OVER MY HEAD IN WATER...

I HAVE BEEN READING QUITE A BIT about what we are doing with all the water in the world. At a practical level, there has been a bit of snow clearing from the driveway and some shoving of snow from off my car. For now, the snow has gone away but the temperatures keep around freezing point. Yesterday (Monday) was an exception with the temperature rocketing to the mid-40s; I ventured out into the garden and even took Uma's scooter out for a spin around the block.

I suppose that one thing that retirees can do is to read lots of books that just happen to interest and then pass on some of that to others via a blog, which seems to be just what I am doing. I have been amazed at how much literature there is about our use of water. There seems to be so much to discover about this that I feel more than a little overwhelmed by it all.

About 200 years back, an English clergyman, Thomas Malthus, got worried about the relationship between population and food supplies. Dear Rev. Tom figured that, since food supplies increase linearly and populations increase exponentially, eventually there would be more people in the world than could be fed putting the human race into a precarious situation. I am sure he had no idea how may people would be on the face of the earth 200 years on. The Rev. Tom's ideas have been quite influential in several areas of science, economics, and population dynamics. He was a skeptic about the promised benefits of the looming industrial revolution and, while the grim conclusions arising from his analysis have been delayed in fulfillment, what with the industrialization of food production, the Green Revolution, and the like, it has taken until our own time for his ideas to have their full impact.

One of the 'and the like's has been the phenomenal increase in the use of irrigation in agriculture since his writing. Humans have been irrigating crops for thousands of years because water is like magic when it comes to increasing food production. It takes around 1,000 tons of water to produce a ton of wheat (and lots, lots more to produce a ton of corn) and, if you are relying on rainfall you get just one good crop per year. With irrigation we can produce wheat and other food even in the dessert, multiply yields many times over, and have two or even three crops each year from the same piece of land. So, if you can put 3,000 tons of water onto the ground you stand to get three tons of wheat where you would have only gotten one. Not bad, eh! Actually, completely astonishing!

The good old Brits got modern irrigation going in India about the time that Malthus was writing his stuff about how the world would one day run out of food enough to feed its growing population. Not content with just improving what the Indian farmers had been doing for thousands of year, the Brits build new canals, barrages and dams. When American engineers got wind of this, they got busy with irrigation during the settlement of the West. They learned to make even bigger dams than the Brits had managed to do and soon, using American methods, those Brits were doing the same all over their Empire and also in places like Egypt.

Today, 40% of food is produced through irrigation. Despite this being the Water Planet, only a very small portion is fresh enough to drink or to use for agricultural and industrial purposes. Most fresh water is under ground so, once centrifugal pumps became available, it was not long before farmers were pumping water out of the huge aquifers as well as diverting it from river systems and lakes. There are problems with adding all this water to the land that were not easily foreseen when the irrigation is started. A big problem is rising soil salination; eventually this can stop farming on the land affected so that the amount of land suitable for agriculture actually begins to diminish. This problem may not be insoluble (sorry about the pun) but it will take a lot of money to research it and change farming practices. Another is that we are using water faster faster than it is being replenished by natural cycles.

Still another problem is that the supply of water for human use and for agriculture is also diminishing. This is due to industrial pollution of water on the surface and underground. As an example, where I live there are considerable gas bearing shale formations underground. To get significant amounts of gas out of these formations it is necessary to drill horizontal wells (down into the shale and then sideways) and then to pump in water and sand to fracture the shale and allow the gas to escape and be collected. This takes a million or so gallons of water per drilled, productive well. When the water returns to the surface it bears the sand and lots of other 'gunk' likely as not rendering this water unusable ass well as polluting steams and aquifers. I am sure each of you readers know of similar instances of industrial pollution.

Expanding cities result not only act to reduce farmland by covering agricultural land by buildings, parking lots, and roads that also interferes with hydrological cycle as well as the run off, with pollutants, going straight into rivers and lakes. In the US, road surfaces cover an area equal to the size of Kansas, not counting parking lots that occupy more space than do buildings in most cities. Another effect of cities is to divert water from agriculture as the balance of population shifts from rural to urban living.

Enough of this! Reading in this area is entirely depressing and I warn you not to proceed. It is very hard to know what any individual can do about it, unless you happen to be a Maude Barlow (read her books).

Well, the thing is that there is a fixed amount of water on this planet (disregarding the minute amounts added via small meteorites and comets entering the atmosphere). Surface water is increasingly polluted through population increase, agriculture, and industry. Under pressure to grow more crops, farmers the world over are pumping water out of aquifers faster than the replenishment rate even while available productive land is diminishing. Oh...and then there is global warming possibly resulting in warming and drying of land currently used for food production.

This all too much!!! Maybe Malthus finally has a point.