Natural Services

This last Friday, I watched in utter amazement, joy, and gratitude as the rain pounded the ground to the accompaniment of lightning and thunder!   In the 44 years that I have lived here, I have never seen a dry spell like the one we have been experiencing.  I live in a wet place, and so, we are one of the last to suffer the effects of a drought.  I have never seen the sword ferns in our yard close up shop and turn brown in mid-July.  I have never noticed the Rhododendrons and even our Italian Prune trees with withered drooping leaves.  I have never had to water the raspberries just to keep the plants alive.
We have drawn our water from a spring on the hillside above us for 40 of the years I’ve been here.  I am happy to say that, as in the past, it is showing very little fluctuation during this very dry season.  I suspect that it is coming from an exposed edge of the shallow aquifer.  Even so, if this unprecedented dry spell continues, it is inevitable that, eventually, it too will begin to drop, and so I have been anxiously and frequently checking it.  

I can’t help but ponder how difficult life could be if our spring no longer provided for us.  Fresh water is one of the services that Nature provides us for free.   In the world we live in today, we like to brag about how we have improved on nature and are no longer limited by its constraints.  We zip around in high-speed vehicles that take us to warm places, or we make summer inside our homes, lounging about in a tee shirt in the coldest depths of winter.  We eat the fruits of any season all year around.  We like to think that we have tamed and improved upon nature and are no longer subject to its vicissitudes.  What I have not been able to avoid noticing is that for every service of nature that we have commandeered and “improved,” there have been costs, not only disruptions of other natural systems, but the need to continuously monitor and manage our man-made systems.  In our immediate situation, what would we do if our aquifers failed?  First of all, we would never be able to secure the abundance of water we now have without considerable expenditure, if at all.  We have been very fortunate here.  We, as many of our fellow earthlings do, could be spending the better part of every day just securing a bare subsistence in water.

We have found, much to our dismay, that when nature fails to provide, transporting or distilling water to serve moderate to large cities is difficult and extremely expensive, if it is feasible at all.  We have constructed vast canal systems for thousands of years.  Even so, many a desiccated civilization has perished.  More recently, water has been transported in ships and even the idea of towing in an iceburg has been entertained. The futility of attempting to provide a sufficient supply that way is now quite apparent.  Perth, Australia, has a solar-energized desalination plant.  We can also successfully recycle sewage water:  an expensive alternative that may save some cities that have outgrown their water supply.  Nobody would argue that a sufficient, natural rainfall would not be preferable, but we continue to plan according to our wants rather than according to what nature will provide.

 Water and its components cannot be created or destroyed except, theoretically, through nuclear fireworks.  All the water that ever was on Earth is still here.  The problem is having it at the right place, in the right form, at the right time.  We have inhabited the places where the hydrologic cycle has usually dropped fresh water on a regular basis.  We understand a fair amount about what creates rainfall in one place and not another, or at some times and not others.  Scarcity and abundance are natural cycles.  We attempt to mitigate this situation somewhat so as to supply water more evenly and predictably, but we have too many people now to be able to assume that we have the ability to supply as much water as we like to any place that we choose.  And we must also realize that when we attempt to supplant the natural system, there will be formidable costs both upfront and ongoing.  

In the end, we can only express gratitude for the wonderful rain we had no part in producing. The distribution of life-giving water, not to mention the photosynthesis that provides all the food we eat and the oxygen we breathe, are systems we may understand and appreciate, but our dependence on them seldom plays a prominent role when we are making plans.  Far better that we try to align our thinking and activities to harmonize with and support the natural systems than impose our idea of how things ought to work.  We have come to view the world as a toybox we can plunder.  Better to return to seeing it as a dance that we can learn.

Comments?  terry@vashonloop.com