Rusty Cohn of Napa alerted me to an interesting interview with Erica Gies in KQED last night. It was all about finding the ancient prehistoic waterbeds that used to flood the central valley and solve California’s rain problem year after year. I was particularly struck by this quote:

Yes, she really said that. And no she didn’t once mention the water-slowing magician we’ve all come to know and love a single solitary time during the interview or in the glossy article ran in Bay Nature that prompted it. Gee. It’s almost like they are blinded by some kind of century-shifting expectation of nature based on the fur trade that left us totally crippled.

That idea goes something like this: Modern societies control water, often speeding it off the land, reducing the time it spends in wetlands, floodplains and other slow-phase ecosystems.

“That creates all kinds of problems,” Gies told KQED’s Brian Watt. “We build cities on those wetlands and then they flood because the water still wants to go there.”

You know how it is. Like the city of Martinez that filled  in the wetlands north of the train tracks with soil years ago so the could extend their reach a little more. The part that still floods every year. You know. The part where the beavers moved in.

What do you want people to know about water?

If the world doesn’t reduce carbon emissions, which of course we need to do, we can still improve our drought and flooding situations locally by making space for slow water. These water detectives are advocating for an un-engineering that allows space for our water to slow on the land. There are a lot of ways that we can do that within our existing human habitat. And that’s what my book is about.

Gee do you think the word beaver appears in your book a single time from cover to cover? I’m holding my breath. Literally.

Capturing the Flood in California’s Ancient Underground Waterways

Long buried riverbeds can move and absorb excess stormwater, storing it for future droughts.

Fogg has a long-held dream: to find more of these paleo valleys and use them to replenish groundwater, depleted by our overpumping. When today’s heavier winter storms have filled up reservoirs, we could move the excess stormwaters that would otherwise flood homes and businesses atop these paleo valleys, using them as giant storm drains. The water would be absorbed quickly underground into the paleo valley, then seep more slowly into the surrounding clays. Using the paleo valleys for stormwater management would help to heal the hydrological cycle; it would refill groundwater, raise the water table, make surface flows stronger and healthier, and allow people to continue to pump water from wells.

What drives him still is his belief that a better understanding of water’s relationship with buried geology will mean these natural systems can both protect human habitat from flooding and sock away big water reserves to help us survive today’s longer droughts. For decades, as Fogg was putting out the call to find more paleo valleys, few people were listening. But lately, that’s beginning to change.

Silly silly me. The answer isn’t in allow thousands if beaver families to create millions of dams across the state that can slow our rain and flooding every single day for free. The answer is to hunt for these giant paleo rivers with expensive equipment and find funding to suck up their nutrients to sprinkle over our drying landscape.

That should do the trick.

Although the sense of water scarcity is often palpable in California, in fact there is enough unmanaged surface water statewide to resupply Central Valley aquifers, according to a 2017 study. The state’s big engineered canals and aqueducts that start up north (where most of the rain falls) and fill irrigation systems in the south are underused in winter when fewer growers need to irrigate, so they could be used to transport excess winter stormwater to depleted aquifers.