LET’S TALK WATER #4

Doing more with less.

 

My wife and I lived on an acreage for a time. It was a wonderful place, except that it had no potable water so I had to drive into town and fill a tank at the public hydrant, drive it home and transfer it to a storage tank from which a pressure pump would send it to the house. Necessity made of us great conservers of water; we generally got by on 250 litres per day, so 125 litres each.

                Household water use has begun to decline slightly, but in 2009 in Canada, per person use was around 275 litres per day. We were using less than half the Canadian average.

                Household use can be shrunk without real hardship. Innovations like a sink that drains grey water into a toilet tank, taps that release water in bursts of a few seconds when handwashing, low-flow shower heads, in-line water heaters, turning lawns into xeriscape gardens, drip watering of gardens and orchards, etc., are not hard to come by, not expensive relative to the approaching alternatives.  

Although the abundance of fresh water in Canada provides little incentive to conserve, the supply is not endless: glaciers that feed our rivers are melting and will disappear, lakes and rivers are being contaminated through waste-water disposal, chemicals and organic material; ground water is compromised by agricultural chemicals and animal feces, diversion projects for hydro energy, etc. In effect, we’re in the business of turning fresh water into unpotable “sewage;” draining inevitably into the sea, which we’re also well on the way to destroying.

Before we can expect fresh water conservation and protection to become a serious issue, education will be increasingly important. But unless necessity energizes people, it’s doubtful that Western culture will do any better at this than we are currently doing at climate change, or adapting to the digital universe gracefully, or curbing the widening spread between the wealthy and the poor. Unless habits shift, the only alternative left will be water sales or water taxes, moves that hardly seem necessary in a progressive, well-educated society.

Plants and animals (including homo sapiens) have adapted to change and survived, but usually with massive attrition. The principle of natural selection—survival of the fittest, if you like—is the primary means by which species are able over time to adjust to changes in food and habitat conditions, but this is generally only possible when many generations are available for the adjustment. Human generations average out to 25 years or so, so 100 years gives us only 4 generations to adapt; fruit flies, on the other hand, would go through a minimum of 1,300 generations in that time. So in 100 years, fruit flies may well look different but they’ll be getting on just nicely while humans are still at early stages of adjusting to changes in their environment.

Humans, though, adapt through political means, not so much through the pure “survival of the fittest” paradigm, and so are reliant on thought and planning, social consensus and cooperation to make the adaptive changes that keep them fit to live in a changed environment. What this implies is the absolute need for a precise science: analysis, innovation, prediction, and the consensus to live by objectively-derived-at precepts.

But back to water. The right time for enacting strenuous fresh water conservation measures is long past. For Canadians to say there’s no need to conserve is to intone a survival of the fittest mode; a “let the poor freeze in the dark” attitude. “What’s it to me?” 

One reason it matters that we begin strategies of conservation of fresh water is that those in areas without water will pack up and move to wherever water is available. After climate change does its worst, every thirsty eye will focus on Canada and Russia particularly.  

Recommended reading: Postindustrial society | Britannica

 

LET’S TALK WATER -- #3    

So what’s the problem?

(Note: I need to tweak an earlier comment on water and its place in a closed system. Speculation in the scientific community now is that Mars, for instance, was once covered in water, some of which wandered off into space with the bulk being absorbed by the planet’s crust, a multi-billion-year process. If the earth’s water supply is losing molecules to space, that would suggest that the earth is on its way to becoming a barren, lifeless planet similar to Mars … perhaps in a billion or so years, so let’s not panic.)

T

he problem has nothing to do with an actual shortage of H₂O. The problem arises when it’s in a place that’s hard to access or in a condition of contamination that makes it unusable.

Much of the earth’s potable water is stored in underground caverns and sand beds and we access it with wells and pumps. Some of these underground “lakes” or aquifers have gathered over centuries, but as we pump the water out for agricultural purposes and for human consumption, they deplete faster than they can be replenished, so that many of the largest aquifers in places like Western Texas and Southern California, for example, now show alarmingly low water tables.

By far the largest storehouses of water are, of course, the oceans that cover about two-thirds of the earth’s surface. Unfortunately, this water has become heavily salinized through millenniums of salts being carried in by rivers that pick-up earth salts and deposit them there. Although the bulk of our ground water comes from ocean evaporation that rains down on us, evaporation/condensation has a distilling effect; the salts and other minerals remain behind, making ocean water unpalatable without desalinization.

The fresh water stored in solid form in the ice caps of the Arctic and Antarctic is also not a viable source for us either. With climate change, the potential for harvesting and utilizing this water is hardly a prospect worth considering as the Arctic storehouse, particularly, is melting into the oceans where its waters will join the unpotable mass.

Maps of Canada would seem to belie a shortage of water. Large and small freshwater lakes are abundant, but the unlikely prospect of moving water from Lac La Ronge, for instance, to the Salinas Valley in California renders much of our freshwater resource inaccessible for any practical purposes.

