What of the Future? - Climate Change Impacts on Freshwater Ecosystems - page 293

they were generally above freezing. Though snow dusted the hilltops for a few
days at a time, it usually soon melted and only about 400 mm of the 1,400 mm of
precipitation evaporated. It was a wet place of grey skies, sodden pastures, dense
alder and willow woodlands in those river valleys that had not been drained.
Hibscotia was an odd, independent sort of island, for despite the humidity of its
air and the quality of its mains drinking waters, the salesmen of moisturizing
creams and bottled waters had, against all logic, reaped rich rewards. But then, it
had traditionally been governed by the graduates of schools of economics,
philosophy and law and not by those of science, so faced with the compelling
evidence of climate change in the late 20th century, its inhabitants murmured
regrets and good intentions and then continued to look after the economy and
buy the bottled water and moisturizing creams.
The landscape was green, turning a yellowish green sometimes in the driest
summers but its pastures yielded wholesome cattle and sheep, large crops of grass
for the dairy industry and an abundance of wheat, other grains, roots and oilseed
rape. The hills had long been grazed down to open grasslands, where naturally
oak woodlands would formerly have stood, and any sense of landscape and
ecological continuity had been obscured by the innumerable hedges and fences
that divided the land into a chessboard of fields, with an occasional square
covered by some still managed remnant of what the mediaeval landscape had
been. These remnants were relatively few and mostly conserved as nature reserves.
All semblances of intact ecosystems had long gone and there was a deep distrust
of any move to reinstate birds or mammals that had once been native, but shot
out long ago in the interests of one landowner or another. The catchment of the
Seventine was thus largely bare of forest, apart from plantations of exotic conifers
in the uplands, and almost entirely farmed. The island location, however, added
a strong maritime dimension and the surrounding seas had long been overfished,
whilst the coastline, perhaps the island's wildest feature, was indented with bays
and rocky headlands, sand dune systems and estuaries pressing deep into the
hinterland.
Flooding was a major preoccupation and most of the funds of its national
agency for the environment went on sea defences, the leveeing of rivers and the
drainage of flood plains.
Its once abundant ponds had been decimated several times over, as agriculture
had become intensive in the last half of the 20th century and ponds had become
inconvenient for the passage of large machines. A traveller crossing the coast by
air would thereafter never be out of sight of a town and tracts of arable or pasture.
It was such a heavily populated island that many rivers had been dammed for
water supply, and in the slightly drier south-east the ground waters had been
heavily mined through an exuberant policy of irrigation.
The inhabitants first noticed the effects, in the early 21st century, of warmer,
wetter winters as mosses grew prolifically on the drives up to their houses and
the rocks of their rockery gardens and the weeds in the flower beds persisted in
the rarity of the frosts that had previously and conveniently killed them. Gardening
was a national preoccupation, much in line philosophically with the controlled
approach to the landscape in general. People also noticed, as the years went on,
a tendency for water to become scarce in late summer as the levels in the many