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1 Introduction
It quenches the thirst of 40 million people and wets and nourishes more than 5 million acres of farmland from Wyoming to Southern California. Well, the fact is it does all this at the present time; the present time being summer of 2019.
The future?
To cut a long story short and get to the point in plain English, you understand, letâs just say that climate change is having a sapping impact on it; thus, its future is not exactly clearâpredictable but somewhat cloudy and more exactly to the point, very dry.
The problem with climate change?
Well, it is all about receding snowpack due to higher temperatures. The fact is that because its essence is water (with a bit of sand, rock and human-made chemicals and trash thrown in), it is subject to evaporation (along with overuse too, of course, that makes its essence in a declining mode).
In a recent backpacking journey in Utah to its confluence with the Green River, it was quite apparent to me that the Colorado River was/is dying; its flow has substantially decreased and continues to decrease at an alarming rate.
Am I crying wolf?
More to the point, I am thinking about thirst, dryness, dehydration, and the future need for liquid.
âFrank R. Spellman (2019)
When color photographs of the earth as it appears from space were first published, it was a revelation: they showed our planet to be astonishingly beautiful. We were taken by surprise. What makes the earth so beautiful is its abundant water. The great expanses of vivid Blue Ocean with swirling, sunlit clouds above them should not have caused surprise, but the reality exceeded everybodyâs expectations. The pictures must have brought home to all who saw them the importance of water to our planet.
âE. C. Pielou, Preface, 1998
Fresh water is unique from other commodities in that it has no substitutes.
âSandra Postel et al., 1996
Whether we characterize it as ice, rainbow, steam, frost, dew, soft summer rain, fog, flood or avalanche, or as stimulating as a stream or cascade, water is specialâwater is strangeâwater is different.
Water is the most abundant inorganic liquid in the world; moreover, it occurs naturally anywhere on earth. Literally awash with it, life depends on it, and yet water is so very different.
Water is scientifically different. With its rare and distinctive property of being denser as a liquid than as a solid, it is different. Water is different in that it is the only chemical compound found naturally in solid, liquid, and gaseous states. Water is sometimes called the universal solvent. This is a fitting name, especially when you consider that water is a powerful reagent, which is capable in time of dissolving everything on earth.
Water is different. It is usually associated with all the good things on earth. For example, water is associated with quenching thirst, with putting out fires, and with irrigating the earth. The question is: Can we really say emphatically, definitively that water is associated with only those things that are good?
Not really!
Remember, water is different; nothing, absolutely nothing, is safe from it.
Water is different. This unique substance is odorless, colorless, and tasteless. Water covers 71% of the earth completely. Even the driest dust ball contains 10â15% water.
Water and lifeâlife and waterâinseparable.
The prosaic becomes wondrous as we perceive the marvels of water.
The Earth is covered with 326 million cubic miles of water, but only 3% of this total is fresh with most locked up in polar ice caps, glaciers, and lakes; inflows through soil and in river and stream flows to an ever increasingly saltier sea (only 0.027% is available for human consumption). Water is different.
Standing at a dripping tap, water is so palpably wet that one can literally hear the drip-drop-plop.
Water is specialâwaster is strangeâwater is differentâmore importantly, water is critical to our survival, yet we abuse it, discard it, fowl it, curse it, dam it, and ignore it. At least this is the way we view the importance of water at this moment in time ⌠however, because water is special, strange, and different, the dawn of tomorrow is pushing for quite a different view.
Along with being special, strange, and different, water is also a contradiction, a riddle.
How?
Consider the Chinese proverb that states, âwater can both float and sink a boat.â
Saltwater is different from freshwater. This book deals with freshwater and ignores saltwater because saltwater fails its most vital duty, which is to be pure, sweet, and serve to nourish us.
Did You Know?
Thereâs a lot of salty water on our planet. By some estimates, if the salt in the ocean could be removed and spread evenly over the earthâs land surface, it would form a layer more than 500 feet (166 meters) thick, about the height of a 40-story office building. The question is: Where did all this salt come from? Folklore and mythology from almost every culture have stories explaining how the oceans became salty. The answer is really quite simple. Salt in the ocean comes from rocks on land. Hereâs how it works: The rain that falls on the land contains some dissolved carbon dioxide from the surrounding air. This causes the rainwater to be slightly acidic due to carbonic acid. The rain physically erodes the rock, and the acids chemically break down the rocks and carry salts and minerals along in a dissolved state as ions. The ions in the runoff are carried to the streams and rivers and then to the ocean. Many of the dissolved ions are used by organisms in the ocean and are removed from the water. Others are not used up and are left for long periods of time where their concentrations increase over time. The two ions that are present most often in seawater are chloride and sodium. These two make up over 90% of all dissolved ions in seawater (USGS, 2013).
