Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Our Most Dangerous Addiction


It's not crystal meth. It's not even gasoline. Our most dangerous addiction, at least in the near future, is freshwater.

The earth's volume of water is a constant. It goes from water to water vapour to rain. The very water you drink from your tap today probably went through a few dinosaurs way back when. That may not be a pleasant thought with your morning coffee, but it's true.

The good part is that we don't really consume water as we consume fossil fuels. Our water is a renewable resource and always will be.

The problem is with how we've come to use our water, the rate at which we consume it compared to the rate at which it is renewed. There's your problem.

The rapidly renewed water is on the surface. Most of our freshwater, however, is in the ground where, after a very long time, it accumulates in formations we call acquifers. It's believed about 80% of man's freshwater supply comes from groundwater.

Think of these acquifers as a bank account that's been carried on by the same family, generation upon generation. Each week a dollar is deposited to that account. No withdrawals. After several centuries the balance becomes quite respectable.

Now, imagine you decide you need a thousand dollars a week for some worthwhile purpose, so you start taking that out of the bank account. What's going to happen? You have one dollar a week coming in, a thousand going out. Obviously you'll run out of money before long.

In the early 1800's the global population first broke the billion mark. Today we're at 6-billion and climbing. Tens of thousands of years to reach a billion, two hundred to increase that sixfold. Quite an accomplishment but it hasn't been easy.

The way we got to six billion was through the much heralded 'green revolution' where we learned techniques of intensive agriculture. We were, generally speaking, able to ramp up our food production to meet the demands of this burgeoning population.

More people, more food, everybody's happy. Of so we thought. What we overlooked (or at least I did and you too probably) is that we were able to produce all this additional food by looting our freshwater aquifers. In effect, we've been drawing down this water supply far faster than nature can replenish it.

Now we still have all those mouths to feed and the agricultural answer still requires groundwater to work its magic. Ergo, when the groundwater runs out, the agriculture runs out, and, in turn, the food required to feed those newly arrived billions runs out.

You really don't have to be a scientist to understand this and whether you believe global warming is a hoax doesn't matter in the least. The water itself isn't running out. We're just drawing it down faster than it can be replenished.

No comments: