Dihydrogen Oxide
Water. Aqua. Dihydrogen oxide. We have more of it than you can shake a stick at. Trouble is, only a fraction of 1% is available for consumption by man and beast. Most of the water on Spaceship Earth is salty. The rest -- excepting that fraction of 1% -- is soaked into the ground, evaporated into the atmosphere, frozen in the form of ice and snow, or bound up in living things.
Nature has a never ending cycle of desalinisation and cleansing of this potable water by evaporation, condensing it in the form of clouds, and returning it to earth in the form of rain, sleet and snow. This presents man with two problems: (1) he can neither increase nor decrease the amount of water in this cycle and (2) he cannot dictate when and where this water will be returned to earth. Indeed, Native American rain dances, cloud seeding by airplanes and urgent petitions of the Lord with prayer appear to have little, if any, effect.
Most of the great cities of the world are located on rivers which serve in the endless cycle as conduits for returning the precipitation they collect from their watersheds to the oceans, seas and lakes of the world. Man, in an attempt to exercise his dominion over the earth, has attempted to buffer the flow of water down the smaller rivers with artificial lakes to help ensure a steady supply of potable water for the cities on their banks.
The sustainable sizes of the cities on the banks of rivers are determined in large part by (a) the available flow of water in the rivers and (b) how the available water is used. Nature determines the amount of available water and thereby sets the maximum size of the cities that can be supported by it. Man determines the usage of that water and thereby the minimum size of the cities that can be sustained by the available water. Buffering of the flow by lakes, of course, tends to exaggerate the sustainable size, which in a drought is actually determined by a flow rate smaller than the average flow rate.
So, now we have Raleigh and much of Wake County being supplied with water by the Neuse River in a drought. The buffer lakes have been pumped dry and the city size is at a maximum for the water available to them. What to do?
The city has three choices:
Politicians who push for limiting growth have short lives in the Triangle and the momentum of the market for new commercial and residential construction is too great to change course abruptly.
So, that means Raleigh will be urgently seeking ways to poach water from buffers other than Falls Lake, including Lake Jordan and Lake Gaston. I forsee great Water Wars looming.
As for me, my largest consumption of water is the toilet, and my current contribution to water conservation is a change to "Ode to Water" usage:
Nature has a never ending cycle of desalinisation and cleansing of this potable water by evaporation, condensing it in the form of clouds, and returning it to earth in the form of rain, sleet and snow. This presents man with two problems: (1) he can neither increase nor decrease the amount of water in this cycle and (2) he cannot dictate when and where this water will be returned to earth. Indeed, Native American rain dances, cloud seeding by airplanes and urgent petitions of the Lord with prayer appear to have little, if any, effect.
Most of the great cities of the world are located on rivers which serve in the endless cycle as conduits for returning the precipitation they collect from their watersheds to the oceans, seas and lakes of the world. Man, in an attempt to exercise his dominion over the earth, has attempted to buffer the flow of water down the smaller rivers with artificial lakes to help ensure a steady supply of potable water for the cities on their banks.
The sustainable sizes of the cities on the banks of rivers are determined in large part by (a) the available flow of water in the rivers and (b) how the available water is used. Nature determines the amount of available water and thereby sets the maximum size of the cities that can be supported by it. Man determines the usage of that water and thereby the minimum size of the cities that can be sustained by the available water. Buffering of the flow by lakes, of course, tends to exaggerate the sustainable size, which in a drought is actually determined by a flow rate smaller than the average flow rate.
So, now we have Raleigh and much of Wake County being supplied with water by the Neuse River in a drought. The buffer lakes have been pumped dry and the city size is at a maximum for the water available to them. What to do?
The city has three choices:
In the short term, a change in usage habits is the only viable alternative. But in the long term, it will not set well for the Chamber of Commerce to say you can live here but you cannot irrigate your Scotts-fed grass with potable water.Hold usage to current levels by halting growth. Increase the available supply by tapping into other rivers. Provide the citizens with an incentive to change their usage habits.
Politicians who push for limiting growth have short lives in the Triangle and the momentum of the market for new commercial and residential construction is too great to change course abruptly.
So, that means Raleigh will be urgently seeking ways to poach water from buffers other than Falls Lake, including Lake Jordan and Lake Gaston. I forsee great Water Wars looming.
As for me, my largest consumption of water is the toilet, and my current contribution to water conservation is a change to "Ode to Water" usage:
If it's yellow,In the mountains, of course, I just go down to the compost pile and mellow the yellow there. There's nothing like going back to nature, folks.
let it mellow.
If it's brown,
flush it down.
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