Читать книгу Taming the Flood: Rivers, Wetlands and the Centuries-Old Battle Against Flooding - Jeremy Purseglove - Страница 7

Taming the Flood, first written in 1986, was long accepted as a standard work on the conflicts between flood alleviation and nature conservation in England and Wales and how to manage rivers in an integrated way. It finally went out of print and then it rained. It rained a lot. Large areas of the country went under water. Floods and all the dilemmas and controversies that come with them are back on the agenda. For these reasons it seems very timely to revise and update this book. In an additional final chapter I have examined the latest twists and turns in these issues leading to 2016.

Between 1977 and 1989, as one of the first environmentalists in the British water industry, I was employed by the Severn Trent Water Authority and, as it became later, the National Rivers Authority. One of the prime duties of this organization was to reduce flooding. This led it into regular conflict with nature conservation, which it was my duty to defend. I therefore found myself in the middle of a long-standing environmental debate concerning river and wetland management, which in the 1980s became increasingly controversial and under the national spotlight. This debate led to major reforms and initiatives whereby landowners were paid compensation to maintain important habitats on their land. Higher environmental standards were also set for river management, and the old world of farmer-dominated land drainage began to evolve to the more rounded system of modern flood defence that we know today. These changes were recorded in chapter 8, which concluded the original book.

Taming the Flood was published on the eve of water privatization, which appeared to bring in a new age of responsible river and wetland management under what is now the Environment Agency. The issues and conflicts that I described seemed to settle down. But they did not go away. With the onset of climate change over the past decade and especially during the winters of 2013–2014 and 2015–2016, the floods have returned with a vengeance. The old issues and conflicts recounted in these pages have resurfaced with an even greater urgency as the dredging debate over how to deal with unprecedented flooding is back in the national media.

In revising the book I have realized that it is both impossible and inappropriate entirely to rewrite the first eight chapters. They belong to the period in which they were written. As such, they must largely remain. Some passages may now seem outdated by the march of history and the benefit of hindsight, particularly with subsequent reforms to both administration of flood defence and the Internal Drainage Boards. Whenever possible, I have appended footnotes at the bottom of the page so that the reader can discover the subsequent developments that have affected particular wetlands or issues under discussion. The original book now reads as a chronicle that hugely informs the events from 1989 to 2016, which are covered in a new chapter 9.

It could be argued that, without reading those earlier pages, it is impossible properly to understand the current debate. This was a passionately campaigning book when I first wrote it, but I have found that, revisiting the current issues after 25 years, rivers and wetlands are still in desperate need of a passionate campaign. Back in the 1980s the big new idea was that the machines that dredged and straightened rivers could also be used to enhance their habitats as part of the normal duties of reducing flooding. Now, the big new idea is that we can use the whole landscape to absorb much of the rain before it reaches the rivers. In this way we can also restore many of our damaged landscapes, especially the most intensive farmland. It remains to be seen whether in this latest crisis of climate change we will rise to the challenge.