Here is an extract from an article by George Monbiot covering the issues involved in the current flooding situation here in the UK Drowning in Money
"The story begins with a group of visionary farmers at Pontbren, in the headwaters of Britain’s longest river, the Severn. In the 1990s they realised that the usual hill farming strategy – loading the land with more and bigger sheep, grubbing up the trees and hedges, digging more drains – wasn’t working. It made no economic sense, the animals had nowhere to shelter, the farmers were breaking their backs to wreck their own land.
So they devised something beautiful. They began planting shelter belts of trees along the contours. They stopped draining the wettest ground and built ponds to catch the water instead. They cut and chipped some of the wood they grew to make bedding for their animals, which meant that they no longer spent a fortune buying straw. Then they used the composted bedding, in a perfect closed loop, to cultivate more trees(3).
One day a government consultant was walking over their fields during a rainstorm. He noticed something that fascinated him: the water flashing off the land suddenly disappeared when it reached the belts of trees the farmers had planted. This prompted a major research programme, which produced the following astonishing results: water sinks into the soil under the trees at 67 times the rate at which it sinks into the soil under the grass(4). The roots of the trees provide channels down which the water flows, deep into the ground."
Do go over to George Monbiot's website and read the whole article: Drowning in Money,
or if you prefer you can read the article in the Guardian: Drowning in Money: the untold story of the crazy public spending that makes flooding inevitable
Image: © Copyright John Chroston and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.
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