[Tagging] Marking waterway=brook as deprecated and problematic

[Kevin Kenny]

On Wed, Dec 30, 2020 at 12:19 PM Brian M. Sperlongano <zelonewolf at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I do not understand this notion that in order to tag water, a mapper must
> first determine whether that water is "natural" or "man-made" (whatever
> "man-made water" is.  I envision someone with a white coat and some beakers
> in a lab creating this franken-water).  It seems to me that it makes much
> more sense to be able to say "this is water" and then allow further tagging
> to say "a ha!  this is (natural/artificial)" and then add further
> clarifying tags.  Otherwise we are essentially saying "do not tag water
> unless you can first determine whether it is natural or artificial!
>
> It does not help that the primary water tag is classified under the
> "natural" key.  Thus there is a contingent that believes that the water
> that has collected in naturally-occuring pond is "natural", while the water
> that has collected in a reservoir is somehow "man-made".  Water in a canal
> or reservoir is just as natural as a forest in which all of the trees have
> been planted by humans.
>

This. (Although I imagine the "man-made water" as dripping out the exhaust
of some sort of hydrogen-fueled contraption.)

As I said before, for a lot of ponds that I've visited, I don't have access
to the outlet and can't determine whether the water is retained by a rock
sill, glacial till, beavers or humans. (And it gets more complicated on
that. When I was a child, my uncle had a pond on his farm that was retained
by a beaver dam that was built on top of the ruins of a demolished
human-constructed one.) In any case, humans may have built a dam, but
ordinarily Mother Nature has provided the water.  I know of only a few
cases (the pumped storage at https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/135584316
comes to mind) where humans have pumped the water into where it wouldn't
flow naturally.

I don't hold with the neo-Platonic idea that 'natural=*' must mean "this
feature is entirely untouched by human hands," nor the idea that land
before the modern Europeans came was some sort of Eden, not sculpted by the
indigenous peoples. There are some summits around here that are now known
to be 'natural=bare_rock' or 'natural=scrub' because earlier inhabitants
burnt them, possibly for religious reasons. They remain clear now simply
because the repeated clearings over centuries depleted the soil to where
trees will not grow.  The competing hypothesis that they were scraped clean
in the glacial epochs is largely refuted by the fact that there are similar
nearby heights that are densely forested. Why would the ice have denuded
one beyond repair, while another grew back to trees in the last fourteen
thousand years or so?

(Related issue: 'natural=wood' meaning "unmanaged".  What's "unmanaged"?
Where I come from, the wilderness areas are among the most intensively
managed areas around. They're managed to constrain and repair human impact.
Some of them are "old second growth" - last harvested over 150 years ago,
and regrown to where only a trained forester or ecologist can tell the
difference between them and first-growth forest, particularly in spots
where the long-lived hemlocks and oaks are rare.)


-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
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