When the River Meets the Sea
the creek
We recently had some heavy rain, and the wooded path behind my house showed sinuous trails where the water carved its way between the leaves. Thankfully, this path is not normally a river bed, but water is a powerful if fleeting force of nature.
All that water ran down the path, into the stream, and followed the road around the corner. After that, my understanding is a bit dodgy.
The reason I’m curious about my raindrop’s destination is because I recently bought a power paint roller that pumps the paint out of the can and into the roller – no bending, no drips! The downside is that you waste a fair bit of paint, and the cleanup instructions tell you to connect a garden hose to a port in the side of the painter, and just let the water flow.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a hose inside my house, so if I cleaned the painter by the prescribed method, I’d be dumping latex paint onto the ground behind the house. It would run down the path, into the stream, and we know where that leads… at least vaguely.
I’d argue that 90 percent of the people who buy this product would hook up the hose and let ‘er rip without thinking about where all of that material ends up. InfoVis to the rescue!
Pierce County Washington has one of the coolest interactive maps I’ve seen in awhile. Just double click on any point, and find out where water (or paint) falling in that location ultimately winds up. If you knew your watershed – the series of rivulets and rivers that connect you with the ocean – would you think twice about what you added to it? What about if you had to drink from it, or your food grew there?
Maybe you’re not a painter, but you might add fertilizer to your lawn. Or, you may spread a few pesticides around the foundation to keep termites and roaches out out of the house. Or, if you’re in North Carolina, you’ll certainly want to dump thousands of gallons of salt water on the roads every time the meteorologist thinks he sees a snowflake.
All of these things actions have a broader impact, and I’d love to see maps like this one for every region, so we could all appreciate our place in the water (and food) chain. Seeing is believing, and maybe protecting.
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