Showing posts with label water conservation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label water conservation. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

"More sinned against than sinning"

First we starve our trees of water during a drought -- thinking there is some better use for water than keeping nature alive -- and then, when the storms blow in and roots and branches crack and split like matchsticks, we blame our trees for collapsing on our buildings. Trees living within a stand are less likely to blow down, but we tend to leave trees standing singly and isolated around our buildings. What chance do they have in a drought and high winds, when the landscape becomes a "blasted heath"?

In late August the News reports were full of oaks, maples, fruit trees and firs blowing down on southern Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland, damaging cars and buildings, dragging down hydro wires -- one "offending tree" went through a window, said a CTV announcer.

"Offending" tree? The urban forest is the victim of offense, not perpetrator: it is eroded and abused, and who can be surprised that it keels over, tree by tree, at the first storm of the season? We must care for, not stress our trees if we want their services as oxygen and shade providers, bulwarks against climate change, habitat for wildlife and beautifiers of our increasingly sterile over-built residential environment. (The offending tree was of course sentenced to execution, without trial.)

Next time we have a drought, let's not make it worse. What good is the water in the reservoir (Victoria's stayed 85% full), when it's needed in the roots of trees? Water in roots is not lost, it's being circulated. Once the hydrological cycle is arrested, death follows. That's a tragedy.

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Gardens don't "waste" water, they conserve water

In a book from 2005 (Curious By Nature), Candace Savage tells us that in Nebraska, fully 250 kilometers of fibrous roots were measured under half a square mile of grassland. The roots of grass are what hold soil in place, so that micro-organisms can break down minerals from rock and soil creating the foundation of terrestrial life. It was the loss of grassland that created the American dustbowl of the 1930s, it was the overuse of the land for agriculture and the removal of the cover that protected the roots that kept the soil alive with microscopic and insect life. It doesn't take long for a little dryness -- a few dry years -- to create havoc in the world we think we can safely wrest for our own purposes from Nature.

Here in BC we have just had the first call of the season for water conservation, the first warning about the paucity of this year's snowpack and its insufficient meltwater. Don't water your garden, say the officials, let your grass go brown and your bedding plants shrivel up.

Sadly, your shrubs will shrivel indeed but grass won't die, the genius of grass is that it has evolved to bounce back greenly from a dry spell with the first enlivening shower -- it is in fact the best covering for dry areas. Removing it to put in spaced-out drought-tolerant plants actually causes soil erosion and compaction from traffic, and loss to wind. The most drought-tolerant plant is grass, but though it tolerates drought, the best grass is watered grass.

If the municipal watering-police were truly motivated to conserve water, they would want to keep gardens in place. They would make sure the cityscape was punctuated with wide greenspaces. Gardens retain water, trees and shrubs pool it for birds and insects in their leaves, return it to the atmosphere and hold it in their roots. A lot preserved for garden space retains water and keeps the environment healthy, while a lot paved over for development is greenspace lost for water. It is now going to harbour a house or apartment block, whose inhabitants will use up hundreds of times more water through their pipes than any garden does, and who will not return it in nature's hydrologic cycle. So if they really want to conserve water, why don't the bureaucrats and politicians put the brakes on development, not on watering gardens? We need to measure how much population our given landscape and climate can healthily support, and limit population growth to that. The alternative is destruction of the living world of nature around us, and a terminally decreasing quality of life for ourselves.

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Word Quiz For Tree Lovers

How many of these lovely old-fashioned tree words do you know? They're not much heard in this era of mechanized household gardening using a plethora of electrical equipment, but in his splendid 2007 title Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees, Roger Deakin discusses the following:

"plashing" and "pleaching" (hedges), "pollarding" and "coppicing," (trees, making a coppice wood); also: spinney, greengage, sward, scrump, scion, holloway, bole, spar, and brorch. Definitions will be listed in a later post (how did you do?)

Deakin packs fact into a long lyrical narrative appreciation of trees in England and Australia, Poland and the Urals. Have you ever wondered where apples came from (where they are "native" to, as people put it today)? Kyrgyzstan. An Oxford professor establishes that fact using DNA profiling, so Deakin goes off to the land of apple genesis. We can thank the horses transporting goods along the silk road trails over the centuries: the ancient apple seed is toughly coated enough to withstand the equine digestive tract, and fell to ground all over Europe within its own bed of compost. Now Britain has 6000 varieties. But even in the ancient stone age civilizations people knew how to plant seeds and cross-breed - we know that from the records and pictograms they kept. Human history is tree history, and Deakin walks us through much of it -- it's also the history of soil, flowers, insects, bees, cattle and sheep whose flavourful varieties of cheese and honey come from plants and their sap ("a tree is a river of sap" says Deakin).

And water: the minerals in soil which micro-organisms make available to roots are dissolved in water. Water cycles as vapour from leaves to sky, from clouds to soil and back into roots. How much less water is in a city as it is increasingly paved? Is there a formula for measuring that?

Grass helps: its underground tangles of roots hold water (and the fungi, filaments and micro-organisms that make minerals bio-available), and leaves of grass send off oxygen and moisture into the air. Unless, that is, its water supply is shut off during a dry season with no sprinkler use. "Water conservation" may "save" water, but for what? Household and industrial use?

Diverting water from plants makes natural landscape die off, and banishing grass with its underlying microbe-civilization makes soil erode away. Do we still want our gardens? And the young trees that will replace Victoria's aging public tree population? It is something to think about, when water use is being debated.

Friday, August 21, 2009

The Sentient Garden



I received two messages today, one an old announcement from the CRD saying not to water our garden (because of water restriction due to supply decrease due to overdevelopment), and one from my trees, saying they were thirsty. The trees which I planted 12 years ago to commemorate the death of my horse, have for the first time gone brown this year. Which message do you think I'm paying attention to?

Gardening has since ancient times been recognized as a spiritual pursuit, by amateur naturalists, Taoists, shamans, monks, nuns and herbalists. It mingles the spirit of the gardener with the "gardened;" it means allowing oneself as gardener to be "gardened" as one weeds and waters, ploughs and plants, to merge with the living world. It means yielding to a bio-centric rather human-centric point of view. Interspecies communicator and musician Jim Nollman puts it like this: "Gardening is a cooperative affair. I am a part of a neighborhood in which plants, dirt, rocks and a human family participate collectively in a love affair with place."

Unfortunately, city planners often forget about the love affair with place. They do violence to place through orgies of "development" and greenspace destruction. They forget that the job of the human residents of a town is to guard, honour and preserve the place which they share in a cooperative enterprise with the trees, shrubs, flowers, weeds, vines, mosses, grasses, insects, birds and animals that also live there. It is time to start communicating better with the trees and gardens, time to start noticing what their whole being is saying to us. Do you think they want to die of thirst? Does the soil, which is alive (there are about 10 billion bacteria cells in a gram of soil) want to be paved over? How many buildings do we pack in before we judge we have enough?

Is this sentimental? Yes indeed. Who wants to live in a culture without sentiment? Sentiment is feeling, and "feeling," or sentience (for sunlight, water, shade, nutrition, attention) is what all living cells respond to and with. That is the common language among species.

Someone estimated that suburban Californians use about one third of household water on their gardens (I don't know the estimate for Victoria). Good! What could be a better place to use it? For what better purpose, than keeping the world alive?

B. Julian

A website worth visiting: http://www.interspecies.com/