Description
What happens when a river stops flowing? Over six decades, Prof. Charles Breen has asked that question from the floodplains of Zululand to the bayous of Louisiana. In this talk he tells four stories from his career.
He starts on the Pongola floodplain, where his pioneering work showed that you can’t manage a river without the people who depend on it. Next comes a year on the Mississippi, where a city is slowly sinking and a lake once disappeared down a drill hole. In the Kruger National Park, rivers were running dry and rare antelope were declining. His answer there was “adaptive management”, an approach now used by parks around the world.
The last story is about our own Knysna Estuary. It covers ancient footprints and lost coastal plains, tides that flush the lagoon in less than a day, and fish stocks that have fallen by 95%. He ends with the question that matters most: what will we do to care for this jewel of the Garden Route?
Prof. Breen is a Water Research Commission Legend (2021), a Limnological Society Gold Medallist and a Distinguished Alumnus of Rhodes University.
