By Brandt Mannchen

Now, particularly in these days after Hurricane Harvey, we hear the word “Detention”, almost like a chant or mantra.  Flood control experts, agencies, public officials, developers, and many citizens talk about “Detention” like it is the solution to our flood problems.  They usually only envision two types of “Detention”.  These two types of “Detention” are digging deep holes in the ground (called basins, reservoirs, or ponds) and digging deeper and wider channels to create “in-line Detention”.

“Detention” is not a small concept or word.  In Nature, there are many different types of “Detention”.  For example, there is “Detention” of water flow, slowed over the ground surface, due to microtopographic differences (many ups and downs over a few inches of height).

In league with this more subtle “Detention” are raindrops that hit vegetation, trees, shrubs, grasses, and wildflowers, and drip and run-down stalks and boughs; all which delay its path forward.

There is the “Detention” of small wetland depressions, called potholes, that collect, hold, evaporate, and absorb flood waters, like a “sponge”.  There is a more expansive “Detention” that floodplains have when they expand out of stream, creek, bayou, and river banks, overflow, and fill to create a massive, but slower-moving flow of water.

There is the micro “Detention” of leaf litter, twigs, humus, organic matter, branches, downed trees, and other natural debris which act as barriers or obstacles to flood flows.

Another natural form of “Detention” is overland flow, where no significant water channel exists in an area, but water flows across the undulating ground until it reaches and empties into a stream.

Then there is the “Detention” capacity that land has as it slows down water and collects, holds, and allows it to evaporate.  This is in conjunction with the “Detention” when water is absorbed, adhered, adsorbed, percolated, fills pore spaces and voids, permeates into soil and subsoil, and finally resides in water tables, aquifers underground, or stream channels.

These types of “Detention” are aided by prairie grasses, and other vegetation, which provide porosity via extensive root systems which take drops and tiny streams of water underground for 3, 6, 10, and 15 feet or more.

These natural “Detention” types exist free for us to use wisely to help us.  Too often our human created “Detention” flood control systems do not allow Nature to work and keep people out of harm’s way. We disrupt, disturb, degrade, and destroy natural “Detention” types so that these combined natural “Detention” systems cannot work.

We concrete, pave, slope, dig deeper, wider, bigger, faster, straighter, and create more soil erosion and sedimentation to get water away from one development, rush it downstream, so that another development can welcome flood waters.  We destroy natural “Detention” types, do not use them in conjunction with enough human-made “Detention” to accommodate flood waters unleased in unnatural flows, velocities, patterns, and magnitudes.

The reason for our failure to use natural “Detention” effectively is our lack of respect for Nature and our place in it.  This reflects our failure to work with and not against Nature.  John Muir revealed our connection to Nature when he said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

Aldo Leopold, the great “land ethic” thinker suggested that “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering” and that “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, the stability, and beauty of the biotic community.  It is wrong when it tends otherwise”.  These concerns about our lack of vision and our head-long pursuit of development caused John Muir to rage, “Not blind opposition to progress, but opposition to blind progress.”  

These quotes reveal that if we are going to survive and coexist with Nature in the Houston Area, we must stop our war against Nature.  Leopold saw this battle as deeply rooted in our existing Society, “We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us.  When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

It is my belief that unless we acknowledge our pointless, harmful, and self-defeating struggle against Nature and change how we approach flood control and development we are doomed to fail.  I don’t want to leave our children with this negative legacy.  I now understand what Leopold meant when he said, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”  No mas!