Water

What water scarcity?

71% of the earth’s sur­face is cov­ered in water. Yes that’s salty, but sweet water orig­i­nates from evap­o­ra­tion off the oceans, plus a little bit of desali­na­tion through dis­til­la­tion or reverse osmosis that we perform. 

We can elec­tro­cute water, split­ting it into oxygen and hydrogen, and it can also get locked up in min­erals, but within the hydro­logic cycle, water is prac­ti­cally never syn­the­sized or broken up. It’s almost as with energy, which is never cre­ated nor destroyed, according to the 1st law of Ther­mo­dy­namics. And in the realm of energy, the sun irra­di­ates onto the earth’s land masses in about 90min all the energy humanity requires in a year. So it is equally inac­cu­rate to talk about energy scarcity or an energy crisis. I’m not a cor­nu­copian, there are tech­no­log­ical chal­lenges to gen­er­a­tion and storage, but fun­da­men­tally, we have energy aplenty. 

Like­wise, we have been con­tent with the amount of fresh water in cir­cu­la­tion for mil­lennia, admit­tedly before the big pop­u­la­tion increase brought about by har­nessing fossil fuels, and before cli­mate change. Still, it is not accu­rate to say that there is too little fresh water, rather we overuse fresh water and nature’s capacity to purify it after we soil it. 

So yes we waste water, but mainly by using it for pur­poses that such a sub­stance is just too pre­cious to be used for. With its three aggre­gate states reg­u­larly occur­ring, its res­o­nance, the unique crys­tal­lizing prop­er­ties and the 4° anomaly enabling all life on earth, it is def­i­nitely one of the most fas­ci­nating sub­stances on earth – yet we are using it to wash away our feces – yet we are using it to wash away our faeces. In nature, ani­mals drink from streams and pee in the woods. Woods never stink, the layer of top­soil is like a mas­sive biore­actor, thin on a global scale, and easily eroded away, but when intact, incred­ibly pow­erful at breaking down any­thing dis­solved in water. Hor­mones, wreaking havoc on fish in aquatic ecosys­tems, are gone within a matter of hours in soil. Even heavy metals are immobilized. 

We are not ani­mals (despite what evo­lu­tionary biology wants to make us believe), but when it comes to living in nature, we could learn a thing or two from them. Using water as a car­rier for human waste has its ori­gins in the roman empire, as cov­ered in this charming doc­u­men­tary. Ini­tially, it was fresh water that had already been used in foun­tains and baths, so it was directly re-used grey water. Fresh water was far too pre­cious. Using clean fresh water in toi­lets should be con­sid­ered an soci­etal dead end. Better ways exist.

As the latest IPCC report shows again, agri­cul­ture is a main con­trib­utor to cli­mate change. It would be impor­tant to acknowl­edge that the main driver for cli­mate change is local, dis­rupting the hydro­logic cycle, draining water quickly and thus removing the coolant from the land­scape, bringing about top­soil ero­sion and dra­matic loss of fer­tility, that can only be com­pen­sated through mas­sive use of fer­til­izer gen­er­ated using huge amounts of released fossil energy, as explained over on the nature page. We can no longer afford the fossil fuel depen­dency nor the nature-degrading prop­er­ties of the modern indus­tri­al­ized agri­cul­ture. Again – alter­na­tives and pio­neering exam­ples thereof, do exist.