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Kudos to all involved but the sub-headline to The
Guardian article continues to perpetuate one of the great intellectual
environmental fallacies of our age when it says, “Rivers are especially
vulnerable to water abstraction and global heating, but now there is
hope for River Chess”. The underlining is mine. Why?
Well, as John Lennon did not sing, imagine an England
without climate change. Would our chalkstreams miraculously recover? Would
abstraction suddenly end? Would sewage pumping cease to be a problem? Would
farmers stop farming? Would politicians end the building of houses (1m in
the past 20 years) on floodplains?
Now, I’m no climate change denier – we are daily trashing
our planet in a bold bid for human oblivion – but to use a global problem
as an excuse for locally sourced destruction is delusional. We have all the
water we need; the rainfall total for 2021 will be much the same as it was
for 1921 which was much the same as in 1821. It is not the climate it is
us! The problem is we treat the water we have with disdain. We don’t
preserve it, use it wisely or care for its purity.
Of course, the counter argument to this is that our weather
is more unpredictable. We have the right rain but increasingly at the wrong
times. Or so it is said. But as I have quoted to you in this column before
this is far from new news. Rider Haggard, he of King Solomon’s Mines
fame, became a farmer in the later years of his Victorian life, bewailing
in his chronicle wet summers and dry winters all in sage agreement with his
Norfolk neighbours in that the climate was irreversibly changing.
I don’t know why it is but for some reason there seems to be
an expectation that British weather should behave as if directed by some
super algorithm that will provide all the weather, at all the times exactly
as we wish it to be. I have this strange paperback book I unearthed when
clearing out the house of my late mother. It is not so old, 1993, but it
charts the freak weather of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight dating back to
1600. I will not bore you with all the events, pretty well at least one for
each decade of the past five centuries, but here are a few highlights:
·
1600’s It rained every day on the Isle of Wight in August
1648 ruining the harvest. In 1684 Southampton Water froze over.
·
1700’s In 1703 a tempest in the Solent claimed 8,000 lives.
Naturalist Gilbert White recorded the coldest ever day in 1776.
·
1800’s A tornado struck Portsmouth in 1810. In 1859 a
severe, and unexpected October frost, caused the mangolds, turnips and swedes
to rot and decay. Southampton recorded an earthquake in 1878.
·
1900’s 22 inches of snow fell in a single day in north
Hampshire in 1908. In 1929, generally considered a freakish year,
after 136 consecutive days without rain the Water Board implemented a
hosepipe ban for gardens and motor cars. Sound familiar?
I could go on (and on, and on the book runs to 167 pages ……)
but you are getting the idea. And remember, this is just one relatively
weather benign southern county of England.
The truth is, as has been similarly said in the breakdown of
many a relationship: it is not you Mother Nature, it is me.
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