In the news today is a flood story from Texas where a river went over its banks due to heavy rain, leading to loss of life and a great deal of damage.
The news reports mainly focus on the damage and the lack of warning, some on climate change, and less on other equally important underlying causes and solutions.
ECOSYSTEM DEGRADATION
Climate change does play a role in this, of course. Increased heat (energy) in the atmosphere leads to more extreme weather, including heavier rainfall.
Still, in many cases, the main cause of disastrous flooding is not climate change itself. It’s degraded ecosystems.
Degraded ecosystems are unable to effectively deal with the inevitable occasional heavy rainfall. They make heavy rain into a problem instead of a resource.
ECOSYSTEM REGENERATION
The solution is ecosystem regeneration. Restore rivers and creeks – through porous stone dams and native vegetation along the banks – so they don’t go dry. Restore the flood plains. Restore the native vegetation in the whole area, the natural layer of mulch, and the soil, so water can slow down and absorb into the ground.
Do this in all public spaces. Encourage it in private spaces, including gardens and farms. (Through training, making plants available, help with the work, subsidies, tax cuts, and so on.) Remove any unnecessary asphalt and replace with native vegetation, or at the very least porous paving.
Install food forests wherever possible, to provide food for animals and the community.
WIN-WIN SOLUTIONS
This helps prevent flooding, makes heavy rain into a resource instead of a problem, and it benefits us in innumerable other ways. It provides habitat and food for others in the web of life we are part of. It provides food for us. It enhances our well-being. It improves the quality of the community. It reduces our ecological footprint. (Which is crucial in our age of global ecological overshoot.)
Also, in terms of climate change, ecosystem regeneration and reducing our ecological footprint are essential parts of the solution.
It’s a win-win-win solution and it’s very doable.
WHAT’S REQUIRED
What’s required is collective will, and perhaps a shift out of a zero-sum to a win-win mindset, and a shift from a view of separation to a view of connection.
Our current modern communities are largely a result of a zero-sum mindset. We use solutions that harm the web of life we are part of. And this is also tied to a view of separation. We see ourselves separate from the web of life, so we don’t care much what happens to it.
The reality is that we are all part of the same seamless web of life and living planet. What happens to the wider web of life happens to us. Win-win solutions are the only ones that make sense in this reality, especially when it comes to how we collectively organize ourselves.
At the center of our civilization is an illusion, and reality reminds us – including through this kind of flooding.
A NOTE ON FUNDING CUTS TO THE WEATHER SERVICE AND SCIENCE
The loss of life and damage caused by this particular flooding likely has many causes, from climate change and degraded ecosystems to cuts to forecasting and science to poor local crisis preparedness and management.
To take one of these: The Trump administration has massively cut funding to the National Weather Service, NOAA, and science in general. That gives less detailed and less accurate forecasts, and that, in turn, puts lives in danger. I don’t know if that’s what happened in this case, but I know it likely will be in many situations in the future.
As Flood Deaths Rise, Texas Officials Blast Faulty Forecast by DOGE-Gutted National Weather Service – Common Dreams