Part 4: Water Conservation on EcoHearth.com

By John Potter

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This is the fourth in a series of articles I’ve written for EcoHearth.com about the perils facing fresh water supplies.
I hope you enjoy it.

Fresh Water Supplies At Risk, Part 4: Water Conservation

Although environmental protection and restoration can provide us with cleaner water and lots of it, that doesn’t negate the benefits of conservation. In many—if not most—places, conservation is essential to ensure ample water for everyone’s use. It may seem an obvious statement, but conservation by consumers costs less and has a smaller impact on the environment than any other method of maintaining the flow of clean water to consumers.

Conservation means protecting and preserving, not wasting—but it doesn’t necessarily mean going without. Asceticism is an effective method of conserving, but the general population is unlikely to embrace that approach. Smaller steps and better, less-invasive methods are more likely to be accepted en masse.

In places such as Las Vegas and most of Florida, freshwater resources have always been limited. Now they are spread even thinner under the stress of booming populations, extravagant lifestyles and public policy that hasn’t changed to accommodate the new conditions. There are two obvious methods of conserving water in these types of places (and any other for that matter): stop wasting water and use what is available more efficiently.

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Fresh Water Supplies At Risk Series:
Part 1,
Part 2,
Part3,
Part4

Part 3: Repairing the Water Cycle on EcoHearth.com

By John Potter

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This is the third in a series of articles I’ve written for EcoHearth.com about the perils facing fresh water supplies.
I hope you enjoy it.

Fresh Water Supplies At Risk, Part 3: Repairing the Water Cycle

Not all solutions to our clean-water supply problems require enormous and complex man-made engineering endeavors. The water cycle was here on Earth before man, and it has worked just fine for millennia. Sometimes the best thing we can do is return our planet to its original state (or as close as possible) and let nature repair itself.

Water moves through watersheds, or drainage areas, which act like giant geographic funnels pulling all of the surrounding surface water to a river or stream. Environmental factors within each watershed directly affect the quality of water passing through it.

Nature’s way of purifying water is through filtration, sedimentation, organic breakdown of materials, ion-exchange, oxidation-reduction and sorption-desorption. Some of these methods are not dissimilar to those we use in purification and waste treatment, but are much better. The big difference is that nature works more slowly than man-made systems; in fact, the more slowly the process proceeds, the more effective the purification.

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Fresh Water Supplies At Risk Series:
Part 1,
Part 2,
Part3,
Part4

Part 2: Groundwater on EcoHearth.com

By John Potter

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This is the second in a series of articles I’ve written for EcoHearth.com about the perils facing fresh water supplies.
I hope you enjoy it.

Fresh Water Supplies At Risk, Part 2: Groundwater

Only one-percent of liquid freshwater is on the surface of the Earth; 99% is underground, held in what are called aquifers, water-bearing rock layers that serve as vast natural warehouses of fresh water. Aquifers can be found virtually everywhere on the globe, but they aren’t always easily accessible, and those that are can be more susceptible to contamination. Once an aquifer has been contaminated, it is not easy to return it to its original state. The “out of sight, out of mind” quality that makes them easy to pollute also makes them difficult to clean.

Potential aquifer contamination is why gas stations have such strict rules regarding their underground tanks. Even the small puddle of oil under your car in the parking lot has the potential of seeping into the ground and coming out of your kitchen faucet.

Other major threats include fertilizer leaching into groundwater, pesticide intrusion and landfill seepage. Many of these hazards are lessened by good regulation and best practices as well as improved technology, but there are many other steps that can be taken to preserve these essential underground ecosystems.

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Fresh Water Supplies At Risk Series:
Part 1,
Part 2,
Part3,
Part4

Part 1: Surface Water on EcoHearth.com

By John Potter

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This is the first in a series of articles I’ve written for EcoHearth.com about the perils facing fresh water supplies.
I hope you enjoy it.

Fresh Water Supplies At Risk, Part 1: Surface Water

The water on this planet is finite. Even so, although we use it, we never lose it. Rather, water cycles through the environment and returns to us. In one simplified example, when a droplet of rain falls, it runs along the ground into a river that carries it to the sea. There it eventually evaporates into the atmosphere and becomes rain again. Along the way, that droplet may have been drunk by an animal or taken in by the roots of a tree, but in the end it moves through the same basic cycle again and again. Although we cannot remove water from this cycle, we can redistribute it so that an area has more or less. We also have the capacity to pollute it to such a degree that it is unusable or even poisonous.

Although water covers 70% of our planet’s surface, nearly all of it is difficult to use or access. According to the U.S. Geological Survey 97 percent of Earth’s water exists in the oceans as saltwater, 2.061% is frozen in glaciers and icecaps, 0.903% is underground, and 0.027% is part of the atmosphere or in plants and animals (including us). This leaves just 0.009 percent as surface water in lakes, streams, rivers and the like.

Put another way, of the 1% of Earth’s liquid and potable H2O, almost all is locked away far underground. Even so, we have enough to meet our present needs. This may not always be the case. As our population increases, so do our requirements. We also continue to pollute our available fresh water at an alarming rate and use much of the rest inefficiently.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON ECOHEARTH.COM

Fresh Water Supplies At Risk Series:
Part 1,
Part 2,
Part3,
Part4