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Let green water cycle and rivers flow all summer
My family and friends used to paddle down the Ipswich River. We’d load up canoes, pull in hands and feet, put paddles out, to follow watery bends and turns down the river. In May, high water carried us over river banks, through trees and out onto flooded fields by the Topsfield fairgrounds. We floated outside the river in hopes of seeing glossy ibis wading the shallow greens and peppering the sky.
Come summer, river water stayed within its bounds. Exposed dirt banks rose up with protruding woody roots that presented roosts for belted kingfishers. The river became a trickle where canoes had to be walked over gravel bottoms. And then there was no water at all in the Ipswich River. The shocking surprise of no water, a dry river, has become over the summers the new normal.
The weather was blamed for less rain and more hot days. Today, blame is hung on the rise of greenhouse gasses and Dave Keeling’s hockey stick graph from Hawaii of increasing carbon dioxide confirming global warming induced climate change. Once we blamed the gods for the weather. Now we blame the combustion of fossil fuels as the number one obstacle to surmount to solve our problems.
The Ipswich River running dry, however, indicated changes afoot in how we treat the land, not the air. Pastures and forests have been turned into house lots. Before…
