“Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink”
This Samuel T. Coleridge’s quotation might as well have been written today,
not about someone at sea, but by almost anyone on this planet. Rain forests
have been denuded, buildings and highways have been erected, we have
burned more fossil fuels in the last century than man burned totally in his
sojourn on this planet up unto that point, we irrigate so we can have fresh
fruits and vegetables out of season, and we waste more water than we use.
Most farmers in this country do not use drip-culture, but saturation
irrigation. We use five galloons waiting for the water to get warm enough to
shower and one gallon waiting for it to be cold enough to drink. Times
those last numbers by three hundred million, give or take!
It is not merely that some places on the planet are scorched and dry; it is that
we are quickly running out of potable water all over. Seeding the clouds,
desalination, and planting a whole bunch of trees ain’t gonna cut it. It takes
one thousand gallons of water to make a ton of those plastic bags at the store
and that water cannot be used again until it is significantly treated; that costs.
Sprinkler systems at commercial establishment and some rich people’s
homes are set to run during the summer even if it is raining. Plus, there is all
the flushing that goes on every day.
This is not a “natural” problem; it is a social one, and it has been since man
first started living together in large numbers. Jared Diamond shows clearly
that the failure of virtually all societies and civilizations that fell on their
own, that is, without being conquered, did so as a direct result of not taking
drinking water into account. Whether it was directly from erosion from
eliminating the vegetation, waste, or pollution, ignoring the obvious has led
to disaster. It is certainly not out of collective ignorance that we bring this
type of cataclysm on ourselves. Whether we are referring to ancient
civilizations in southeast Africa, the Anastasia in southwest North America,
or the Nabateans of the Jordan Valley, there were clear warnings that were
ignored.
Today, one third of the people on the planet have readily accessible clean
drinking water. Loss of habitat for many species of flora and fauna is the
direct or indirect result of humankind’s abuse of water, by damming,
diverting, exhausting, or polluting. It really would be a shame if we were
one of the species killed off.