This is about one of my best friends! He is an amazing local historian and a staunchly wedded empiricist, a resident of SF in the deep, old way. I highly recommend taking one of his ThinkWalks if you want to learn about local history, ecology, and the meeting of the two. http://www.thinkwalks.org/
Also check out his amazing water map of SF, which is both beautiful AND accurate: http://seepcity.org/
I live in a neighborhood of Washington, DC, where it is clear that old streams have been buried. Buildings, roads, and sidewalks shed water that would have gone into the ground, and storm drains carry a lot of it off. But you can see houses that have settled, almost certainly because they are where a stream was filled. And a neighbor found a sinkhole under his driveway some years ago, probably from an old stream.
One can sometimes gauge where the streams were by the spacing and ages of the houses.
I live on a named creek in the S.F. Bay Area, and I've recently re-discovered what a natural wonder it is. It is mostly original creek for its entire length. I discovered recently a tributary that at one time ran through my property was re-routed (I suspect in the 1960s) to empty into the creek 400 yards downstream. This probably results in less flooding on my property than historically otherwise would occur.
It used to be a steelhead creek, but in the 1950s the Army Corps of Engineers did major flood control alterations to the major creek it flows into, making it impossible for fish to swim upstream. New environmental laws requiring runoff to percolate through the soil and stemming construction erosion help the water quality. I hope someday the flood control gets rebuilt to be migrating fish friendly.
Usually creeks and steams are very well managed by concretizing the riverbed. Japan is in love with concrete and with controlling river flow and coastlines. Basically if it’s in a city, it gets paved over!
There's a duality there. The other side of that coin is they started the whole forest bathing movement.
I’m reminded by Zizek that outsiders to a culture are apt to romanticize things they don’t know. His go to quip is how an American Indian (native/First Nations person) frustrates and indignant at this romanticizing bursted out saying “we killed more buffaloes than any settlers ever did”. The point being most humans have the same drive and desires, in this case to control nature and unpredictability.
> “we killed more buffaloes than any settlers ever did”
Is he saying in total over thousands of years that they hunted them? Or in the time that guns were introduced to Native Americans? If the later, that is pretty surprising and I had never heard that if true.
It’s not meant to be taken literally. It’s a way to give oneself agency. “We are also just regular people like you; we can do good, and we can do bad. We’re not to be romanticized and looked at as weird noble people, something no one can actually be.”
Also check out his amazing water map of SF, which is both beautiful AND accurate: http://seepcity.org/