Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

If you ever have a friend or family member who is trying to get around wetland conservation laws, they are contributing to the shrinking of our river systems.

Water retention capacity in upper watersheds directly contribute to average river flow, which is very easy to show by the behavior of streams. Deserts are self-reinforcing systems where the heat pushes clouds up or away from them. Wet, cool forests draw in more precipitation in. We don't really understand the processes yet, but we do know it's not a zero sum game of delaying (or 'stealing') water versus total system flow. This is most easily demonstrated for watersheds on the windward sides of mountains, due to snow pack, but forests and microbes both fiddle around with cloud cover in general.

As for restoring watersheds, we systematically removed the engineers that created the lush river systems of the US and Canada, namely the beaver, which once numbered at somewhere between 60 and 300 million animals in North America. We blame long term changes in rain patterns for the reduced river flow, but I strongly suspect that is the '3 Whys' trap of the Five Whys Process.

It's painful how widespread this notion of 'nature steals precious water' is, and how quickly the practical implications of such a mindset leads to further destruction.

The municipality where I live have an annual cycle of doing things like:

  * Scraping away every fallen leaf to be burned
  * Removing all twigs, branches and dead wood
  * Burning or spraying down all weeds
  * Cutting the grass, even in places no one walks
  * Aggressively cutting down bushes

Every year the soil gets drier, compacts and washes away when rainfall comes in the spring and turns our parks into giant mudslides.

Next year they spend hundreds of thousands trying to replant and reseed, only to lose it again in the words of 'maintenance'.

Meanwhile, our smaller community decided to do the complete opposite:

  * Faux-compost everything (grass cuttings, leaves, twigs, weeds) by literally just throwing it into a pile and forgetting about it
  * Mulch everything with said compost
  * Let (non-invasive) weeds take over areas that were previously barren
  * Not trim down bushes before winter

In nearly two seasons now, we've gone from watching a slow depressing death of what used to be a wonderful garden before the droughts started in ~2018, to a garden that is even more impressive and seems to grow stronger every year. We now have more birds than ever, as insects have started to bounce back.

We're doing 1/10th of the work as our neighboring communities, and we're getting as good if not better results.

I wish more people approached gardening/landscaping with this water-harvesting, nature mimicking way. It's cheap, takes extremely little resources and demonstrates how incredibly strong an ecosystem can be if you just work with it rather than against it, even on a small scale.

The absolute amount of effort we spend fighting nature instead of just guiding and living with it is frightening.

Illusion of Control. We need group therapy and nobody who has successfully accomplished that at such scales has any formal training in the subject.

If you don't manage it (fight it) you get the buried and re-discovered pyramids of southern Mexico (and Cambodia). Yes, there is a balance, however, the other extreme is also not viable for habitation.

Yea but we're so far on the extreme of slash and burn and pouring chemicals on lawns that it's not even worth considering at this point concerns of habitation. It's just not even on the radar in terms of things that we need to bother caring about for the foreseeable future (100+ years minimum).

I agree that we can find better solutions than what lawns provide, however, weeds, nature and plants will take over an unmanaged property pretty quickly... maybe 20 years. In 100 places are near unrecognizable. The abandoned areas of Detroit did not take 100 years to become overtaken by nature. And that's a continental climate. In Tropical climates the rate will be quicker.

Sure, but in the context of this discussion unmanaged property simply isn't an issue, in my view. It's too much management that's causing problems.

OP is thinking of protecting property value

Pouring chemicals? Maybe a few do but I only apply one application of pre-emergent a year and then one application of fertilizer in the fall. That's not really pouring chemicals. In fact nature seems to thrive in our lawn.

From my time in the suburbs, people spray weed killer and similar chemicals throughout the spring and summer and into the fall. Of course each individual is different. We never sprayed and just let them grow and mowed them down and then pulled them out of flower beds.

You can also verify that these are used extensively by looking at the number of products sold for this purpose at national hardware retailers.

But this is just one issue among many. Lawns are de facto desert areas.

