Why I Scream at the Radio Sometimes

I was on my way home from Church. I had NPR on. Bob Edwards had some woman who has written a book about water.

Potable water.

Seems like multinational corporations are taking over developing world water supplies and making a profit. Horrors.

Then I heard this statement: We could live without oil, but we can't live without water. Letting corporations control this will mean that our lives are submitted to the corporations like they are to oil.

What?? And the yelling began.

First, there is no shortage of water. Water cannot be created nor destroyed. There is exactly the same amount of water on the earth as there was a million years ago and the same as there will be a million years from not. There is no creation nor destruction of water. There is no water shortage. NONE.

I'll give the kneejerk readers time to digest this truth.

OK, times up.

Now, let's talk potable water. Let's talk fresh water.

There are some places on the earth people shouldn't live because there is no water there, hasn't been for thousands of years. You could fit all the people on the planet in the state of Texas with each person having an area to exist about the size of a small house. 1250 square feet. About 35 feet on each side.

Now I know that kind of density is over the top but the reality is we have lots of room in the world and lots of water in the right places.

Our problem is not potable water where water exists, we don't know how to preserve it. Cisterns don't exists in most places. In fact the areas that have the biggest water problems are those with huge rainfalls like India and Pakistan. They get lots of rain, they just shunt it off.

Our problem with water is we shunt it off the watershed and send it down river to the oceans as fast as we can without considering the fact that it would be better held on the land to recharge the aquifer and to be a source of evaporation to charge the atmosphere. I won't give a weather lesson here but the reason it doesn't rain in the desert is there is no moisture in the atmosphere generated by evaporation from the ground.

We need swamps and sloughs full or water.

The agriculture that tiles off the land so there is no water standing defeats the purpose.

We just had Ike last week. 10 inches of Ike. That water is gone. It shouldn't be. If it were still here we would have a better climatic cycle.

In Texas when that big rain came thru, it should have stood to evaporate. Ike was a gift not taken. I know it did damage but it also provided a lot of rain.

Much of it is on it's way unused, undrank, un potable back to the ocean. Until we learn to keep water on the land where it falls we will have unreliable rainfalls. That reduces water available and allows multinational corporations to sell us the sky. That's where rain comes from.