Common Sense and Natural Forces

There is more than one way to deal with a water gap.  We had a neighbor that recognized nature's way of removing them by utilizing natural materials to fill them.  You can see the remains of an ancient barbed wire fence in the photo and a nearly new post on the left, but the gap is blocked by tree limbs that will be washed away when the next flood comes.  When that occurred, he simply came back after the waters receded and replaced them with more limbs.

Most people approach a water gap as a way to pit themselves against nature.  The idea is to construct something that will withstand the forces of the water and bend it to their will.  They use bull wire panels that will swing upward as the waters rise, or perhaps even anchor them to the banks in a way that allows smaller debris to pass through while catching the larger pieces.  Eventually, they always wash out, or are otherwise destroyed in the floods.

Working with nature seems to be the best way.  It is something we should do in many areas.  Instead, it is man's way to attempt to tame it.  We build our buildings and streets, we change the landscape with heavy equipment and we suffer the consequences with flooding and devastation.

Many agricultural practices also take an approach that doesn't necessarily work with nature, but seeks to "overcome" natural forces through artificial means.  We do this with fertilizers and chemicals and plows that re-shape the land into our "image" of what is necessary to produce food.  Historically, such practices resulted in catastrophic loss through flooding, or drought-fueled wind storms.

Many today are taking more conservation-conscious approaches that disturb the soil less and utilize natural forces to manage the land.  In livestock production it is seen in rotational grazing systems based on native forage species -- sometimes in intensive rotational grazing that mimics the pattern of native ungulates such as American Bison.  In farming we are seeing a switch to less soil-disturbing methods such as low-till, or no-till cultivation.  We see the use of cover crops and more drought-tolerant species.

We are currently seeing another form of the devastating impacts of man's attempts to change the natural systems in the California wildfires.  Failure to allow periodic low-impact fires to clear brush and undergrowth has created a tremendous fuel load in those forests.  Crossing those brush-covered hills with electrical lines is a perfect setup for the fires which are raging there now.  Just like in the water gap shown in the image at the top of this post, nature will cross man's artificial boundaries at a whim.

They need to control the brush with goats, or controlled burns.  They need to bury their power transmission lines.  They need to stop building on erosive slopes.  They need to understand that nature will have her way in spite of the billions of dollars they spend attempting to prevent it.  Perhaps what is needed most is some common sense, like our neighbor used by stopping the water gap with limbs, but we are talking about California....