There are so many products because people are ignorant and just want an easy fix. It's pure laziness and has nothing to do with having a healthy lawn. There's a lot of money in laziness :)

A healthy lawn really doesn't require that much from a chemical standpoint, but it take effort to figure out what it needs and you have to do things at the right time. In fact, the healthier the lawn the less weed killers you need because a thick lawn is a poor environment for weeds.

Lots of people blanket apply fertilizers too. But in reality a quick test of the soil can tell you exactly what is out of balance and if you need that fertilizer application at all.

I definitely agree with you there, but even a healthy lawn is still a lawn, which is still a bit of a problem. Outside of insects in the ground not much can live there. You need a variety of bushes, trees, herbs, flowers, and other types of plants to create a healthy ecosystem there. A lawn simply can't provide that.

that’s the historical point of a lawn. no one wants pests near their home.

Yea but now we can see the ecological impact of tens (hundreds?) of millions of people doing that and it doesn’t work.

Those few though in total mean your city is pouring more chemicals on per unit area that farmers who "pour chemical" on every acre. Of course farmers are talking about thousands of acres and so chemical prices add up, while the individual is only talking about 1/10th an acre or less, so the costs add up a lot slower. Thus the farmer has incentive to put on only what is needed, and not let it run away. (not that farmers do a good job here, but they are aware of the problem unlike city residents)

You would be astounded if you looked more deeply in to this. I have tried in vain to get my landlord to stop paying a lawncare company to regularly (every month or two) dousing the patchy, dry, awful grass patches some call a lawn with fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides.

There is a huge business around doing this as well, you may not see it if you don't walk suburbs during working hours when much of this is done.

Oh no I believe it and I am against those practices very much! But I feel like lawns are demonized when they don't need to be if properly done. There are a lot of benefits to lawns that are just being flat out ignored in a large part of these comment sections.

I think the reason for this is as follows, if you'll allow:

Let's pretend that wine is good for cardiovascular health (there were some conflicting studies so it's truthy enough I think for this point).

We're having a discussion and we have a mutual friend who is a raging alcoholic. They drink and drive every night, they get blacked out completely, they can't hold a job. Myself and a few others are like hey friend, you need to go to AA, you need to get help, you need to see a doctor. We find them at bars and take their keys. We tell bartenders to stop serving them. They go to liquor stores and just cannot stop.

And you're like, well ya know wine does have some cardiovascular benefits. And it's a great social lubricant.

Now of course you aren't really dismissing the problem here, which is that our mutual friend is a raging alcoholic. We all can see that undeniably. But you're also not really helping because you're espousing these health benefits but we're trying to keep someone from killing themselves or others. We're working on a gigantic problem with this person and these health benefits just do not enter into the picture at this point.

This maps back to suburban America (and elsewhere) where yea there are well taken care of lawns and sure a few people can have them. But our suburban friend here is a raging alcoholic and no amount of lawn is really good for them regardless of the benefits it may have.

Manage and fight are vastly different - we're getting better at this (example: freeways used to have water runoff go to the storm sewers and now they go into dry holding ponds instead).

I spent some time as a volunteer sandbagging one of the levees in Missouri as high water neared flood stage. While there, I heard a quote attributed to an old-time farmer who was also the president of the Upper Mississippi Valley Drainage Association who also appeared before Congress on damages caused by varying the water level. The quote was along the lines of: "We think we can drain water from certain areas and farm the land next to the river, but that land belongs to the Mississippi. It can take it back any time it wants to."

The eventual disaster at the old river control will show us that someday. Hopefully not soon.

You should go live in a third world village for a few years and then come back here and say that. Life in “nature” sucks. The kids in my dad’s village don’t have to take a boat to school during monsoon season, like he has to do growing up, because they “fought nature” to control flooding.

All the more desperate considering that 1/10th of the work may be regarded by many as "not good for the economy".

We should take those people and make them dig holes in the ground, and then fill them up again. Plenty of work, great for the economy.