The presence of water everywhere feeds these contradictions. For example, Lewis (1996, p. 90) points out that âwater is the key ingredient of motherâs milk and snake venom, honey and tears.â
- Leonardo da Vinci gave us insight into more of waterâs apparent contradictions:
- Water is sometimes sharp and sometimes strong, sometimes acid and sometimes bitter;
- Water is sometimes sweet and sometimes thick or thin;
- Water sometimes brings hurt or pestilence, sometimes health-giving, sometimes poisonous.
- Water suffers changes into as many natures as are the different places through which it passes.
- Water, as with the mirror that changes with the color of its object, so it alters with the nature of the place, becoming: noisome, laxative, astringent, sulfurous, salt, incarnadined, mournful, raging, angry, red, yellow, green, black, blue, greasy, fat or slim.
- Water sometimes starts a conflagration, sometimes it extinguishes one.
- Water is warm and is cold.
- Water carries away or sets down.
- Water hollows out or builds up.
- Water tears down or establishes.
- Water empties or fills.
- Water raises itself or burrows down.
- Water spreads or is still.
- Water is the cause at times of life or death, or increase of privation, nourishes at times and at others does the contrary.
- Water, at times has a tang, at times it is without savor.
- Water sometimes submerges the valleys with great flood.
- In time and with water, everything changes.
Waterâs contradictions can be summed up by simply stating that though the globe is awash with it, water is no single thing, but an elemental force that shapes our existence. Leonardoâs last contradiction, âIn time and with water, everything changes,â concerns us most in this text.
Many of Leonardoâs water contradictions are apparent to most observers. But with water there are other factors that do not necessarily stand out, that are not always so apparent. This is made clear by the following exampleâwhat you see on the surface is not necessarily what lies beneath.
Still Water
Consider a river pool, isolated by fluvial processes and time from the mainstream flow. We are immediately struck by one overwhelming impression: It appears so still ⌠so very still ⌠still enough to soothe us. The river pool provides a kind of poetic solemnity, if only at the poolâs surface. No words of peace, no description of silence or motionlessness can convey the perfection of this place, in this moment stolen out of time.
We ask ourselves, âThe water is still, but does the term âstillâ correctly describe what we are viewing ... is there any other term we can use besides stillâis there any other kind of still?â
Yes, of course, we know many ways to characterize âstillâ. For sound or noise, âstillâ can mean inaudible, noiseless, quiet, or silent. With movement (or lack of movement), âstillâ can mean immobile, inert, motionless, or stationary. At least, this is how the pool appears to the casual visitor on the surface. The visitor sees no more than water and rocks.
How is the rest of the pool? We know very well that a river pool is more than just a surface. How does the rest of the pool (for example, the subsurface) fit the descriptors we tried to use to characterize its surface? Maybe they fit, maybe they do not. In time, we will go beneath the surface, through the liquid mass, to the very bottom of the pool to find out. For now, remember that images retained from first glances are almost always incorrectly perceived, incorrectly discerned, and never fully understood.
On second look, we see that the fundamental characterization of this particular poolâs surface is correct enough. Wedged in a lonely riparian corridorâformed by riverbank on one side and sandbar on the otherâbetween a youthful, vigorous river system on its lower end and a glacier- and artesian-fed lake on its headwater end, almost entirely overhung by mossy old Sitka spruce, the surface of the large pool, at least at this particular location, is indeed still. In the proverbial sense, the poolâs surface is as still and as flat as a flawless sheet of glass.
The glass image is a good one, because, like perfect glass, the poolâs surface is clear, crystalline, unclouded, definitely transparent, yet perceptively deceptive as well. The waterâs clarity, accentuated by its bone-chilling coldness, is apparent at close range. Further back, we see only the world reflected in the waterâthe depths are hidden and unknown. Quiet and reflective, the polished surface of the water perfectly reflects in a mirror-image reversal the spring greens of the forest at the pondâs edge, witho...
