Water

What can't we live without, even for a few days? Not food, not oil, not (sorry John Lennon) love. What we need is water. And it better be relatively clean if we want to live long.

Radio host, Tom Ashbrook ( OnPoint ), and his guest Fred Pearce ("When the Rivers Run Dry: Water - The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century") were discussing a point that has long been near and dear to my heart: the water issues facing the world today and into the near future.

As most of you will know, the earth doesn't lose or gain water - it recycles it. Water in the atmosphere precipitates as rain-snow-sleet and then it absorbs-evaporates-runs off. We can drink from springs and wells (ground water), but most cities and large towns can't be serviced in this way because of the density of the population, hence the resevoirs which surround them. And, most of our riverways are polluted from human or animal sewage and from silty or chemical ladden farmland runoff. Unfortunately, water doesn't fall evenly on all surfaces of the earth. We have water in abundance in some of the remotest places (the arctic, antarctic, glacier covered mountains), but not in some of the most populated areas (India, California, Mexico City).

Fred Pearce postulates that India will run out of water in 10 years. The monsoons will still come to give them rain once a year, but their ground water is nearly gone. He travelled to major rivers across the globe to find many didn't reach their deltas. Most shrivelled up way before they reached the ocean. The atlas on your shelf provides a false image. We levi rivers, we dam them, we run divert them. He speaks of the Yellow River in China which has been levi'd for hundreds of years. It has risen to dozens of feet above it's original banks. You can stand at the tops of the levis and look down on what used to be fertile floodplains, naturally fertilized by the annual floods.

There are simple ways to help conserve water, not all are as obvious as shortening shower time. Apparently, coffee production uses huge amounts of water and cotton is a very thirsty crop. I want to quit coffee all over again and start buying more hemp and flax and less cotton.....

....More to come....