Take me to the river

Recently I read The Guardian coverage of the new river (Rio Nuevo) in Argentina.  The title of the article implied that Nature was taking command after years of human mismanagement.  It is certainly the case that this new river is a consequence of human activity.

After reading I found myself on the beach in Carbis Bay, Cornwall.  A stream terminates on this beach creating a channel through the sand as the tide lowers, and a beautiful delta system emerges.  It would be a tremendous place to teach physical geography students about meanders, and the pulsing wash out across the flat, gently sloped beach.  The educational possibilities of this stream are not lost on countless parents and their children, all busy reengineering the stream through dams, canals and obstacles to change speed and direction of flow.  Many take a great interest in the downstream effects of an upstream intervention.  For example, a slight deviation in flow thanks to a placed rock can see the cliff edges several metres down the stream side crack, cleave away and collapse.  The new stream creates new geography, albeit at a much smaller scale to the Rio Nuevo.

My family are not immune to the draw of this stream and we spend much time there playing and engineering.  We are early risers and often find ourselves on the beach before others.  We take a spot along the stream and begin our adventures in fluid dynamics.  But soon enough other families arrive and also begin to engage with the stream.  Multiple families find themselves dispersed along this linear feature; and this introduces a form of competition.  Those families downstream of a new arrival will often find their hard-won sand works washed away by a tidal surge caused by the newcomer's zeal for territorial development.

I have never seen a discussion arise as a result of such destruction.  No one gets visibly angry, although disappointment briefly washes across some faces. Most often people seem resilient and attempt to rebuild after the flood.  This often becomes a Sisyphean labour and I wonder about the existential lessons beach dwellers are taking in their daily grind at the stream side.  But more generally I marvel at the persistence and the urge to conquer Nature even in her response to other anthropogenic systems.  Surely there are some lessons here, not dissimilar to the ones noted by The Guardian?

Stepping back from the scene today I also realized that there were lessons for human cooperation.  If all of the families on the beach met and coordinated their actions they could build a mighty construction that met multiple interests.  If they stopped to look at the consequences of their actions on their near neighbours, or considered talking with the new upstream residents, less time and energy would be wasted.  They might also come up with systems to allocate limited resources such as spades, stones and boulders, needed for construction.  I can imagine Lin Ostrom sat on a deck chair gently guiding emergent structures of governance.

But all of that coordination will amount to nothing after the tide rises and reorganizes the entire beach.  And eventually the sea defences will be defeated by rising sea levels and the cliffs that bound this beach will vanish.  To resolve those problems we must look to cooperation between all inhabitants of the planet.  But whilst this must be imposed by legislation at international and national levels, its bite will be far more effective if people are exposed to the small scale lessons of rapid environmental change as a consequence of human action.

In many senses this has been a reflection on modelling.  Models are simplifications of more complex systems, and good models remove noise in order to gain a clarity that provides a general theoretical framework and the capacity to build specific hypotheses across multiple situations.  It would be wonderful to find a way to present data on the changing stream and the points of human action to visitors to Carbis Bay: take everyone to the river.   People see the stream change in the moment, but I doubt they stand back and regard all of the actions along its extent, let alone fully connect the causal chain of human agency.