“People who live at the lower ends of watersheds cannot be isolationists — or not for long. Pretty soon they will notice that water flows, and that will set them to thinking about the people upstream who either do or do not send down their silt and pollutants and garbage. Thinking about the people upstream out to cause further thinking about the people downstream. Such pondering on the facts of gravity and the fluidity of water shows us that the golden rule speaks to a condition of absolute interdependency and obligation. People who live on rivers — or, in fact, anywhere in a watershed — might rephrase the rule in this way: Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.”
- Wendell Berry, from his essay “Watershed and Commonwealth”, in Citizenship Papers (2003)
i see many things in nature; flowers, trees, cliffs, bugs and bees. but it’s these rivers, with all their divisions, their demands, their desires, that truly erode away at my shell, and carve away at the detachment i’ve built up over many years, replacing it with… substance. with calm, with anger, with fear and love and joy. but most importantly of all, they move me. they’re the arteries, veins, and capillaries of the world.
and as the world becomes increasingly hostile, they carry on circulating their suspended sediments around, and around, and around. sometimes they drag them violently and smoothing out the rough edges, sometimes they carry them like passengers of a well-maintained train. but they always go somewhere, and there’s no stopping them.
i wish i had that drive sometimes, to carry me forward. but i guess all that matters is that i keep on moving.
A new map visualizes the flow of ever river in the United States. (Image credit: Robert Szucs, Fejetlenfej/Imgur)
The striking image also reveals that the vast majority of the Midwest and much of the Mountain West are threaded with streams, rivers and tributaries that fan out from the Missouri and the mighty Mississippi. The Missouri River is the longest river in North America, while the second-longest, the Mississippi holds the most water. The Mississippi meanders 2,350 miles (3,781 kilometers) from Lake Itasca in Minnesota before emptying into the Gulf of Mexico (The Missouri River is longer). At Lake Itasca, the river is less than 30 feet (9 m) wide, but it sprawls 11 miles (17 km) across near Lake Winnibigoshish in Minnesota, according to the National Park Service.
Tia Ghose at LiveScience. Every US River Visualized in One Glorious Map
Robert Szucs sells the map at the Etsy shop Grasshopper Geography.
The justices ruled that many wetlands are not covered by the Clean Water Act.
SCOTUS basically just nerfed the EPA’s ability to regulate under the Clean Water Act. This is INFURIATING as a hydrologic engineer since it shows a fundamental lack of understanding of basic hydrology, hydraulics, and ecosystem dynamics in a changing climate.
Basically the definition of a wetland is now limited to areas connected to federally regulated waters by a “continuous surface connection”. The legal history of groundwater rights in the US is a whole different story, but this is such a narrow definition that shows a surface level (no pun intended) understanding of hydrology. People like to think of rivers and lakes as discrete units. But they’re not. They’re part of a larger interconnected watershed. Hence why federal regulations make sense in the context of wetlands. Not to mention that it’s just ridiculous to classify wetlands based on flowing surface water, when several key wetlands really aren’t related to any rivers.
This shows a greater trend about our unwillingness to adapt to climate change as well. Basically a couple built a house on an area that wasn’t a wetland, but was later classified as one, and regulatory agencies wanted them to return and restore the land. Obviously that’s shitty, and it’s probably a good thing that SCOTUS sided with them. But the legal precedent for reclassifying wetlands is insane.
We’re already seeing pushback from homeowners buying land in FEMA designated floodplains, and this certainly won’t help matters. The sad reality is that we will not be able to create a sustainable built environment in areas where we historically may have been able to. Like Florida coastlines, for example. Sticking our head in the sand and pretending that wetlands aren’t important, floodplains aren’t changing, and the climate is stationary is just a road to disaster in the long term that will have serious consequences.
When it’s legal to build in a floodplain or wetland, who do you think ends up in these high-risk areas? Often it’s the most underprivileged members of society who can’t afford to live elsewhere. This is just as much of a socioeconomic catastrophe as it is an environmental one.
The way we regulate water in the US is already insane, with agencies like the EPA, USACE, state governments, and interstate compacts causing a mess of tangled legislation. The complexities of our hydrologic cycle in a changing climate really can’t be left to individual stakeholders since we all live here and drink the same water that goes through the water cycle at the end of the day.
I just learned that an Environmental Study will be conducted on this concrete creek to determine what sort of improvements can and should be made. The reason for this change is flood mitigation (to prevent flooding). The brochure discussed widening and naturalizing the banks of the creek, this is something I am 100% in favour of! This could become a really beautiful area when the naturalization project is approved and completed.
