Mon 5 Nov 2007

Drought By Small Increments

Over at the Inkstain presses, John's been publishing a lot of interesting little pieces lately about the immediate and very local effects of drought in places the US. His note about the drought web portal reminded me of something I'd been meaning to check out.

Following my return from a trip to New Jersey at the start of October, I wrote the following paragraphs about my impressions of the natural environment there. Looking at the drought service confirms that that area of the country isn't particularly severely affected. In that respect, it provides a contrast between my local area and the north-eastern USA:

South Plainfield, New Jersey, is a semi-urban area, lots of industrial parks — offices, a few storage places, about a dozen strip malls in a two mile radius and some medium-density housing. Walking between my hotel and the offices I was working in each day (maybe 1000 yards each way), it was really noticeable how different that part of the US is from where I live at the moment.

I could almost smell the water (more likely, the freshness of the plants, even after a long summer) in the ground and flora. Until being exposed to this difference and realised what I was seeing and smelling, it hadn't struck me just how dry things are, even around Sydney (which, let's be honest, is hardly suffering as much as rural areas of this country). Things like the smell of cut grass and dew on the ground in the morning. The really lush green of places with actual lawn, and even the nature strips along the roadsides. Trees that were full of leaves and growing fantastically.

It really hit me just how much things have changed locally in the past years. All the New Jersey surroundings were instantly familiar and brought back memories of growing up and even where I lived when I first moved to Sydney back in 1993. When you live in an area that changes by degrees month to month and year to year, you don't automatically realise how large the accumulated change is. Particularly when it's "home" and one's reference point for "normal". Looking around in the few days since I've been back, the signs of low rainfall are everywhere. Things don't look any different than they did before, but having been exposed to the alternative for a while, it's interesting to look with fresh eyes and notice the accumulated effect. The Australian bushland plants are the ones that are thriving. Imported species and those designed to live near water are looking much more straggly and definitely less dense than in past years.

Observing change as it happens is hard. We can all say the price of fruit and vegetables has increased over the past two or three years, but when did it really go up more at a particular moment than the normal variation and stay there? Was it observable at the time and not just in hindsight? The scientists who measure climate effects in real time and try to make predictions from underneath all the natural variations do not have an easy time of it. The critics who feel that dismissing such predications is easy because of their volatility are not considering the necessity of such actions, the difference between researching and critiquing, or the relative historical accuracy, and hence, relative success, of such predictions.

Topics: science/weather/drought, life