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When Beth Dowdle, an urban planner and environmentalist, arrived in Florida in the 1990s to work on the future of the Loxahatchee River watershed, a 500,000-acre basin critical to the Palm Beach area, she went to the headquarters of the South Florida Water Management District, the government agency responsible for the region’s water system. “It’s something out of a science fiction movie,” she recalls, “a big command center, a huge, very modern building in the suburbs, adjacent to the airport. I was in a room full of TV monitors watching the weather—lots of buttons, bells and whistles. You have to be cleared to go inside. When big storms come through, they hunker down in there to manage the water system.”
Dowdle spent some time looking at a large map of south Florida, talking with one of the district’s hydrological engineers. “Their maps are exquisite—satellite imagery maps. I’m seeing a beautiful wetlands mosaic: the river, canals, the whole Loxahatchee watershed.” After a while, she turned to the engineer. “Which way is the water flowing?” she asked.
The engineer laughed. “We can make it move any way you want it to.”
Here was a classic example of the human urge to control nature—to engineer and harness it—for human ends. For most of the 20th century engineers had directed the slow flow of water in Florida’s huge Everglades, draining and damming to make dry land for development of housing and entire communities. Nowhere has this man-over-nature mindset been more apparent than in the case of the City of New Orleans. Nearly 300 years ago the first levees, four to six feet high, were built along the Mississippi River to protect the city from floods.
But, as John Barry recounts in Rising Tide, “levee building never stopped. Levees were extended above and below New Orleans, then to the opposite bank. Those levees increased the pressure on old ones. The reason is simple: when the river was leveed on only one bank, in flood it simply overflowed the opposite bank. But with both banks leveed, the river could not spread out. Therefore, it rose up. Thus, the levees, by holding the water in, forced the river higher. In turn, men tried to contain the flood height by building levees still higher. By 1812, levees in Louisiana began just below New Orleans and extended 155 miles north on the east bank of the river and 180 miles on the west bank. By 1858, levees on the two sides of the river totaled well over 1,000 miles.”
To control the Mississippi River, Barry continues, “was the perfect task for the nineteenth century. This was the century of iron and steel, certainty and progress, and the belief that physical laws as solid and rigid as iron and steel governed nature, possibly even man’s nature, and that man had only to discover these laws to truly rule the world. It was the century of Euclidean geometry, linear logic, magnificent accomplishments, and brilliant mechanics. It was the century of the engineer.”
At the beginning of the 21st century, however, a new approach—green services—rejects engineered solutions in favor of “letting natural systems do the work.” |
