This is not another depressing book on how little water we have left on the planet. Nor is it a book about how doomed we all are (though we very well may be). Sure, you will learn about some unhappy facts throughout these chapters, because, well, we really have turned our freshwater supply into a mess. My hope, however, is that by the time you’ve read the last words of the last chapter, you step away feeling not depressed, but enlightened, and a little more up to speed on what is truly happening with our water.
That way, next time you’re at a cocktail party and the discussion somehow shifts to H20, you’ll have something more to say than: it’s the oil of the 21st century.
Because for years now, that’s what the media and experts alike have said. Everyone wants water, but eventually there simply won’t be enough to go around. That’s what they say.
Based on these predictions, the future looks pretty bad on a global scale. A crystal ball would show more poverty, more wars, more droughts, major declines in food production, displaced populations, and increases in mosquito-borne illness.
Looking for ways to make their millions off of the panic, the money hungry are eating up these predictions, already bracing themselves for such a future. That includes guys like the Canadian dentist Otto Spork. In July 2013, a Harper’s journalist exposed Spork for securing water rights to a glacier in Iceland, with plans to create a global-warming Ponzi scheme.
How did we come to this? We live on the blue planet; doesn’t that mean we’re water-rich?
One would think so, based on the numbers: more than 70 percent of our planet is covered in water, at around 332.5 million cubic miles. [USGS]
To put those numbers into perspective, that’s the rough equivalent of about 366,776,800,000,000,000,000 gallon-sized milk containers of water. [http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/oceanwater.html]
That seems like a lot, right?
It is. But if we consider how much is actually available to us freshwater-dependent humans, the number is much smaller. Perhaps you have heard that: of the 332.5 million cubic miles of water on earth, only about two percent of it is freshwater, and around 68 percent of that two percent is frozen in our ice caps and glaciers.
So, as far as water for human consumption goes, we are not quite as water-rich as one would think.
That doesn’t stop us from acting like it, though, especially in first world countries. If everyone on earth lived as long as the average American (about 77 years) and consumed as much water as the average American, each person would use approximately 1.8 million gallons of water within a lifetime.
[http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/lessons/14/g68/HumanFootprint.pdf]
So if you divvied up the earth’s available freshwater supply into 1.8 million gallons of water per person, that would be enough water to support the lifetimes of about 1,594,460,255,556 people.
Wait! But the world’s population is currently at 7 billion people, or 7,000,000,000,000, and growing!
So, how are we getting by?
Let me be clear: water is not going anywhere. It’s a renewable resource that never leaves our planet. We have just as much of it now as we have ever had. Mass cannot be created or destroyed, right? The law of conservation of mass applies to water, too.
So, if we have enough water to support 1,594,460,255,556 people throughout their lifetime, couldn’t we just keep using and reusing water to support everyone?
Because water is, and always has been, in a constant cycle. It is forever changing states, fluctuating from the oceans to the clouds, snowing onto the mountains, and melting into our rivers and streams.
In an ideal world, yes. We should be able to use and reuse water. After all, that’s the standard procedure on earth. And, prior to the 19th century, that wasn’t a problem.
Unfortunately, we have exponentially rendered more and more of our water unusable, largely due to industry. You can read more about that in chapter xxx.
We are also demanding water at rates faster than we can keep up with. At least in countries like the U.S., Canada, Australia, and most of Europe.
The ugly truth though, is that the other 80 percent of the world population doesn’t use, or have even remote access to, such massive amounts of water. Only about 20 percent of the world’s population enjoys running water in such abundance.
[http://www.theworldwater.org/water_facts.php]
For example, while one average American may use anywhere from 60 to more than 100 gallons of water in a day, an average family in Africa uses about five. [http://www.theworldwater.org/water_facts.php, http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/lessons/14/g68/HumanFootprint.pdf]
Why the disparity? Here’s the short answer: at least one billion people worldwide trek three-plus hours to get their drinking water.
[http://www.theworldwater.org/water_facts.php]
Here in the U.S., though, we have done an excellent job of muscling around our water, from Lake Powell to the Colorado River, making it all too easy to turn a knob and let the water just flow. Just wait until you read chapter three!