From today I'm having three weeks holiday so my first 2022 post airs Friday 28 January. See you then! To highlight or enlarge a picture in today's post, please click it. Light blue text indicates a link. Please click on it. -------------------- Three starting pointsThis week's post has three starting points.
Come and look for eels
Daylighting city streams
Blaschke says: “I’d say the character of a hill city can't be complete, without its streams feeding into the harbour. We still have a beautiful landscape, but it's not really complete, because we've lost the fresh water part of it." So Blaschke wants some of these hidden streams 'daylighted' – uncovered. And so do local Maori. They feel deprived of traditional heritage. Blaschke says "Daylighted streams do a better job of retaining and distributing nutrients for plants and wildlife, can act as a natural water filter, are less vulnerable to flooding and also add a lot of vibrancy to public space." Daylighting – South Korea's Cheong Gye Cheong ProjectIn these gathering days of environmental concern, daylighting is apparently increasing as a way of revitalising cities. One of the most oft quoted examples is Seoul's staggering Cheong Gye Cheong Project – staggering because of its size and centrality, staggering because of its historic earliness and staggering because of its speed of accomplishment. The unsanitary stream was roaded over in the 1950s and then in the 1970s a freeway was added on top and to one side. Then according to the waterways site LA Creek Freak, "From 2002 to 2005, at a cost of about $380 million (U.S.), the city tore down the freeway, ripped out the road, and daylighted 6 kilometers (about 4 miles) of their stream." Biodiversity surveys on the released stream are interesting. According to the Landscape Architecture Site, landscape performance environmental benefits include: "The Increased overall biodiversity by 639% between the pre-restoration work in 2003 and the end of 2008 with the number of plant species increasing from 62 to 308, fish species from 4 to 25, bird species from 6 to 36, aquatic invertebrate species from 5 to 53, insect species from 15 to 192, mammals from 2 to 4, and amphibians from 4 to 8." I hasten to say that I've never been to South Korea, so this account is all from internet sources. There are other impressive daylighting sites but this one really caught my imagination. Live waterI'm very glad that my little local stream is open. It could easily be piped. If piped it almost dies biologically. Just before I came to Wellington there was a determined move further down the valley, below where the Korimako joins another branch, to pipe it and put a road over the top but citizen voices prevented that happening. I'm grateful. As a trout fisherman I've been around rivers and streams all my life and I know that they are biologically alive and that we must keep them that way for the sake of biodiversity, so I hope daylighting will continue to be a feature of our present and our future. □ New Year Greetings!I'm writing this final 2021 post on Friday 31 December. Year 2022 tomorrow! I suppose year 2022 will have its ups and downs, it's expected and unexpected happenings, and its happy and unhappy moments. Every year has all those doesn't it? I hope you endure! I wish you well. John. John McInnes Friday 31 December 2021 ##########
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