Did you just invent an imaginary group of baddies, assign them an imaginary belief, and then feel concerned because they "exist"?

Not that we, or rather I, mowed our lawn often, at most ince every 3-4 weeks or so. This year, we decided to leave part of it to grow. The amount of insects in there was astounishing, so the patch stayed uncut between June and two weeks ago. The rain transfromed it ibto something less than pretty. Turned out the grass underneath is prettier than before. Next we gonna repeat the same thing with a different patch.

Did this for No-Mow-May. Left some patches unmowed for that month (we got a lot of rain in May this year). Lots of diversity in those patches. It was kind of hard to mow them in June - had to use the weed-eater first. Left a couple of the patches longer into July. Neighbor across the street almost came unhinged. Tried to explain that it was helping polinators... but it was a waste of breath.

Lucky us we don't have of those neighbors, and basically cannot get them. No HOAs or similar shenenigans were we live, even the city leaves large patches in parks unmowed until automn in some places.

Here's a fun bit of chemistry I learned some time ago: the breakdown of cellulose and lignin produces water as one of the byproducts. Which stands to reason since photosynthesis consumes a good deal of water in the first place.

Those saprophytic fungi, which enjoy a nice wet environment to work in, are producing some of the water they need to work. When you burn this material instead, you send all of that humidity up the chimney with the rest of the gasses (and a little extra from the surroundings due to evaporation from the heat).

Because I'm extremely lazy, that's what I do with my yard. I let the native plants do what they want, just cutting down the invasive ones.

It's been (slowly) turning into a lovely yard, lots of wildflowers, bees, and critters. No need to ever water it, either.

A book that talks about this at a different level is One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka that follows the idea of Do Nothing Farming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_farming

We need a state of climate emergency to just ban some needlessly destructive practices, ideally globally. Mowing lawns is something we can just decide not to do. Meat and dairy we can just decide not to do.

Not only affecting the shrinking of the river systems, but also degrading the quality of the water.

I live in Iowa, home of 3.15 million people and 24 million pigs. Tile in the fields and a complete lack of buffer between fields and streams sends massive amounts of fertilizer into the waterways and ultimately down the Mississippi. ~85% of the land in the state is dedicated to farming in one way or another, and the amount of manure which can be spread per acre is based on crop production per acre formulas from the 1970's. Breeding work has increased corn yield by about 65%, allowing that much more manure to be spread.

I recently found this podcast which talks about water issues around the state, produced by University of Iowa professors.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-all-want-clean-h2o/...

Your post reminds me of this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSctr0aQOso

There's a group working in the Columbia River basin, and they've seen good results both from just setting beavers loose. They've seen positive but lesser results from man-made bespoke beaver dams, but of note is that in some cases the beavers adopted a man-made dam and completed it, which may help smooth the path for reintroduction in places where Illusion of Control sufferers paint beavers as anarchists. We would prefer the beaver dams be here, here and here, so we will try to coax them into doing just that.

Part of my statements above come from their work, and if memory serves, they made an off-hand comment in one of their reports about wanting to try the same thing in the Colorado. The Columbia is in good enough shape that we've removed dams to restore salmon spawning grounds. The Colorado is a fucking mess, but it's not in 'hippy dippy' states where funding is easier to come by.

> …I strongly suspect that is the '3 Whys' trap of the Five Whys Process.

My search-fu fails me. What is this?

I'm guessing it means "stop asking why before discovering the root cause". I.e. the analysis stops at a symptom rather than the cause.

What routerl said. Skipping out on root cause analysis by stopping as soon as you find something actionable. Those shallow analyses often result in a much bigger cleanup project that is also much less effective. Great for empire building, not so great for progress.

It just so happens that I usually catch people at this when they only have 3 Whys mapped out. There's something going on there but I'm not sure I understand the mechanics.

Gotcha, thanks! AFAICT you coined "3 Whys trap", which is a great name for it.

