Classical art depicting the Garden of Eden usually shows a river running through it. The Garden of Eden is heaven dressed in earthly clothes — flowers and fruit trees — which can’t exist without water. The Edenic “garden city” used to be a civic ideal (the Uplands is an example), but today we have dust-bowl cities, full of arid soil and brown grass. The Old English word “drought” (or “drouth”) seems onomatopoeic, itself sounding brown, desiccated, lifeless. Life shrinks from drought.
Decreasing snow-melt and increasing construction drain a regional water supply, and we need only look south to California to see where this leads. There, repeated years of drought (plus mega-cities and industrial agriculture draining the landscape) have meant the disappearance of estuary and meadow creatures like leopard lizards, salamanders, snakes and voles. We too may lose those. In the UK the Centre For Ecology and Hydrology is documenting the same, noting declining populations of six butterfly species because the host plants of their caterpillars are drying out.
“It is likely species groups such as dragonflies, bees, moths and beetles … will be impacted by climate warming (drought),” warns the UK Centre. The same species are at risk here.
Locally, summer drought means fewer acorns, which affects birds and squirrels. Shrinking bush means less of the camouflage many animals require, and fewer of the slugs, snails and insects they eat. Drying streams mean fewer and smaller salmon. In California, according to Anne Casselman writing in Scientific American (2015), the chinook salmon is “most at risk of extinction”. Here, our sub-species of chinook are crucial to orcas; now the orcas are starving. We are watching Eden unravel. We could create refuges and wetlands, directing water toward plants and animals instead of into plumbing, but we often subdivide and pave without thought for plants and animals.
Local householders can’t do much about the dying spruce and ash of the boreal forests which, stretching across northern Canada and Russia, are even more than the tropics the lungs of the world, but we could rescue suburban green space. We could turn our own gardens and parks into moist refuges for wildlife instead of increasing drought through water restriction.
“Human solutions to the lack of water are taking a toll on a number of endangered species,” says American biologist Kevin Matthews.
In Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, that retrospective ballad of environmentalism, the mariner’s ship is becalmed when he kills an albatross — the embodiment of nature — and the sailors die of thirst “as the charmed water burnt away”. It’s uncanny how Coleridge’s language anticipates our fear of global warming (“all in a hot and copper sky/ The bloody Sun, at noon …”). The upshot is that only when the mariner really sees the life around him, in the form of water snakes (“happy living things”), does the drought break and the albatross fall from his neck. The take-away is that thirst kills.
We have an aging population of urban trees constantly being removed as “sick”. Even if these are replaced, fragile young trees can’t get a start without lots of water. Vancouver asks residents to water the boulevard trees in front of their houses and aims to plant 150,000 new trees by 2020 for a 22% canopy coverage. The capital region too will need to relax water restriction if we want to avoid a tree-less, dead-albatross world. Oak Bay’s Urban Forest blueprint of March 2017 suggests aiming for 45 per cent canopy coverage by 2045 – a whole generation away.
Residents however can choose to keep their own gardens moist with sprinklers, bird-baths and bowls of water for other wildlife. One way or another Eden must have its river.
Barbara Julian is a local writer and nature enthusiast who writes monthly about the various species making their home in Oak Bay.