Last winter we witnessed 24+ hours of water flowing down our road … millions of liters. The sound of running water was beautiful but the sight of that water escaping was sad. It caused some damage to the road leading up to our property.
It was, I believe, a result of a wet season and years of over-grazing higher up in the valley (causing lack of vegetation to slow the flow of water and reduced water holding capacity in the soil).
When I talked about this with someone in the village he explained to me that it was my responsiblity (as the owner of the property) to build water ditches alongside the road to divert the water flow + “we’ve been doing it like this for generations, and there’s never been a problem!” It was as if he didn’t hear me … I could not find a way to show a deeper chain of causality where choices that we make upstream in our ecological cycles have downtstream effects.
Today I came across this video and wanted to make a note of it as evidence for future reference: