Into the Fish’s Mouth

"Two years’ average rainfall fell in just three days. Permaculture came to their rescue." 

 

The scenes following extreme rainfall events in Kerr County Texas, Cape Town South Africa, Kazakhstan, Hunan and Sichuan China, Venezuela, Austria, and New South Wales are apocalyptic. On July 4th, the Guadalupe River at Kerrville rose 31 feet in 90 minutes, sweeping away recreational campgrounds and summer camps along the river. 

The Jin River, flowing through Chengdu, originates from the Dujiangyan Irrigation System and is a tributary of the Min River. Image at left is from 2018 by Albert Bates. The image at right is July 4, 2025, from Chengdu Expat News.

After watching one of the videos from Western China, I recalled conducting a month-long course in ecovillage design at the UNESCO Rural Development Center in Chengdu in September 2018. I paid ~$615 for food and boarding for 28 days.

In March 2018, the Chinese Constitution was amended to add “the building of an ecological civilization” to the duties and powers of every State Council, so my team from the Global Ecovillage Network was invited to Sichuan to show young engineers and designers how to achieve this. I reported at the time.

I have never been fond of cities, but if you had to live in a Chinese megacity, you could do worse than Chengdu. It is the capital of Sichuan Province so you know the food is going to be good. It has been sobriqueted at one time or another as “The God-favored Land,” “Hibiscus City,” “Brocade City,” “Civilized City,” “Garden City,” “World Gastronomic Capital,” and “Model City for Environmental Protection,” whose biggest sightseer draws are the wild herds of pandas. It is also home to 16 million permanent residents, has 20 districts (former cities and towns it swallowed up somewhere along the millennia), is said by Forbes to be the fastest growing city on Earth, and is expected to remain on that blistering pace for at least the next decade. Apart from the pandas, those are not pluses.

At the invitation of Mr. Wang Li, Deputy Director of the UNESCO Center, I was taken to a convention center downtown to speak of ecovillages in the context of environmental education. It was the 9th annual meeting of the Dujiangyan International Forum and the theme that year was “Harmonizing Urban-rural Education Development in the Context of Education 2030.” I honestly expected most of the speeches to be real snoozers, given titles like “Let Education Be Implanted with the Green Heart and Share the Beautiful Earth,” but I was in for a real surprise. The first talk, by the deputy director of an academic committee of a prominent Chinese university, had me hanging on every word.

Eco-Civilization

In China, more wind turbines and solar panels were installed last year than in the rest of the world combined. And China’s clean energy boom is going global. Chinese companies are building electric vehicle and battery factories in Brazil, Thailand, Morocco, Hungary and beyond.

At the same time, in the United States, President Trump is pressing Japan and South Korea to invest “trillions of dollars” in a project to ship natural gas to Asia. General Motors just killed plans to make electric motors at a factory near Buffalo, N.Y., and instead will put $888 million into building V-8 gasoline engines there. And this week Congress rewrote American energy policy to strongly favor fossil fuels over cleaner alternatives like solar, wind and EVs.

—The New York Times, July 5, 2025

Wen Tiejun had every right to be outspoken. As a teenager at the time of the Cultural Revolution, he was yanked from school and sent out to a gruesome life of menial labor on a remote collective farm, along with his parents, who were being punished for being intellectuals. Many of the presenters prepared talks on bringing rural students into the digital age, or using cyber enhancements to improve pedagogy. Wen called that moving from a colonial knowledge system to a neocolonial exploitative system. It is the old paradigm of “development-ism,” he said: “colonization, overproduction, overconsumption, capitalization of the economy.”

According to Wen, developed countries were going all over the world paying vast sums in “foreign aid” to “propagate the crisis.” It was the same mentality that brought about World War II, he said. First, you build massive arsenals so you can build massive industrial infrastructure, then you have to use it, destroy it, and build newer and bigger replacements. “We need a decolonial policy,” he demanded, taking indirect aim at Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road initiative. He told the assembly that if you want rural revitalization, you need to put the culture back into agriculture. You need ecological agriculture, farmer rights, and a bottom-up love for environmental sustainability. 

He ticked off the list of recent Chinese government slogans:

• Integrate Urban and Rural (2002)

• Scientific Development (2004)

• A Harmony Society (2004)

• Multifunction Agriculture (2006)

• Eco-Civilization (2007)

• Inclusive Growth (2009)

“If you want to put meaning into meaningless slogans,” he said, “think about an eco-civilization that means local resource sovereignty, multidiversity solidarity, and sustainable ecological safety.” What China was doing instead, he complained, was adopting an Anglo-American model of very destructive neocolonialism that destroys the fabric of culture, soils and health. “Modernization is a trap.” 

Giving an example, he said the East Asian Land Reform initiative went from ideals of Confucius (good governance arises from good-hearted people) and community stability to the largest percentage of the population becoming petty bourgeois and omni-destructive consumerists. What was cast as land reform ended up destabilizing Asia—most dramatically India—separating rich and poor, pushing a third of the population into landless, jobless poverty, threatening two thirds of the states with growing insurrections, and making 90 percent of those who counted themselves employed no more than slaves of an unstable grey economy, all the while accelerating pollution, land degradation and climate change.

Wen shows strawbale houses being built by volunteers as an example of what rural China needs more of. I was looking around the room and trying to see if anyone else was as dumbstruck as I was, but they applauded Wen’s candor. This is not your daddy’s China anymore. UNESCO Office Director of the International Training Center for Rural Education Zhao Yuchi, seated next to me, leaned over and said, “We are the people who are eating the first crabs.”

Taking advantage of an app on WeChat, I rented an e-bike and followed some of the bike paths along the river. The site and name have remained unchanged since at least the time Chengdu became the capital for the 9th Kaiming King of the Shu 2300 years ago. As recently as 2100 years ago, it had its first school, called Shishi (“thank you”) built by Governor Wen Weng. According to legend, around the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty (25–220), Zhang Daoling, later known as Celestial Master Zhang Tianshi, cultivated and preached the way of the Tao on Mt. Qingcheng, now revered as the birthplace of Taoism.

Contrast that placid river bank then with the scenes coming via YouTube now:

 

The Fish’s Mouth

Near the UNESCO Center in Dujiangyan is a historic site that I have often described in these posts as an early permaculture example. It is called the Fish’s Mouth (鱼嘴).

Originally constructed around 256 BC by King Zhaoxiang (秦昭襄王) of Qin, the earthworks are still in use today. Especially today. During the Warring States period over 2,250 years ago, people who lived in the area of the Min River were plagued by annual flooding. Despite the fertile soils of the valley floor, life was an endless struggle to provide. No sooner was the rice ready to harvest than the Min River would rush down from the steep Western mountains, slow abruptly upon reaching the Chengdu Plain, drop its mud, and make disastrous floods. 

The royal hydrologist Li Bing investigated the problem and discovered that the river was swollen by fast-flowing spring meltwater from the local mountains that burst the banks when it reached the slow-moving and heavily silted stretch below. One solution would have been to build a dam, but fortunately, the King lacked an Army Corps of Engineers to advise him. Instead, all he had were Taoist priests. They said, Do not fight the water, bend it. 

In just four years, using tens of thousands of villagers, Zhao and Li constructed a water-diversion levee resembling a fish’s mouth, using long, sausage-shaped baskets of woven bamboo filled with stones (known as zhulong) held in place by wooden tripods (known as macha). Next, Zhao and Bing cut a deep channel to one side of the island. This was before the invention of gunpowder, and normally, cutting through the hard mountain granite with hand tools would have taken decades. But Li Bing invented a method of using fire and water to rapidly heat and cool the rocks, causing them to crack and allowing them to be easily removed. I had seen a similar technique used by Incan builders. After eight years of such work, a 20-meter (66 ft)-wide channel had been gouged through the gorge, dividing the river into two sides of a central island. In this way, Zhao’s engineers could allow floodwaters to escape harmlessly to the center of the mouth while taming the channels to either side for irrigation. In the center channel, a dam could be opened and closed in season, diverting more water to irrigation as needed.

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After the system was finished, no more floods occurred. The irrigation made Sichuan the most productive agricultural region in China. The construction is also credited with giving the people of Sichuan a laid-back attitude to life and a taste for spicy food. It eliminated a constant disaster, ensured a predictably bountiful harvest, and left the Kingdom of Min with plenty of free time to engage in pleasure-filled leisure.

Zhao and Bing harnessed the river not by damming it, but by dividing it. They spread it, slowed it, sank it, and stored it. Millions visit the Dujiangyan Fish’s Mouth still today, to watch it renew by rain, gravity, and the weight of water as it irrigates over 2,000 square miles (5,300 km2) of high dry plains. In 2000, Dujiangyan became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

A Walk Through the Book of Revelation

So what happened this year? In mid-June, even as the east coast baked under a scorching sun, China’s western interior was welcoming its annual Plum Rains —the seasonal monsoon. It came not as expected. Torrential downpours lashed northern Hunan Province, particularly the Xiangxi and Zhangjiajie regions. Rivers swelled beyond historical records.

When we speak of China’s historical records, we are in a whole different league than with the records of weather services in Western nations. We are not speaking of centuries, but of millennia. In 2025, water inundated homes and businesses, with at least three people losing their lives in Zhangjiajie when an underground parking garage flooded rapidly. Over 400,000 residents were affected and nearly 95,000 displaced as landslides and floodwaters swept through in mid-June.

