Eight beavers solved a flooding problem in the London Tube

 

Courtesy of elli60, free photo

Since the nineteen seventies, there had been a problem with flooding in the London Tube in the Ealing area and the neighborhoods around it.  Nothing the City did worked to stop it.  But in 2023, the city introduced five beavers to Paradise Fields, which this year had eight beavers.  There was no flooding problem in the Tube or the neighborhoods this year even though there were torrential rains.  The dams and wetlands the beavers created held the water.

We have had occasional flooding in the Southwest part of our city on the South side of the Rogue River.  Public Works Director Jason Canady told me that they are staying on top of it, but he is intrigued with the idea.

It might take longer than in London; we might have to buy land near the Redwood Highway or Redwood Avenue and plant a lot of fast-growing willows, poplars and big-leaf maples.  But our river will be cleaner once the dams are built and the chances of flooding will be greatly reduced.  We don’t even need to go far for beavers, as they live in our river and make their homes in its banks.

2-minute speech to Grants Pass City Council, 6/17/26

 published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com.

Posted on Facebook, Nextdoor and X.com

 

 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener          541-955-9040              rycke@gardener.com

Apologies for the center alingment; Blogger gets stubborn about correcting it.

Anonymous Prophets of Drought

 

When people can't afford to water their yards, they often neglect to cut their weeds.  Grants Pass depends on citizens to report property neglect, but few do so.  We had two decades of drought until the eruption of Hunga Tonga, an underwater volcano in the South Pacific, blew its top on January 15th, 2022, sending 150 million tons of seawater into the stratosphere, though the flooding of California and other places started in September of that year, and continued through winter and spring.  Fall to late spring rain and flooding around the globe are expected to continue for another two years.

In 1986 in Grants Pass, we were told that we would be in drought that year, so “Don’t water your lawns or wash your cars.”  We had 103 days without rain that year, 97 days the next.

 In 1986, we first started hearing a new meme in the media: “Fresh water is a scarce and precious resource!  Only 2 percent of the water on earth is fresh water, and it must be conserved!”

 Interestingly, no one stepped up to write a book about it like Bill McKibben did about carbon dioxide and global warming.  This was because the movement to ration our water by rates, the way electricity and natural gas have been rate-rationed for over 50 years, required rationing of water to provide evidence for global warming.  

Water vapor is the most abundant and powerful greenhouse gas, but it also cools and thus moderates temperatures.  Their push to tax carbon dioxide has always been noisy; rate-rationing of water has been very quiet.

Building water treatment plants allowed cities to bring clean water to every building and fire hydrant, protecting both the cities and the surrounding countryside from wildfires, using irrigation and evaporation. 

But rate-rationing of city water has stopped our rain, because not enough people are watering.  Please bring back the rate system that will give us cheap water to use again.

                                            1-7-2026 2-minute Speech to Grants Pass City Council

Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com and shared on Facebook, Nextdoor, and X

Like Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook

 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener      541-955-9040           rycke@gardener.com