11. Rivers and How They Flow
If we understood the importance of water both for the environment
and for life, we would nurture and protect our rivers, which are the
great arteries of the Earth. Healthy streams and rivers are water at
its most active, powerful and playful. In our ignorance of how water
needs to move, we restrict rivers with embankments and other
unnatural constructions. We treat rivers as sewers for waste, and we
extract the energy and spirit from their form.
For scores of thousands of years, since people started to settle on
the land, our forebears were aware that their prosperity depended
on the river. Soils are quickly depleted of their nutrients by agricul-
ture, particularly if intensive. Remineralization by regular flooding
of the river was vital to obtaining good crops. This allowed the great
civilizations to grow and flourish, in Mesopotamia, the valleys of the
Nile, the Yellow River and the Indus, to name a few.
Today's technocrats have a need to control this apparently
chaotic behaviour of the natural river, by steering the flow, some-
times behind high banks, and disregarding the ecosystem, to the
great loss of fertility of the surrounding fields. Modern artificial fer-
tilization (NPK — nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) cannot
take the place of Nature's remineralization; in fact it often causes
great problems through creating imbalances and pollution.Stages of a river
A river has three stages of life. Its youthful stage energizes the water
as the steep landscape puts it through vigorous tumbling, spinning
and intense vortical movements. The immature cold water is hun-
gry, taking up minerals as it scours the rock, cutting gullies and
steepening the sides of the valley, more especially when it is in spate.
It is oxygenated in rapids and waterfalls. It is put through exercises
that it will use well when it matures.
When the stream leaves the steep country, the flow slows, and
some of the heavier rock matter it carried in suspension is
deposited, to be picked up again when the flow accelerates. The
water is now mature, having absorbed minerals and generative
- RIVERS AND HOW THEY FLOW