CIVIL ENGINEER RICARDO AGUIRRE ASSERTS THAT NATURE WILL OUT-PERFORM SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Nature-based management will solve problems such as drought, desertification and flooding that engineering has not yet solved.
“I really believe that we need to shift our perspective back to Nature, hitch our wagon to something that's been proven for four billion years, as opposed to something that's only been around for 150 years.”
--Ricardo Aguirre
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HART HAGAN: What would you like to see happen in the American West? If you had, if you had a high-level position and could make things happen, what would you recommend?
RICARDO AGUIRRE: We need to be actively and aggressively managing our land better. So whether this so-called high-level position would be with a state level or federal level, we need to focus on our land. We need to properly manage our land with actively managed livestock, and scale that up.
We are consultants for local, state and federal level governments. We're noticing that there are other consultants out there that are using mechanical, chemical and manual treatments.
The reality is that nature didn't evolve with these systems. These systems only evolved out of the Industrial Age which has only been around for 150 years. If you look at a law called the Lindy effect or the Lindy law, it states that the longer something has been around the likelihood is that it will continue to be around a long time.
When you look at technology, you can see this. We don't have rotary dial anymore. We don’t use fax machines because it's all on our cell phone.
Life on planet Earth has been around for four billion years, compared to the Industrial Age, which produced Science and Technology. That's only been around for 150 years. Civil engineering is a product of assembly line, industrial, scientific thinking. And that's where the pipe, the channel and a hole in the ground comes in. [Ricardo, a civil engineer, observes that civil engineering only teaches you three tools, a pipe, a channel and a hole in the ground.]
I really believe that we need to shift our perspective back to Nature, hitch our wagon to something that's been proven for four billion years, as opposed to something that's only been around for 150 years.
And if you overlay that 150 years with the desertification of the world's grasslands, it's pretty concurrent, which suggests that we have not been doing a very good job with these technical, scientific practices and that nature had it dialed in all along and evolved in perfection.
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Ricardo Aguirre is a civil engineer based in Arizona. He is one of the very few civil engineers who seeks to treat stormwater as a resource, not a nuisance. He seeks to cause water to soak into the ground, where water can do a lot of good, like providing water for plants to grow, and gradually releasing clean water into the streams and waterways.
For the entire conversation with Ricardo Aguirre, please click on the link to the YouTube video.