The abundance of water where we live makes even conservation seem ludicrous. Many a family in dry areas of Africa could get by for a day with just the water we release down the drain every day while waiting for it to run cold enough … or hot enough. Think about it: we flush our toilets with drinking water!

                But it’s a world problem, and so drought anywhere is our problem too; we’ve become a global village. Canadians during long, frozen winters depend on the orchards of Mexico and the Southern US having enough water so we can consume fruits and vegetables when we can’t practically grow them. Drought, when it becomes widespread and frequent, results in refugee movement and the suffering that migrants endure … and the accommodating adjustments they represent to receiving, "have" countries.

(On this WORLD WATER DAY, MARCH 22, I highly recommend a look at what we do worldwide to make even that fresh water we have unpalatable. See https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/un-world-water-day-photos-1.5956227)

                Look for the next installment where I’ll share some thoughts about the psychology and practicality of conservation.

 

LET’S TALK WATER -- #2

What is Water, Anyway?

As the earth formed, there was present an abundance of different atoms including hydrogen and oxygen gas. These two elements easily form a covalent molecule because the outer ring of the oxygen molecule has six electrons leaving room for two more.

 (Some caution is in order here; the illustration above shows a concept suggested by Niels Bohr, which is very useful because it helps us understand and predict chemical reactions among atoms. Physics has since determined that atoms/molecules are too complex in their behaviour to be rendered visually, one-dimensionally)

 Hydrogen being the simplest atom known has only one electron on its outer ring, so when molecules of hydrogen are in the vicinity of oxygen, the oxygen and hydrogen atoms are able to make a deal to share electrons, thereby creating a more stable molecule than each possess separately. 

Although hydrogen is by far the most abundant element in the universe, it exists mainly in molecular bonding with other elements, water being the main one here on earth. The covalent molecule of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms is what we call “water.” We could call it “di-hydrogen oxide,” but to yell at the dinner table, “Please pass the Di-Hydrogen Oxide” would sound silly.

The earth, for all practical purposes, is a closed system; theoretically, its mass is only increased if it collides with another object in the solar system and its mass is reduced only if we shoot something out of the earth’s orbit. Water is subject to neither of these to any appreciable extent, so the total amount of water on earth remains relatively the same—again, for all practical purposes.

But the water cycle is an open system inside a closed system; energy is repeatedly absorbed and given up so that water evaporates into mist, condenses and falls again as water, a never-ending cycle.

When we talk water, we’re normally referring to liquid water.  The state of the water for washing and drinking—as opposed to fog, clouds and invisible vapour—is fluid (pardon the pun): water and water vapour molecules are in free vibration but when enough energy is removed by cooling, condensation produces liqued water. When molecular vibration in liquid water slows down due to further cooling, it turns to its solid state: ice. 

When water vapour is cooled to below zero degrees Celsius, molecules coalesce into snow crystals, their shape a product of the construction of the molecules themselves. It's still water, but called "snow."

We can separate the hydrogen from the oxygen of a water molecule by passing an electric current through it. That’s why the production of enough hydrogen to be used as a medium for driving cars and buses is best located near a hydro dam. In a hydrogen-driven car, the hydrogen molecules reunite with oxygen atoms to return it … you guessed it … to water. 

Tearing the water molecules apart through hydrolysis takes energy; in a car engine, this energy is returned as the hydrogen “burns,” or "oxidizes," and the resulting water drips from the exhaust pipe. 

(Note: If you have trouble believing this, go to Hydrolysis (eircom.net) and split some water molecules yourself.)

Far more interesting, probably, is how water changes states in the process of plant growth, how plants steal hydrogen from water to make the carbohydrates that provide their energy for growth and spit out excess oxygen during the day when photosynthesis is taking place. Also, how they steal Carbon dioxide from the air because carbon is the main ingredient in carbohydrates, thereby doing their part in saving the planet from climate change. But all that's another story. 

Look for the next episode: "So What's the Problem?"

 

 

LET’S TALK WATER -- #1

Why talk water?  

Because there are more and more places on earth where fresh water is in short supply. A solution in Great Britain during Margaret Thatcher’s time turned all waters over to corporations which priced it as you would oil. The thinking was that just like the Carbon Tax reduces fossil fuel consumption, water as a saleable commodity would cut waste and make desperately-needed upgrades that the government couldn't afford. This makes some sense, except that distributing water for profit introduces as many troublesome issues as it solves.

            In Australia, for instance, water is piped from the wetter north to the drier south and farmers and other enterprises that need water have to buy it. A megalitre (one-million litres) of water will cost you as much as $700.00. Also, a kind of “stock market” has arisen where people speculate on rising and falling prices and buy and sell paper units of water for profit.

            Canada presently has a surplus of fresh water and vegetable-growing California has been known to speculate on buying some of this surplus by, for instance, diverting some of the Fraser River water southward. There are, of course, corporations and investors who salivate at the thought of getting into a water market.

I suggest watching Lords of Water on the Knowledge Network (access on line at Knowledge.ca) and look for future posts in what I’m calling a Let’s Talk Water series.

 
#2 will be titled, What is Water, Actually?