Today is Blog Action Day. Around the world, bloggers are posting about one of our most important environmental and social challenges: water depletion. I'm joining the effort.
In my garden, this is my connection to water. And of all my garden tools, the hoses--and the well and the electrical water pump they connect to and the aquifer that flows underground--rank right up there as my "most useful" tools and resources. Without them, it would be harder to water my garden beds. (Buckets of water are heavy. The creek is about 100 yards away. In the summer, it is usually dry.)
And since we live on the 98th meridian--what Walter Prescott Webb called the "institutional fault line" between the well-watered east and the arid west--we get only about 30" a year of rain: green water, ecologists call it. Here in the Hill Country, most of our rain comes in November/December, when I'm growing winter table greens, and again in May (if we're lucky) when the spring garden is coming on. The rest of the year, I'm using blue water--water from the Trinity aquifer, which flows about 400 feet underground. The water it carries is mostly fossil water, stored over millenia, and only a little (5%) from recent rains. It flows slowly and recharges slowly.
And the Trinity is in trouble. In the 25 years we've lived here, we've seen changes in our water level and availability. If we pump too much, the pump stops until the area around the bottom of the well-pipe refills with water. We've learned how to be water-frugal, how to conserve, how and when to water the garden and Bill's pecan trees. We've shortened our showers and we never, ever water our grass. I've gotten rid of all those water-hog exotic landscape plants, too. What we have now is a native xeriscape. The plants make it or they don't. If they don't, they're replaced with something that will survive on green water.
But we're not the only ones using this precious bluewater aquifer. Over the next 50 years, the Trinity is projected to be one of the most stressed aquifers in Texas, with large areas seeing steep drops in water levels. As more development occurs, more households and businesses are pumping Trinity's blue water. There are (gasp!) swimming pools by the 100s in upscale housing developments here. There are spray irrigation pumps for golf courses and lawns. People are using this resource without understanding it, and they are overusing it. Like other depleting resources here in Texas (oil, to name the most significant), our aquifers are dwindling. Texans need to know this. We all need to know what's happening and why and what the consequences are.
Which raises these questions. Do you know where your water comes from? Do you know what happens to it after it goes down your drain? Do you know whether it is an endangered and depleting resource in your area? If so, are you doing what you can to conserve it? If you can't answer these questions, it's time you did some research and took the appropriate personal action. Today is a good day to begin.
Reading note. To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it. ~Barbara Kingsolver
