Watching the news about a UK which is waterlogged for the second year in a row, and the tribulations of the people who have been repeatedly flooded out, had days-long blackouts and all sorts of other trials, strangely, I feel optimistic. Sometimes it takes hard times to force people to reconsider the status quo, and in the process it seems to bring out the very best and the worst in people - sometimes it takes a disaster to get people to help each other.
In the last week, I have seen more air time given on the news to the need to have more trees on high ground, so that their roots can release water more slowly to the rivers, which should meander more across the land to slow them down and stop them bursting their banks. There has also been coverage of moving subsidies from paying farmers for owning land, to paying them for taking on land and nature conservation activities. It takes years for this kind of thing to take hold - consider the effects of the successive clean air acts in the UK (1956, 1968, 1993) and the USA (1963, 1967, 1970, 1977, 1990). Before they came into effect, London was famous for its pea-souper fogs, in which you could barely see a metre ahead of you, and all cities in the UK were soot-blackened from the use of coal fires. Now, after the instigation of smoke-free zones and with the help of changes to natural gas as a fuel, it has become worthwhile to sand blast the grand old buildings in the cities and restore them to their former splendor.
I'm looking forward to a future in which the UK is a more forested landscape, and in which news stories of people being washed out of their homes have become a rarity.
Posted by Ross
