Reality Cheques 29capture nutrients that run off fields, provide flood protection and are important
cultural features of the landscape.
Donald Worster describes growing up within 30 metres of the already tamed
Cow Creek in Kansas: ‘we could not see it from our windows; we could only see
the levee’. In the 19th century, as the town had expanded by the river, and the early
settlers converted land to wheat cultivation, so the normal and regular flooding of
the river started to cause considerable economic damage. Episodes of flooding and
continued expenditure on flood protection continued for decades, until a major flood
in 1941 finally led the Army Corps of Engineers to construct a series of 4-metre-
high levees: ‘now at long last the good Kansas folk, having vanquished the Indians
and the bison and the sandhill cranes and the antelope, had managed to vanquish
Cow Creek. Abruptly, it disappeared from their lives.’ This is the alarming part.
When valued landscape features have gone, or have been replaced, the everyday expe-
riences of local people will steadily erode old memories. The young will not know,
while the old will be troubled, until they pass on too.^22 Meanwhile, we all lose.
In Europe, river valleys used to contain many water meadows, fields likely to
be flooded by overflowing rivers, and so used productively to produce a late winter
or early spring crop of grass. More importantly, when the river did flood, water was
stored on the meadows, and did not harm housing or other vulnerable areas. But
in the drive towards intensification of food production, most of these meadows
have been converted to arable fields. At the same time, rivers have been tamed
through channelling, field sizes increased, hedgerows removed, and houses built
on vulnerable land. Now, when it rains, the consequence is increased flooding to
vulnerable areas. It looks as though there has been ‘too much’ rain, but in truth it
is largely due to changes in the landscape.
In Germany, Rienk van der Ploeg and colleagues have correlated loss of mead-
ows with an increased incidence of inland floods, with 6 of the 12 most extreme
events over a century having occurred since 1983. They show that changes in the
diversity of use of agricultural land are the main cause. In particular, permanent
meadows have been converted to arable fields, some 1½ million hectares since the
mid-1960s, which because of surface sealing and compaction are less likely to hold
water during winter. Another 4½ million hectares of wetland soils have been
drained since the 1940s. Thus when it rains, water contributes more rapidly to
river water discharge, so increasing the likelihood of flooding. The cost of two
floods in 1993 and 1995 were nearly DM2 billion, and van der Ploeg concludes
that the conversion of arable back to permanent meadows would be economically
and environmentally beneficial: ‘it must be acknowledged that any further increase
in agricultural productivity is likely to cause additional adverse environmental
effects. Future farm policy must pay more attention to the environment’.^23
Japan provides another example of the wider value of agricultural wetlands, in
this case irrigated paddy rice fields. Japan’s very high rainfall is concentrated into a
few months on a landscape characterized by a high mountain chain. With a very
short flow time to the sea, this means that much of the country is subject to severe
flood risk. Paddy rice farming, though, provides an important sink for this water.