Thinking like a Creek
"What is the sound of one rock?"
When I was much younger, I worked for the Appellate Division in the New York City court system. We were tasked by Mayor John Lindsay with bringing the city jail, known affectionately as The Tombs, into compliance with a court order requiring a significant population reduction, among other things. Conditions in the jail were abysmal. Prisoners were herded into standing-room-only cells in ankle-deep water. As I wrote here in 2023, “I saw the rain coming from the ceilings and how some corridors would become ‘trails to the wading place.’”
For 200 years, the city had been trying to engineer its way out of that situation without any attempt to ask what the water wanted. The jail was constructed on an infilled swamp, formerly a sparkling-clear body of water in the middle of Manhattan Island. When it was a 48-acre, 18-meter-deep lake, it had supplied the Munsee villages with fish, beaver and turtles. A stream flowed north, then west, through a salt marsh into the Hudson. Another stream issued from the south toward the East River. The spring-fed lake was so large that John Fitch and Robert Fulton used it to test the world’s first steam-powered paddlewheel boat in 1796. Absent environmental regulation, it was terribly polluted, so it was drained in 1811, and the Tombs were built in 1828, initially on a platform of hemlock logs. The snake and mosquito-ridden swamp was deemed an ideal location for a jail, or maybe a leper’s colony.
In Permaculture, we like to say the best designs are aikido, not karate. Stress is caused when humans and nature collide. Harmony is restored when humans adapt to nature’s way. Water is the easiest communicator of that way. It is also the most easily offended when you don’t pause and listen to what it is telling you.
In an era of seemingly intractable climate change, this is agency.
I have no doubt that the pond in Manhattan is still telling the city engineers what needs to be done to set things right. Mostly, it would like to regain its freedom, a sentiment shared by most of those in The Tombs.
Hopi Rainkeepers
Did you know that, in an era of extreme weather, we can harness the regenerative power of floods to rebuild soils, reforest floodplains and repair gullied stream channels? It does not take a Corps of Engineers or a billion-dollar budget. You can do it just by picking up a rock or two.
In 2016, while at the COP22 Climate Summit in Marrakech, I had the opportunity to travel to the edge of the Agafay Desert with ecosystem regeneration visionary and filmmaker John D. Liu. There, we visited the glampsite of Terre des Etoiles and worked alongside Hopi Rainkeepers to build stone check dams in desert wadis. Behind the check dams, where the Hopi knew the soil would accrete when it rained, we planted tree saplings that Terre des Etoiles founders knew from their studies would withstand the harsh conditions and eventually reestablish a Mediterranean forest, holding carbon and pushing back the desert.
After documenting China’s progress in restoring the native ecology of the Loess Plateau, Liu concluded that ecosystem regeneration is our only possible future. Solving the climate dilemma is not about flying halfway around the world to attend a conference, listening to presentations, drawing up mind maps on a whiteboard, photographing progress and writing a report. It is about growing biomass, building soil, and restoring healthy, healing ecosystems.
More importantly, Liu grasped the potential of youth as the principal agents of the great change that has to happen. After all, those born before 1980 lucked out. They’ll be dead of natural causes, if nothing else, before the real climate catastrophe takes hold (if they are lucky). Anyone younger than that is going to get a stern taste of the Anthropocene. Those kids are already starting to realize they have the most to lose.
The Hopi Rainkeepers’ techniques were remarkably simple. I recall the time my late brother-in-law, a cattle rancher who backpacked supplies to firefighters, told me that, while walking a mountain trail with a team of Native American packers, he noticed his hiking companions had a habit of kicking stones.
As they walked the trail, a lead packer would kick a stone from the trail into a low gully as he passed over it. The next would do the same, and the others as well, until the stones that collected in that depression after the hikers had passed formed a low check dam. They weren’t talking about it or describing what they were doing. It was just what their parents had taught them to do, and their parents’ parents before that.
Zeedyk’s Dikes
William (‘Bill’) D. Zeedyk was born in 1935 to New Jersey school teachers and by the age of 14 had decided he wanted to be a forester. He had a 34-year-long career with the US Forest Service, in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Delaware, West Virginia, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. After he happened upon a North Carolina road maintenance technique called ‘the rolling dip,’ a mild diversion in a mountain road that shed water without slowing traffic, Zeedyk started building them in the 1960’s. Many are still there.
Only one stone deep, the dams do not impede the flow of water during heavy, erosive rain events. They allow water to pass over the top. The rock slows the flow just enough that the dirt eroded from above is deposited, filling in around the rocks. After a few such events, you don’t see the stones. Then the process can be repeated, gradually raising a terrace that backfills the gully. Eventually it will sustain shrubs, then trees. The desert greens. Carbon flows back into the earth.
In an era of seemingly intractable climate change, this is agency.
Ecosystem Restoration Communities have by now recruited youth from over 75 countries to move stones, working shoulder to shoulder in the days and playing guitars around the campfire at night. Just like our small group that left the climate conference to join the Hopi Rainkeepers, they are moving rocks and planting trees. As they sip their coffee, they save the world.
A footnote: Last week I reported on the bioregional congress meeting here in Tennessee. In that report, I relayed what we had been told—that bioregionalism was declining in many regions. That was false. In comments to that post, I was reliably informed that both the Kansas Area Watershed and the Ozark Council are doing just fine, thank you. This is a great relief. We need that!
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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 rather than 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.
Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion.
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