1/6 Water detectives are asking a radical question: what does #water want? “Water Always Wins: Thriving in an age of drought and deluge” (@uchicagopress, 2022) is about changing our relationship with water from a control mindset to one of collaboration. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book… 2/6 Climate change is bringing bigger rains & more severe droughts. But our development choices are making these disasters worse. Urban sprawl, industrial agriculture, & attempts to control water - levees and dams, burying creeks and wetlands - are making human habitats brittle.

A thread: With the lethal flooding in NY and NJ & elsewhere this year, journalist Ann Scott Tyson @csmonitor asks if China's Sponge Cities program works to absorb floods, citing Zhengzhou's recent flooding that killed 73 people. That's the wrong question. csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pac… The massive rainstorms climate change is bringing are a big problem. But the flooding is not just caused by climate change. Our infrastructure is making flooding worse: both urban sprawl and pavement and our concrete water control structures.

President @JoeBiden is visiting NY and NJ today to talk about #infrastructure in the wake of flooding. Talk that includes more $ for sea walls, levees, stormwater drains. But to solve flooding, we have to consider how #water behaves. It can come from the sky, from the sea, and even from up from underground due to hydrological pressure. #ClimateCrisis is showing us a quantity of water our #infrastructure is not built to handle. B/c our concrete water infrastructure is inflexible.

Is this when Americans wake up to #ClimateCrisis? Not likely, says @jeffgoodell in @RollingStone "Evidence of cluelessness and short term greed is everywhere." rollingstone.com/politics/polit… He's not wrong. I've been on this beat 20 years and I'm not optimistic about humanity's ability to adapt; we have good qualities but we're also short-sighted and greedy. Still. The conversation has changed over my 20 years covering this.

"SLOW WATER" is what I'm calling the way we can adapt to avoid the increased flood risk of 48 percent of global land area by 2100, and 52% of the population, per a new study from @nature slowwater.world I've been reporting on people who are innovating Slow Water solutions for my upcoming book, as they ask a bold question that inverts our control freak tendencies: What does water want? #slowwater #water #climate