“Water” Letter to the editor
I mentioned village economics last week writing that our first priority should be food and water. One can live more than a month without food but will die in four days without water so let’s think about water. Water is what allowed life to happen on this planet if you think about it, our bodies are 75% water, our brain is 80% water and our blood 90%. I expect we can agree it is critically important, so why do we waste so much of it? And why do we drink so much soda pop which is 10,000 times more acidic than our blood when we are thirsty? It is full of sugar for one thing, I guess that explains it, but one does not have to be a nutritionist to suspect that it may not be very good for us. Our health depends on good water and thousands of babies die in this world every day for the lack of it.
Less that one hundredth of one percent of the water on our planet is fresh. Renewed only by rainfall it is what sustains our forests, our farms, our grasslands and all terrestrial life on earth. Our civilization uses it as if it were limitless draining water tables, lakes, rivers and swamps at unsustainable rates, irrigating crops that are 80-90% water and shipping them elsewhere. To make matters worse we are still dumping sewage, garbage and toxic chemicals into our drinking water.
Our climate on this planet is dependent on water as well. We’ve been enjoying, I think, the wettest July in memory and it has kept us much more comfortable than normal. So much so that one might even imagine that “global warming” is a myth. But a friend of mine wrote a book about global warming and climate change years ago which said that it would be marked by disrupted and erratic weather patterns. If you watch the weather channel you can tell we are experiencing that for sure. Over 100 in the northwest and in the 80s in Texas, in July! Our planet’s forests are essential to moderating our climate because of the water they store and process. We are not experiencing water scarcity here in Perry County yet but some places in the world are not so lucky and it might be wise for us to consider some local water conservation measures as we continue toward an uncertain future.
First let me tell you about the Konso people who live high, between 6000 and 13,000 feet, in the mountains of southwestern Ethiopia. Who knew? Anyway, for hundreds of years they have been farming that region utilizing a very sophisticated system of water catchments and irrigation channels all built of earth and stone. These water catchments were specially designed ponds built with the full participation of everyone in the village. If you were away when it was time to work on the dam that created your village pond you came back to help. The men dug out earth to make the pond and used it to build a dam. The women and children would dance and sing, sometimes all night to compact the earth on the dam with their feet. Then the pond was lined with rock to protect the dam and with regular maintenance, also a whole village affair, has supplied their water for hundreds of years. They are surrounded by living thorn bush fences to keep the animals from spoiling the water which instead were watered in troughs nearby filled with the pond’s water. A system of filtering plants, gravel beds and rock spillways also cleaned and aerated the water as it entered the pond. All this knowledge about how to build and maintain this water system was passed along to the children in the songs the women and old folks sang to them. All was going fine until last century when massive deforestation, wars and government policy tore the region up. For a time the UN and various missionaries tried unsuccessfully to build them a water system and most people get their water now from pipes that only work a couple hours per day. The problem was that the many villages in the area had worked out longstanding traditions and agreements on how to care for the water and these have been disrupted and the forest that was once considered sacred that was essential for their having water no longer exists. It is a sad story but now that everyone is aware of the problem the forest can be replanted and the dams rebuilt. It may take some time but the people of Konso know how to do it if they are only allowed to.
Many of us have been watching with dread as our local forest is being cut down, it has been happening everywhere. The great forest of the Amazon is still being cleared. Because of the devastation deforestation has caused some countries have made laws against cutting their forests, New Zealand, China, the Philippines and Thailand are among them. Unfortunately this shifts the deforestation to other countries or drives illegal logging. Still, our having water depends on our having a healthy forest system. The forest can supply medicine, food and shelter as well. Anything we can due to stem the tide of deforestation in our region will help us and future generations survive the future.
There are other things we can do to preserve and protect our water too. Rain barrels are long standing ways of collecting and preserving water for the drier times. For every inch of rain fall a 1000 square foot roof will shed 600 gallons of water. That requires a big rain barrel so often cisterns were built with a much larger capacity. The water coming off of the roofs of our downtown buildings amounts to thousands of gallons every time it rains. The new downtown street plan, as its architects said in the public meeting where they presented the plan, is largely a water management issue. That being the case I was a little disappointed they didn’t address that better. The green spaces they showed could have been rain gardens or small wetlands that helped slow the water down and clean it up before going on into the river. A healthy wetland, by the way, is a mosquito eater not a breeder. The state (TDEC) has a website that describes how tiny wetland shrimp and certain plants keep mosquito populations way down. We can start composting our human wastes too instead of contaminating our water with our flush toilets and then poisoning the pathogens we’ve put into it before dumping it into the river. There are better ways of doing it and people are just beginning to realize how important our water is. I hope we will all soon begin to treat water as the essential ingredient it is for life in Perry County.
