Can We Hold Back the Flood?
A LAST winter's floods on the rivers of central Europe were among the worst
since the Middle Ages, and as winter storms return, the spectre of floods is returning too. Just weeks
ago, the river Rhône in south-east France burst its banks, driving 15,000 people from their homes, and
worse could be on the way. Traditionally, river engineers have gone for Plan A: get rid of the water
fast, draining it off the land and down to the sea in tall-sides rivers re-engineered as
high-performance drains. But however big they dig city drains, however wide and straight they make the
rivers, and however high they build the banks, the floods keep coming back to haunt them, from the
Mississippi to the Danube. And when the floods come, they seem to be worse than ever.
B No wonder engineers are turning to Plan B: sap the water's destructive
strength by dispersing it into fields, forgotten lakes, flood plains and aquifers. Back in the days when
rivers took a more tortuous path to the sea, floodwaters lost impetus and volume while meandering across
flood plains and idling through wetlands and inland deltas. But today the water tends to have an
unimpeded journey to the sea. And this means that when it rains in the uplands, the water comes down all
at once. Worse, whenever we close off more flood plain, the river's flow farther downstream becomes more
violent and uncontrollable. Dykes are only as good as their weakest link – and the water will unerringly
find it.
C Today, the river has lost 7 per cent of its original length and runs up to
a third faster. When it rains hard in the Alps, the peak flows from several tributaries coincide in the
main river, where once they arrived separately. And with four-fifths of the Lower Rhine's flood plain
barricaded off, the waters rise ever higher. The result is more frequent flooding that does ever-greater
damage to the homes, offices and roads that sit on the flood plain. Much the same has happened in the US
on the mighty Mississippi, which drains the world's second-largest river catchment into the Gulf of
Mexico.
D The European Union is trying to improve rain forecasts and more accurately
model how intense rains swell rivers. That may help cities prepare, but it won't stop the floods. To do
that, say, hydrologists, you need a new approach to engineering, not just Agency – country £1 billion –
puts it like this: "The focus is now on working with the forces of nature. Towering concrete walls are
out, and new wetlands are in." to help keep London's upstream and reflooding 10 square kilometres
outside Oxford. Nearer to London it has spent £100 million creating new wetlands and a relief channel
across 16 kilometres.
E The same is taking place on a much grander scale in Austria, in one of
Europe's largest river restorations to date. Engineers are regenerating flood plains along 60 kilometres
of the river Drave as it exits the Alps. They are also widening the river bed and channeling it back
into abandoned meanders, oxbow lakes and backwaters overhung with willows. The engineers calculate that
the restored flood plain can now store up to 10 million cubic metres of floodwaters and slow storm
surges coming out of the Alps by more than an hour, protecting towns as far downstream as Slovenia and
Croatia.
F "Rivers have to be allowed to take more space. They have to be turned from
flood-chutes into flood-foilers," says Nienhuis. And the Dutch, for whom preventing floods is a matter
of survival, have gone furthest. A nation built largely on drained marshes and seabed had the fright of
its life in 1993 when the Rhine almost overwhelmed it. The same happened again in 1995 when a quarter of
a million people were evacuated from the Netherlands. But a new breed of "soft engineers" wants our
cities to become porous, and Berlin is their governed by tough new rules to prevent its drains from
becoming overloaded after heavy rains. Herald Kraft, an architect working in the city, says: "We now see
rainwater as giant Potsdamer Platz, a huge new commercial redevelopment by DaimlerChrysler in the heart
of the city.
G Los Angeles has spent billions of dollars digging huge drains and
concreting river beds to carry away the water from occasional intense storms. "In LA we receive half the
water we need in rainfall, and we throw it away. Then we spend hundreds of millions to import water,"
says Andy Lipkis, an LA environmentalist who kick-started the idea of the porous city by showing it
could work on one house. Lipkis, along with citizens groups like Friends of the Los Angeles River and
Unpaved LA, want to beat the urban flood hazard and fill the taps by holding onto the city's floodwater.
