The weather has been awful lately, I’ve never seen so much rain in summer (or in winter for that matter). It’s all gone to hell. It might be something to do with climate change or global warming, I can’t be sure but things certainly seem to have changed and the weather certainly seems to be a lot less predictable and a lot more – well freaky. Should I be worried? Is there anything that I can do about it? Apparently it’s the worst rain in June since records began and everyone says it the worst that they can remember.
Since records began? The worst that they can remember? This has got me thinking. I live in a small market town in the North of England, similar to many small market towns all over the country. It has a river which is normally gentle and a pleasant and passive feature of the location. The banks of the river are very obvious, rising to a hundred metres in places and at least a kilometre wide from one side of the valley to another. All along the banks are areas of flat lands, flood planes I think they are called.
The town last flooded seriously in September 2008 and it was devastating for the town and its people. It took a couple of years for the majority of the residents to get back on their feet and even today some businesses are not back to where they were. Before then the town had previously flooded seriously in March 1963 and there are still people living close by who have vivid memories of that inundation. Forty five years is a long time.
But then I thought about the floods in 2008 and how little they altered the landscape around the town. The banks weren’t worn away, there weren’t any major landslides, just a few minor ones and the river didn’t change its course. The banks are built up nowadays and controlled with concrete and stonework but changing the landscape takes a long time and the river valley didn’t happen overnight. It must have taken thousands of years and probably hundreds of floods to shift that much earth and rock to get to where the town is today.
The first recorded flood in the town was in 1863 and the 2008 event was the thirteenth written down for posterity. One hundred and fifty years may seem like a long period in the history of the settlement but it is the wink of an eye in the age of the earth. And so this says to me that what appears to us to be a stable system punctuated by periods of intense weather is actually a dynamic system wearing down the surface of the land through the erosion caused by running water but over geological time and not human time.
Yes, the weather has been awful lately and it certainly seems to have changed and to be a lot less predictable but how do we know that this isn’t just normal when viewed over a longer period of time? Look around you at the streams and rivers and the gorges and valleys that they have cut and ask yourself how much bad weather must have taken place already to get the landscape to where it is today.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 