Gnamma a little bit early this week as I will be offline this weekend.
I finally finished Mark Reisner's seminal
Cadillac Desert, which I'd been slogging through all Summer. It's a now-outdated (1986) political and physical history of water management in the American West, and sits on the shelf of most hydrologists I know (whether or not they've read it). It's thorough and, at times, lively, but dense and repetitive. Reisner's history is a biting portrait of the hubris, greed, and short-sightedness of many water projects in the West, but he also acknowledges that some of the water projects are the necessary
lifeblood of large cities in California south of Humboldt.
The final chapter of
Cadillac Desert ends with an scornful quote from Raphael Kazmann's
Modern Hydrology:
[T]he reservoir construction program, objectively considered, is really a program for the continued and endless expenditure of ever-increasing sums of public money to combat the effects of geologic forces, as these forces strive to reach positions of relative equilibrium in the regime of rivers and the flow of water. It may be that future research in the field of modern hydrology will be primarily to find a method of extricating ourselves from this unequal struggle with the minimum loss to the nation.... The forces involved... are comparable to those met by a boy who builds a castle on the sandy ocean beach, next to the water, at low tide....[I]t is not pessimism, merely an objective evaluation, to predict the destruction of the castle....
What struck me most about this passage is the sense of combat between "geologic forces" and human construction. An earlier newsletter touched on the nature of
building objects with geologic lifespans. Sometimes this feels like battle of endurance—human-made structures trying to weather natural conditions for millennia. Can it be more of a
dance? Where it's less about the preservation of fixed entities (a sculptural mode) and more about continuous, unfolding processes (a "performance art" mode, perhaps)? The difficulty often comes in embracing destruction when it is necessary—cultural mechanisms that embrace end-times feel few and far-between to me. In mostly-unstated ways, Reisner's book encourages the abandonment of some of the Western water systems due to the economic and ecologic havoc they drive. (More to say, some other time, on the first large-scale dam removals now happening on the West coast.) Geology (and meteorology and more) have made
certain places extremely fertile for civilization but, at some point, these global-scale dynamics will move on, and we should keep moving, too.
It's hard to find good examples of large-scale projects that encapsulate what I'm looking for; the conditions are probably unique to the affordances of any geographic location. I don't want to perpetuate the Dutch hegemony on hydraulic engineering, but the
Sand Engine (out of the
Building with Nature initiative) is one example in the right direction: accounting for natural oceanography and sediment flows in the area to encourage the local beach system to self-manage towards some preferable state. At some point, over a long time, components of the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt delta will shift, and the whole project will need to be adjusted, or abandoned, for the dance to continue.
FWIW I highly recommend Manaugh's
writing on the subject, or
this essay by Gacnik. I haven't read Lippard's essay on stones (yet!!!) but I think working with local stone is a manifest way to
practice geography on a geologic timescale.
Following the fault,
Lukas