Читать книгу Taming the Flood: Rivers, Wetlands and the Centuries-Old Battle Against Flooding - Jeremy Purseglove - Страница 12

Before work began.

The machines move in.

The disastrous results of traditional river engineering.

The fact that rivers are such a symbol of endurance and of changeless change is what makes their management a touchstone for the whole issue of our relationship with the natural world. It is therefore a moving thought that the river managers were among the first people in the modern countryside business to stop and think a little harder about what they were actually doing. To adapt the slogan ‘Put the Great back in Britain’, some of them have begun to put the river back into river management. It remains to be seen whether at this eleventh hour for the English countryside, those other giants, the forestry and the agriculture industries, are also prepared to take seriously a wider frame of reference. If they are, we will at last be able to see the countryside put back into countryside management. Such an achievement depends upon two things for which the English have always had a special genius: a sense of place and a sense of compromise. What river engineers have begun to do is to rediscover their roots, and these, as we shall see, go back a very long way.