The weather this summer showed a deficiency in temperature and precipitation – a long-term trend. It appears though that our land is drying out and the effects of this shortage of precilJitation are far worse than the weather data show. Fewer woodlands and swamps, more silt in the watercourses and reservoirs, more paving, more sunny instead of shady places, all add up to poor capacity to
store water. Nowadays it takes only a small shortage of rainfall to be apparent 1n vegetation, even in crop failures; and conversely when it does rain hard, as with Hurricane Agnes, everything is flooded.