And it's not just a pipe dream. The authorities this year launched a $100 million scheme to road-test
the porous city in one flood-hit community in Sun Valley. The plan is to catch the rain that falls on
thousands of driveways, parking lots and rooftops in the valley. Trees will soak up water from parking
lots. Homes and public buildings will capture roof water to irrigate gardens and parks. And road drains
will empty into old gravel pits and other leaky places that should recharge the city's underground water
reserves. Result: less flooding and more water for the city. Plan B says every city should be porous,
every river should have room to flood naturally and every coastline should be left to build its own
defences. It sounds expensive and utopian, until you realise how much we spend trying to drain cities
and protect our watery margins – and how bad we are at it.
Life-Casting and Art
Julian Bames explores the questions posed by Life-Casts,
an exhibition of plaster moulds of living people and objects which were originally used for scientific
purposes
A Art changes over time and our idea of what art is changing too. For
example, objects originally intended for devotional, ritualistic or recreational purposes may be
recategorized as art by members of other later civilisations, such as our own, which no longer respond
to these purposes.
B What also happens is that techniques and crafts which would have been
judged inartistic at the time they were used are reassessed. Life-casting is an interesting example of
this. It involved making a plaster mould of a living person or thing. This was complex, technical work,
as Benjamin Robert Haydon discovered when he poured 250 litres of plaster over his human model and
nearly killed him. At the time, the casts were used for medical research and, consequently, in the
nineteenth-century life-casting was considered inferior to sculpture in the same way that, more
recently, photography was thought to be a lesser art than painting. Both were viewed as unacceptable
shortcuts by the 'senior' arts. Their virtues of speed and unwavering realism also implied their
limitations; they left little or no room for the imagination.
C For many, life-casting was an insult to the sculptor's creative genius. In
an infamous lawsuit of 1834, a moulder whose mask of the dying French emperor Napoleon had been
reproduced and sold without his permission was judged to have no rights to the image. In other words, he
was specifically held not to be an artist. This judgement reflects the view of established members of
the nineteenth-century art world such as Rodin, who commented that life-casting 'happens fast but it
doesn't make Art'. Some even feared that 'if too much nature was allowed in, it would lead Art away from
its proper course of the Ideal.
D The painter Gauguin, at the end of the nineteenth century, worried about
future developments in photography. If ever the process went into colour, what painter would labour away
at a likeness with a brush made from squirrel-tail? But painting has proved robust. Photography has
changed it, of course, just as the novel had to reassess narrative after the arrival of the cinema. But
the gap between the senior and junior arts was always narrower than the traditionalists implied.
Painters have always used technical back-up such as studio assistants to do the boring bits, while
apparently lesser crafts involve great skill, thought, preparation and, depending on how we define it,
imagination.
E Time changes our view in another way, too. Each new movement implies a
reassessment of what has gone before? What is done now alters what was done before. In some cases, this
is merely self-serving, with the new art using the old to justify itself. It seems to be saying, look at
how all of that points to this! Aren't we clever to be the culmination of all that has gone before? But
usually, it is a matter of re-alerting the sensibility, reminding us not to take things for granted.
Take, for example, the cast of the hand of a giant from a circus, made by an anonymous artist around
1889, an item that would now sit happily in any commercial or public gallery. The most significant
impact of this piece is on the eye, in the contradiction between unexpected size and verisimilitude.
Next, the human element kicks in, you note that the nails are dirt-encrusted, unless this is the
caster's decorative addition, and the fingertips extend far beyond them. Then you take in the element of
choice, arrangement, art if you like, in the neat, pleated, buttoned sleeve-end that gives the item
balance and variation of texture. This is just a moulded hand, yet the part stands utterly for the
whole. It reminds us slyly, poignantly, of the full-size original.
F But is it art? And, if so, why? These are old tediously repeated questions
to which artists have often responded, 'It is art because I am an artist and therefore what I do is art.
However, what doesn't work for literature works much better for artworks of art do float free of their
creators' intentions. Over time the "reader" does become more powerful. Few of us can look at a medieval
altarpiece as its painter intended. We believe too little and aesthetically know too much, so we
recreate and find new fields of pleasure in the work. Equally, the lack of artistic intention of Paul
Richer and other forgotten craftsmen who brushed oil onto flesh, who moulded, cast and decorated in the
nineteenth century is now irrelevant. What counts is the surviving object and our response to it. The
tests are simple: does it interest the eye, excite the brain, move the mind to reflection and involve
the heart. It may, to use the old dichotomy, be beautiful but it is rarely true to any significant
depth. One of the constant pleasures of art is its ability to come at us from an unexpected angle and
stop us short in wonder.
