Environmental policy, River restoration, Writing

Floodlines

Somerset floods - Daily Telegraph

I’ve spent most of the last few weeks taking a break from writing books and advertising copy to work on another kind of big writing job: pulling together the final draft of the Wandle Catchment Plan.

It’s involved a lot of thinking about water, and how to meet the challenges of balancing too much against not enough…

… especially in a chalkstream catchment as highly urbanised yet horribly over-abstracted as the Wandle.

With the water rising noticeably in the river over the road, as well as up-catchment, this work has provided an excellent personal context for the recent national debate about water management and mitigating some of the most immediate effects of anthropogenic climate change.

Just in case you’ve missed any of it, here are some of the best (read: scientifically robust and rational) links I’ve noticed in the last month or so.

Keep checking this blog if you find them interesting. I’ll try to add more as they appear…

My own call on this? There’ll be no overnight solutions to our current mess of sheepwrecked uplands, maize-silted rivers and concrete-covered floodplains, not to mention the perched-and-canalised problems epitomised by the photo at the top of this blog.

But if this winter’s jetstream propels us as a nation towards working in harmony with natural processes, rather than wilfully opposing them and actually believing we can conquer nature (nice deconstruction of the old-school Soviet Olympic strapline right there, Matt!) without getting properly slapped for our pains…

… I think that’ll  be a start.

(Photo: Daily Telegraph)