streams from underground
and reintroduction of them to the surface. There is ample research-based
evidence for what seems intuitively true: natural waterways—meaning, those that
flow through the topography of a landscape and not through a sewer—support
healthier ecosystems than those encased in concrete darkness. Daylighting
brings benefits to water quality that include nutrient retention, prevention of
algal blooms, and overall more supportive environments for a diversity of
species. It also keeps clean water out of the sewer system, where, currently,
huge volumes of it unnecessarily go through the sewage treatment process, a
waste of resources that can also cause sewers to overflow.
For those who care, several daylighted waterways have brought new business and
development to their cities by becoming centerpieces of new recreational areas
(this approach, of course, often overlooks all that is harmful about
gentrification). But the more compelling argument, beyond economics, comes from
Eric Sanderson, historical ecologist and author of
Mannahatta: A Natural
History of New York City, who told me, simply, “The water’s going to flow
where the water wants to go.” There is a “fundamental logic” to managing water:
at a certain point, it will not be managed. “There’s been this
idea—particularly this American idea—[that] you can kind of refashion nature
however you like and it’ll all be fine,” he said. “I think we’re sort of at the
end of that.”"
Via
Reasons to be Cheerful:
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-were-reading-free-money-cleaner-lagoons/>
Cheers,
*** 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
