Channelling water where it’s not: lessons about holding back nature

All civilisations collapse due to loss of soil fertility and water. Animals are continuously driving the mechanisms that restabilise this. It’s this dogged behaviour that separates us from wildlife. Wild creatures do what they know and we are the only animal on Earth that has a brain that thinks we can do otherwise: that we can control nature. I was drawn to this reference in The Guardian today, by a representative of the Australian Farm Institute. The article by Natasha May talks about the impact of mice on the integrity of manmade irrigation systems: of channelling water where it’s not natural.

“If you’ve got levee banks breaking or earthworks formed to channel water in a particular way and they fail, then you can have really severe or damaging intense flooding because you’re basically channelling water where it’s not meant to go,” Heath said.

Quote from Richard Heath, the executive director of the Australian Farm Institute, in The Guardian

Let’s unpack the comment for a moment. Heath says ‘you’re basically channeling water where it’s not meant to go’. This means farmers know what they are doing is unnatural, yet continue to do so. The mice, as always, get a bad wrap. Farmers are seen as victims of nature gone wrong and the mice, as pests to be destroyed. Is that true though?

By admitting the system is naturally compromised though, surely it’s worth considering an alternative view?

An alternative way of thinking about wildlife

I’m currently reading The Reindeer Chronicles by Judith Schwartz (and will be reviewing soon, I hope). Herein, the author says:

‘Irrigation … results in salt-laden soil, a situation ameliorated only by flooding the area. Which in turn sparks more erosion. “This is the standard modelThe process, either mathematically or in the human brain, of creating an internal version of something that we can refer to, to better understand how it functions and our place within. Scientific modelling is where we take the best knowledge we have and build a version of what will happen, if we assume certain parameters. For example, we might model More of what happens to civilizations,” Neal [Spackman] says. The sequence “generally takes three hundred to seven hundred years. It starts with agriculture.”

Judith Schwartz, The Reindeer Chronicles.

Resetting and restoring balance in the ecosystemHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More is what the mice are doing. We, the farmers, are the problem. Ignoring what animals reveal to us about our own unnatural behaviour will be to our peril. History has shown us time and time again, that our economy will collapse if we are channelling water where it’s not natural. The system will reset itself.

Ironically, the mice will still be around, after that happens. They will keep repeating what they do until it eventually works. It’s strange to think that in the battle between mice and men, the mice will win out. This is certainly what Douglas Adams meant to imply.

‘These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vastly hyperintelligent pandimensional beings.’

– Douglas Adams, 1979. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy