Reducing Flooding Due to Global Weirding

 

While average forest cover across Europe is 37%, in Britain it is 13% , so we should plant plenty of trees, and we should plant them wherever we are likely to get flooding.

After Leeds was flooded they asked for ideas to stop this happening again, and I sent them the advice of Environmentalist George Monbiot, who went later to successfully argue his case. When it rains trees drive water into the soil, and thus slow down flooding, so we have to plant lots of trees upstream to lessen the effect of heavier rains, and less often, in the new age we have caused. His advise to the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee was:

 

“Our bare hills are an artefact of three principal activities: sheep farming, deer stalking and grouse shooting. Sheep and deer selectively browse out tree seedlings, ensuring that existing forests cannot regenerate and trees cannot repopulate bare land.” Our new anti-flooding forests, filled with native trees planted in equilateral triangles to maximise crops, thus need protection from sheep and deer.

The landowners issued the threat of legal action after ministers started working on producing a law to ban them from carrying out the environmentally damaging practice on their moorland estates. The old heather is burned to expose new shoots – a source of food for grouse, whose numbers are boosted. The estates then charge people who want to shoot grouse. Environmentalists say that this releases CO2 into the atmosphere which harms both the wildlife and causes flooding and degrading. No doubt deer stalkers and sheep farmers will be threatening to sue as well, perhaps the government can employ them all to look after the new forests. We must triple the number of trees we have and these are the people in the right place and at the right time. For a method of fast planting please see: Tree Planting by Drone