The Tupi people, one of the main ethnic groups of Brazilian indigenous people, believe in a male supernatural being called “Curupira” that guards the forest in Tupi mythology. I crowned this BLOG with his name because I aspire the BLOG, which deals with insects as part of the nature, to play a role just like Curupira who protects the forest from the destructive habits of man.
27 Nov, 2008
We've been having quite a lot of rainfall these days.
When it rains, the level of rainfall easily reaches 70 mm or so in two to three hours, causing the creek running right by the Museum to overflow in a snap.
The swollen creek. The bank of the creek would normally appear 10 meters behind the water line shown in the photo.
When I constructed the Museum back in 1988, there were less than 10,000 people living upstream of this point; the landscape at that time reminded me of that of a scarcely-populated deep-forest region in the mountains in Japan. After 20 years of continuous development, the once-secluded area is now populated by 300,000 to 400,000 people, and is gridded with paved roads and dotted with occasional lonesome mango trees in residential quarters. As easily conceivable, even a short period of pouring rain can flood the canal, which irresistibly brings tons of garbage into my pond. What a bummer.
Usually there is an elevation difference of more than 100 cm between the level of the creek and that of the pond; so, there is no problem so far as the rainfall stays within 50 mm.
The creek's susceptibility to flooding is a result of successful campaigning against its dredging led by an environmentalist living across the stream, who advocated that any dredging work would wipe out the Amazonian alligator population inhabiting there.
But without dredging, the banks of the creek have been filled with trash washed ashore and, as a matter of course, ended up depriving the reptilians of their spawning ground.
The protection of alligators is a sound judgment on the one hand, and yet the campaign approach was partial and lacked a comprehensive perspective.
As the time has passed, the creek is getting increasingly clogged due to ever growing heaps of rubbish, and the foul smell of stagnant water is getting stronger.
Penned on Nov. 27, 2008
