Floodwater that was as troubling as it was lovely, seen around the area of Lussier County Park, Sauk City, WI. Many entrances and roads around the park were closed due to worse flooding, even though the recent rain wasn’t overly heavy. This particular road was blocked off with concrete barricades, implying that the flood issue was recurring and without an upcoming solution.
This encroaching floodwater may simply be attributed to the wetland area being naturally prone to flooding, but what I see is man’s heavy handed and short-sighted imposition on nature, and the insulting effort to mitigate resulting problems. The road has been rendered useless by perpetual flooding, and the solution is a no parking sign for cars that do happen to cross. The wastefulness of the road’s creation and “maintenance” is an affront to logic and practicality. From a sustainability standpoint, the road has doubly maimed the land – once with its existence, and again with its uselessness.
All this brings to mind the constant wildfires and sustained drought on the US west coast, the intensifying storms in the US midwest (one of which happened several weeks ago at the time of writing and even affected my old college town), southwest, and east coast, and the extreme weather around the world. Drought, flooding, deadly storms, and communal displacement, all of which are under-reported or left untold. The most that average Americans seem to hear is the local news meteorologist brightly stating the new record broken: new heat records, new drought records, new sudden rainfall records, and the term “unseasonable weather” repeated again and again.
A cursory search for “weather record” at my hometown local news site shows this:
- https://www.fox32chicago.com/weather/friday-brings-another-day-of-single-digit-temps-brutal-wind-chills (the article states early on that this is the first such occurrence in nearly a year)
- https://www.fox32chicago.com/weather/4-inches-of-overnight-rain-in-chicago-area-sets-record-weather-service
- https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/warm-weather-sets-record-friday-at-ohare
- https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/chicago-breaks-a-warm-weather-record-for-the-third-day-in-a-row
- https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/warm-chicago-weather-breaks-121-year-old-record
And what is our response to this? Some US cities and states offer promising efforts like New York City moving to ban natural gas in new buildings, Colorado aiming to improve weatherization in poor community construction, and California eventually looking to ban fracking. Global leaders, however, nearly derailed the 2021 U.N. Climate Summit with coal concessions, and the climate efforts of Biden’s Build Back Better plan were opposed by single legislators and their bad-faith arguments. We bikeshed when real action is needed, and mire ourselves with agendas that may be reversed, fruitless planning, and accommodating detrimental or outright sabotaging parties.
Ultimately, the narrative will pressure everyday people to pick up the slack. Adjusting one’s lifestyle to be more sustainable and have a smaller carbon footprint is an admirable endeavor and much-needed contribution, but it is infuriating that the middle class and poor have to tighten the belt once more while monied interests and those with the power to affect large-scale change do nothing. Will their offspring somehow not be affected by their inaction and indecision?
I fear that a time will come where those with the greatest ability to enact change will have no choice but to take action, but by then it will be as effective as the road sign above.
Mamiya RB 67 Pro-S
Mamiya 50mm f/4.5 C
Ilford Delta – ISO 100 – 6×7