How should reading be taught?
By Keith Rayncr a Barbara R Foorman
A Learning to speak is automatic for almost all children, but learning to
read requires elaborate instruction and conscious effort. Well aware of the difficulties, educators have
given a great deal of thought to how they can best help children learn to read. No single method has
triumphed. Indeed, heated arguments about the most appropriate form of reading instruction continue to
polarize the teaching community.
B Three general approaches have been tried. In one, called whole-word
instruction, children learn by rote how to recognise at a glance a vocabulary of 50 to 100 words. Then
they gradually acquire other words, often through seeing them used over and over again in the context of
a story. Speakers of most languages learn the relationship between letters and the sounds associated
with them (phonemes). That is, children are taught how to use their knowledge of the alphabet to sound
out words. This procedure constitutes a second approach to teaching reading – phonics. Many schools have
adopted a different approach: the whole-language method. The strategy here relies on the child's
experience with the language. For example, students are offered engaging books and are encouraged to
guess the words that they do not know by considering the context of the sentence or by looking for clues
in the storyline and illustrations, rather than trying to sound them out. Many teachers adopted the
whole-language approach because of its intuitive appeal. Making reading fun promises to keep children
motivated, and learning to read depends more on what the student does than on what the teacher does. The
presumed benefits of whole-language instruction – and the contrast to the perceived dullness of phonics
– led to its growing acceptance across American during the 1990s and a movement away from phonics.
C However, many linguists and psychologists objected strongly to the
abandonment of phonics in American schools. Why was this so? In short, because research had clearly
demonstrated that understanding how letters related to the component sounds in words is critically
important in reading. This conclusion rests, in part, on knowledge of how experienced readers make sense
of words on a page. Advocates of whole-language instruction have argued forcefully that people often
derive meanings directly from print without ever determining the sound of the word. Some psychologists
today accept this view, but most believe that reading is typically a process of rapidly sounding out
words mentally. Compelling evidence for this comes from experiments which show that subjects often
confuse homophones (words that sound the same, such as Jrose and 'rows5). This supports the idea that
readers convert strings of letters to sounds.
D In order to evaluate different approaches to teaching reading, a number of
experiments have been carried out, firstly with college students, then with school pupils. Investigators
trained English-speaking college students to read using unfamiliar symbols such as Arabic letters (the
phonics approach), while another group learned entire words associated with certain strings of Arabic
letters (whole-word). Then both groups were required to read a new set of words constructed from the
original characters. In general, readers who were taught the rules of phonics could read many more new
words than those trained with a whole-word procedure. Classroom studies comparing phonics with either
whole-word or whole-language instruction are also quite illuminating. One particularly persuasive study
compared two programmes used in 20 first-grade classrooms. Half the students were offered traditional
reading instruction, which included the use of phonics drills and applications. The other half were
taught using an individualised method that drew from their experiences with languages; these children
produce their own booklets of stories and developed sets of words to be recognised (common components of
the whole-language approach). This study found that the first group scored higher at year's end on tests
of reading and comprehension.
E If researchers are so convinced about the need for phonics instruction, why
does the debate continue? Because the controversy is enmeshed in the philosophical differences between
traditional and progressive (or new) approaches, differences that have divided educators for years. The
progressive challenge the results of laboratory tests and classroom studies on the basis of a broad
philosophical skepticism about the values of such research. They champion student-centred learned and
teacher empowerment. Sadly, they fail to realise that these very admirable educational values are
equally consistent with the teaching of phonics.
F If schools of education insisted that would-be reading teachers learned
something about the vast research in linguistics and psychology that bears on reading, their graduates
would be more eager to use phonics and would be prepared to do so effectively. They could allow their
pupils to apply the principles of phonics while reading for pleasure. Using whole-language activities to
supplement phonics instruction certainly helps to make reading fun and meaningful for children, so no
one would want to see such tools discarded. Indeed, recent work has indicated that the combination of
literature-based instruction and phonics is more powerful than either method used alone. Teachers need
to strike a balance. But in doing so, we urge them to remember that reading must be grounded in a firm
understanding of the connections between letters and sounds. Educators who deny this reality are
neglecting decades of research. They are also neglecting the needs of their students.