Days passed. The rains intensified and moved westward. Guizhou Province’s Rongjiang County was next to face disaster. Between June 20 and June 29, two waves of torrential rain battered the area. The first wave peaked on June 21, driving the Duliu River to its highest level since records began in 1954. The second surge struck on June 28, submerging the county’s town center and local landmarks—the Changchi Plaza and the “Village Super League” football field—under meters of water. More than 120,000 people were evacuated and six lives were lost as mud blanketed the streets and cars piled atop one another.

By late June, intense monsoon rains combined with a tropical depression that made landfall on Hainan Island, then swept inland toward Guangdong and Guangxi. Rivers overflowed, landslides tore through hillsides, and entire buildings collapsed as waterlogged soil gave way. In Guangxi, a five-story building under construction crumbled into the Lengshui River.

The disaster’s reach then extended north and west. By early July, the rains had marched from Sichuan through Gansu and up to Liaoning, prompting red alerts and mass mobilization of emergency personnel. In Henan’s Taiping town, a river burst its banks, killing five and leaving three missing.

On July 3, Chengdu experienced an intense rainstorm — more than 170 mm (6.7 inches) within a few hours — that led to catastrophic flooding. Water levels in streets reached knee to waist height. Some residents deployed kayaks. At Chengdu East Railway Station, passengers had to wade from their trains. The subway system flooded. Bridges over the Mang River tributary were overtopped and collapsed, isolating some. Early reports are that at least 150 people were killed and more than 500 injured, but rescue and evacuation efforts are still underway, complicated by ongoing poor weather.

Permaculture to the Rescue

In order to understand how the Mongolian Plateau affected the North China region hundreds of kilometers away, researchers utilized their developed integrated Atmospheric Model Across Scales (iAMAS) model. Together with the support of China’s new Sunway supercomputer, researchers precisely simulated and reproduced the extreme rainfall process. The simulation results were highly consistent with actual observations in terms of rainfall distribution, intensity, and spatiotemporal evolution.

The rapid warming of the air (middle atmosphere) over the Mongolian Plateau acted like a "heater", promoting the formation of an abnormally strong and stable high-pressure system in the region. The air had developed and connected with the Western North Pacific Subtropical High. In the end, a high-pressure system over the North China region was formed.

The system hindered the remnant circulation of the Doksuri carrying water vapor from continuing its northward or eastward journey, trapping it for a long time in the region in front of the Taihang Mountains in North China.

The intercepted water vapor, under the continuous uplift effect of the Taihang Mountains terrain, was forced to converge and rise, leading to rainfall being concentrated and poured in a narrow area for a long time, ultimately resulting in a record-breaking extreme rainstorm disaster.

—University of Science and Technology of China, “Earth System Numerical Simulation Facility” (EarthLab). The study used computing resources from the Supercomputing Center of the USTC and the Qingdao Supercomputing and Big Data Center, employing the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) for high-quality ERA5 data. Copernicus will soon be discontinued under DOGE and the Beautiful Big Bill Act of 2025.

An aerial drone photo taken on July 4, 2025 shows a view of Dujiangyan irrigation system in southwest China's Sichuan Province on the Minjiang River. This is at the flood peak on Friday. (Photo by He Bo/Xinhua)

The first drone shots of Dujiangyan show the Fish’s Mouth still working, although at this time of year the flood gates might normally have been closed to favor the side channels and the ancient irrigation system. Instead, they were opened wide. That allowed the central, deeper channel to bear the destructive force of the Jin. While doubtless many farms were flooded (7 inches of rain in a few hours!), the 2400-year-old earthworks functioned just as Zhao and Bing had envisaged they would.

Old Dujiangyan market plaza was spared by 2000-year-old earthworks.

 

When the floodwaters came, they rushed to the two sides of the Fish’s Mouth. The valley side led to a shallow delta of irrigated rice paddies while the center channel, gouged deep into bedrock, captured the cresting wave and diverted it downriver. While Chengdu city was unable to absorb that much, — no city is prepared for that much rain — many Sichuan farms were saved by clever planning and public works two thousand years before.

If you enjoy Sichuan cuisine, you may have Zhao and Bing to thank.]

 

 

Meanwhile, let’s end these wars. We support peace in the West Bank and Gaza and the efforts to cease the war in Ukraine immediately. Global Village Institute’s Peace Thru Permaculture initiative has sponsored the Green Kibbutz network in Israel and the Marda Permaculture Farm in the West Bank for over 30 years. It will continue to do so with your assistance. We aid Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture farms along the Green Road and work to heal collective trauma everywhere through the Pocket Project. You can read about it on the Global Village Institute website (GVIx.org). Thank you for your support.

And speaking of resettling refugees, did you know? A study by Poland’s National Development Bank found that the influx of Ukrainians added between 0.5% and 2.5% to GDP growth and paid more in taxes than they received in benefits.

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#RestorationGeneration.

When humans are locked in a cage, the Earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is that human beings are not necessary. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.

We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.

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