I really appreciated this! I've heard of the five whys earlier in life, and later on I've heard of 'the 3 whys', part of the selling technique that everyone has to answer:

- Why buy anything? - Why buy from you? - Why buy now?

I knew it wasn't that, and the idea of the 5 Whys funnel crapping out at 3 Whys does make sense!

pretty popular for root cause analysis technique at AWS. They published an article on it here https://wa.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/2020-07-02T19-33-2....

Thanks, I'm a fan of "5 Whys" but had never heard of the "3 Whys trap".

And the Supreme Court will probably gut those laws in the near future.

How would wetlands conservation laws not be constitutional?

Takings and violation of property rights

Environmental conservation laws should be considered a matter of national security. We need to mobilize the military industrial complex on the side of the environment before everything dies.

Ah yes, “we need to bend the procedures for the stuff I think is important.”

I think they're just advocating for more conservation laws, right? That is the procedures, not a bending of them.

Invocation of “national security” generally implies some sort of bending or exceptions to the ordinary rules. “We can’t reveal those documents because of national security.” “We need to indefinitely detain those terrorists because of national security.”

Because Congress hasn’t passed comprehensive wetland conservation laws. The executive branch has invoked authority under the Clean Water Act, which applies to “navigable waters” which in turn is defined as “waters of the United States.” https://www.epa.gov/wotus/about-waters-united-states

A marsh on your farm that isn’t connected to a navigable body of water is outside the reach of the CWA.

>If you ever have a friend or family member who is trying to get around wetland conservation laws, they are contributing to the shrinking of our river systems.

If you ever read/hear a statement like this you can safely ignore it because nobody with any second or even third hand exposure to the true vastness of the scope of wetland conservation laws would say such a thing.

Somebody's little construction project to replace their 25x30 cabin on a lake in the woods with one that's 24x32 isn't material in this context no matter how hard people may dishonestly try to imply otherwise. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of cases of "skirting conservation laws" are cases of people who want to do a nearly like for like replacement of some existing thing that didn't need permission when it was done 40-140yr ago and don't want to pay some guy with a license thousands of dollars for the privilege of a stamped drawing.

You say that like nobody of Hacker News knows anybody who is a land developer.

> some existing thing that didn't need permission when it was done 40-140yr ago

Not every law ever written has grandfather clauses, and where water rights are concerned we are quickly running out of patience for grandfather clauses.

> no matter how hard people may dishonestly try to imply otherwise

Hey you know what else is dishonest? Making a big conversation with wide ranging consequences have to pause to talk about one particular line item you have a problem with. Agenda or no (which you are projecting on others), the results are the same.

Every city is worsening its watershed - through development - except for the few that are actively fighting against it. And so many families are getting burned out by wildfires because we keep increasing the density of cabins out in the woods. It's not isolated incidents when you have 5 million or even half a million people living in a county all trying to do their own thing without The Man trying to stop them.

No single rain drop believes it is responsible for the flood.

> we are quickly running out of patience for grandfather clauses.

Who is "we"? Who put you in charge of speaking for everyone?

Start at the south end of the Colorado for the loudest voices, and then work your way north. So that's the entire country of Mexico who wonders where their river went, and the people upstream who are progressively less effected by the reduced flow.

Then add in environmentalists and conservationists. You can't preserve wetland plants and animals when there's no wetland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Delta

> The loss of freshwater flows to the delta over the twentieth century has reduced delta wetlands to about 5 percent of their original extent, and non-native species have compromised the ecological health of much of what remains. Stress on ecosystems has allowed invasive plants to out-compete native species along Colorado River riparian areas. Native forests of cottonwood and willow have yielded to sand and mudflats dominated by the nonnative tamarisk (also known as salt cedar), arrow-weed, and iodine bush, a transformation that has decreased the habitat value of the riparian forest.[7]

> So that's the entire country of Mexico who wonders where their river went

Why is it "their river" more than, say, Colorado's river?

And, once again, who put you in charge of speaking for them?

We did when we failed to marginalize such dolts decades ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com