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Just out of college and employed at Lycoming County as their first environmental planner, author Tim Palmer found himself living in the middle of one of the area's most catastrophic weather events -- the flooding resulting from Hurricane Agnes in 1972.
Environmental planning was a new field when Palmer joined the county to work under then-planning director Jerry Walls.
"Incorporating those concerns into planning for land-use had not been done very much before the 1970s," according to Palmer, who responded to questions in email and telephone interviews.
"Not that people didn't care about things like clean water and open spaces for nature, communities, and recreation; the environment had simply not yet been much recognized by the government at any level, really. It was an exciting time, trying to figure out how to do that in ways that were both effective and acceptable," he said.
Palmer worked in county planning for nine years.
"Those were some of the best years of my life. The work was very demanding and extremely rewarding," he said.
He left, as he said, "because of the 'pull' and not the 'push.'"
"The work was good. The boss and the staff were great and we were getting a lot done. But, along the way, I had realized that a fundamental need was to increase people's awareness about both the values and the threats to places where we live and where we love to go," he said.
"Without awareness, it's harder to make the case for good planning. So, the challenges of communication with the general public led me to focus on that aspect of the job," he said.
Added to that was his love of everything to do with writing -- the research, interviewing people to learn their points of view, the creative process, the photography embedded in stories and ultimately the production of "beautiful books."
"I had this insatiable hunger to travel and to learn about what was happening to rivers and landscapes all over America," Palmer said.
Out of that hunger has come over 30 books detailing natural sites across the country. His latest, "Seek Higher Ground," is what brings him back to Lycoming County later this month for two speaking engagements and a book signing.
The book offers ideas from an environmental planner's viewpoint about dealing with areas designated as floodplains and what should and should not be located there.
"I'm interested-obsessed one might say-about what's happening to the earth, to its life, to the places that we love and the communities where we live. All of my books address these topics in one way or another. Flood issues were always a critical part of planning: floodplains are often the most dangerous and costly places to live and to develop. Yet we were developing them all the time," he said.
"Within the larger canvas of river protection and land planning, I saw that the flood issues were not being given the attention they deserved. This goes back to my education as a landscape architect, and then being a flood victim and then to my obligations working as a planner in the aftermath of America's greatest flood, up to that date," he explained.
Although he admitted that "everything is affected by an event as tumultuous as the Agnes Flood," Palmer points to a time when he was a student at Penn State and studied with a forester who impressed on him "the need to respect floodplains and protect them as open spaces."
"I had grown up along the Ohio River in western Pennsylvania and understood the message. Then after I went to work here for the Lycoming County Planning Commission, the cabin where my wife and I lived along Pine Creek was nearly flooded and the neighbors were hit badly," Palmer said.
"As soon as the roads opened, I returned to my job, which was not just to deal with the aftermath, but more important, to figure out how to avoid such a catastrophe in the future. We soon began work on the county's first comprehensive land-use plan and we addressed the flooding issue as part of that. We managed to help all the county's local municipalities to develop floodplain zoning and to comply with the national flood insurance program so that people could get insurance," he said.
But across the country, the programs were not so successful.
"We were very hopeful and expected back then, that the flood insurance program would bring about a new era of progressive, insightful planning to finally begin to solve the perpetual problem of flood damage in America. It didn't really turn out that way," he said.
"As time went on, the goals of the program were watered down; the administration was compromised; the rules for new development in flood zones were kind of evened; so tragically the program ended up in part an incentive for more development in the flood plain because now the taxpayers were underwriting the risk. That has not worked out. The flood insurance program is $22 billion in debt now," he said.
In the intervening years since he left the Planning Commission, Palmer at first traveled the country living out of his van and writing -- "my book projects took me all over the place," he said -- but he now has been living on the south coast of Oregon for about 22 years.
The idea for the book evolved from what he had seen over those years as a lack of understanding about what needs to be done to mitigate the damage from river flooding.
"There have been changes, but what is more remarkable to me is how little we have learned and really been able to reform the essential systems and programs centered around the hazards of flooding," he said.
In the book, Palmer stresses the fact that although floods have always occurred, the important thing is to not "increase our vulnerability even more than it already is," to flooding.
"When we build homes and infrastructure in the path of high water, the costs and hazards are great," he said.
"The other side of the coin here is important: floods are not only inevitable, but they are essential to the way the earth works. Floods are actually needed for rivers to be healthy. Floods create habitat for fish and wildlife, they deliver overflows that soak into the groundwater that we need for our water supplies, and floods are needed for nature to function in other essential ways that I describe in the book. The bottom line here is that we need to learn to live with nature instead of fighting against it," he said.
Palmer stated that he was prompted to write the book over 50 years after the Agnes flood event because the "heating climate is now making floods worse."
"A mountain of evidence points to this. For too long we've been in denial about the costs of flooding and about the continual need to address this issue differently. The floods of the future will mean that the age of denial has got to end," Palmer said.
"Whether you believe in global warming or not doesn't matter; we know that the floods are bad and getting worse. Who wants to be a victim here, losing our homes and everything we own? All of that makes this truly a story of our time. It's a story that involves people, politics, and practicalities; engineering, economics, and ecology. Flooding is about way more than the destruction and mayhem that we so often hear about. It's a story about coming to terms with a problem that's been a problem for far too long. It's a story of life in America in the year 2024," he said.
During his visit in the county, Pamer will be featured at the following events: a slide show presentation at the regular meeting of the Lycoming County Planning Commission, 6 p.m. May 16 at 33 W. Third St.; a book-signing at 10 a.m. May 17, at Otto's Books, 107 W. Fourth St.; and a slide show presentation at 2 p.m., May 17 at Lycoming College, Barclay Lecture Hall/Heim G 11, hosted by the Lycoming College Clean Water Institute (CWI).
For more information, visit www.timpalmer.org