What is soft-path river engineering? One way to visualize its spirit is to liken it to a footpath in the forest. Suppose a tree falls across a footpath. A soft-path response would be simply to redirect the trail around the fallen tree. A more interventionist response would be to ① remove the tree and restore the original route. A still more interventionist response might be to straighten and pave the path to insert it more ② permanently in the landscape. The true high-modernist step would, of course, be to ③ create a superhighway that removes the landscape and bulldozes straight through all obstacles in the topography. Soft-path engineering has the unique advantage of intellectual ④ modesty with respect to what we actually know about river movement and its environmental effects. In contrast to hard-path engineering, soft-path engineering accepts variability in the river’s movement as ⑤ insignificant until proven otherwise. Backwaters, short-lived wetlands, braids and channels, swamps ― all undesirable to hard-path engineering ― are presumed by soft-path engineers to be ecologically important.
* pave: 포장하다 ** topography: 지형