I don't know where you are exactly, Tanya, but NYC used to have brooks, and creeks all through BROOKlyn and the Bronx and Manhattan. Clear bubbling brooks rolled over the dark stone that's now the foundations of the skyscrapers.
We ... buried the streams in underground drain tunnels, but they are all still there! Water is powerful and tried to return to these old paths and now that there is more... Well there is some thinking we need to do.
@futurebird@whereistanya It always struck me as weird that the heart of climate change denial money was usually New York, Texas and Florida - Places that were in many places barely feet above, if not below, sea level.
@zzzeek@futurebird@whereistanya Having been so successful with cockroach eradication I look forward to equal success with terror and prostration before our eventual insect overlords.
If we'd take sewer design more seriously we could greatly reduce the roaches and rats.
But no one thinks about it in terms of the city being an ecosystem where creatures, not just people MUST live. So what creatures do we want to live with? Which ones do we not want?
@futurebird@zzzeek@whereistanya Yeah, it's tough to throw them out when there's a big sign that says "Free Fud and Howzes". Once we've created an ideal environment, it's almost impossible to meaningfully control them.
Rat meat is considered a delicacy in some countries. An average cooked rat produces 63 g of protein. Maybe we should trap, purge, and also domesticate them as a food source for the poor and hungry or anyone. I would eat a properly prepared rat on a stick.
Hmmm. I need to read up on this. We really can't have disease carrying mosquitos in a massive dense city ... but my heart always sinks when it's more insect killing chemicals... I feel like they are never precise enough.
Most of the mosquitos don't even bite people. They are bird food.
@Nazani@futurebird@zzzeek@whereistanya Those sound better options, but it seems like every time we do this we say, "We have a beetle problem, let's bring in some cane toads" or "Purple loosestrife is pretty, lets bring some in for the gardens". On the personal scale like you're doing its not a problem, but when we do it on municipal or national scales we always seem to make things worse.
@futurebird@zzzeek@signalthirteen@whereistanya What was that project that produced a crap ton of sterile males? So they'd just fly around breeding and producing no viable eggs. That would be a mosquito species-specific intervention so it could at least be precisely targeted but I have no idea if it is scalable.
@futurebird@_L1vY_@signalthirteen@whereistanya fun fact: the floor of the ny stock exchange is underground, thus, under sea level and, as Manhattan is a deceivingly hilly place, it’s down hill. it is always one of the first places to flood in nyc. i was under water for days after Sandy. of course, they were mercilessly mocked for it.
@futurebird ugh that sounds like Chicago this year. Terrible flooding and more mosquitos than I've ever experienced in Illinois. The mosquitos ruined most of our summer evenings 😟
We are right on top of an aquifer that leaks out a little bit in the mountains of Manhattan but unloads ultimately in Riverhead It goes underneath both the Hudson and the East Rivers, the headwaters of the Great lakes
@futurebird@whereistanya Funny that. Even Las Vegas, in particular The Strip, has river beds that have been built over. A few years back that became really obvious to lots of folks. I wonder also about places like Tokyo where they’ve built highways over the old streams and waterways, lots of concrete and no place to absorb the rain, but it knows where to go. Many cities around the world will find out in the coming years it seems.
@futurebird@whereistanya Not just buried, either, but requiring 24-hour constant pumping to keep those waters subjugated. When the power goes out, NYC has just hours to couple of days of diesel keeping the subways, cellars, and tunnels passable...
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