Pooping in the Perrier

 

I may be easily amused but I think we should take this time of year to be thankful for plumbing.  I’m continually amazed that we can turn on our tap and drink fresh clean water.  Hot and cold, you can’t do that in most of the world.  Treated surface or pure ground water, it’s amazing that we poop in the Perrier fresh, local spring water, and It all goes somewhere, by gravity, to be cleaned magically and put back in the river.  Or that the sun evaporites salty sea water into perfectly clean freshwater clouds that float over our mountains and drop their load as rain and snow that we can use on its gravity driven run to the sea.  This old Hydrological Cycle has served us well for eons for all our use.  Eighty percent of all precipitation, 17 trillion gallons a year, goes to natural vegetation. 16 percent to agriculture, mostly for animal feed for meat.  3 percent goes to lawns and golf courses.  A half percent goes to our houses and % 0.1 is actually consumed by our bodies.  So there is a lot of water out there and it really matters how we use it.  If we really wanted to save water, eating less meat would be a good place to star for the best bang for the buck.

It’s Amazing that someone can keep track of all that water and divvy it out to all of us to use for beneficial use and the public welfare, for free.  We use a system developed by the California miners and perfected by the Mormons, to set priorities:’ first in line first in right’ and ‘use it or lose it’.  The actual commodity of water doesn’t cost anything, only its delivery.  And it’s amazing how little we pay for water when it is our second most precious, life-giving compound, behind air.  You can live for 5 minutes without air and 5 days without water, but we pay a lot more for gas, coffee and beer than clean air and clean water. ‘Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting’, said Mark Twain. 

I was skiing glaciers in Alaska above Glacier Bay one time and our plane could not land to take us home due to the weather.  We had food and tea, whiskey and warm tents but we were running out of gas for the stove.  No stove meant no snow melting and hard times for us.  That trip highlighted the connection of energy and water.  You make energy with water at dams, and you use energy to make water from the sea by reverse osmosis.   Park City recently built a 100-million-dollar water treatment plant to get Heavy Metals out of mine water (like Led Zeplin and Metallica.).   So the new Hydrologic Cycle is the interrelation between water, energy, money, grass, food, people.  ‘You know the worth of a glass of water when the well goes dry’, said Ben Franklin.

My wife Tracey and I spend some time each year on the Central California Coast in a few small beach towns that don’t have any extra water and don’t want any.  Therefore, there is only very controlled growth and high property prices due to small supply.  In the 80s we thought we could limit growth in Park City that way, but we had money and bought other people’s water, lots of it.  Water flows towards money.

So here we are in sunny Park City, still dependent on an economy that relies heavily on snow.   But there is less and less supply of snow and water and more and more demand for it.  As things get warmer, less snow can be made and more snow comes as rain.  Scientists predict that we could be out of snow by 2050 as we enter a rain-based hydrology.  Then consider that we are using so much more water and getting so much less rain and snow that the Great Salt Lake is drying up along with the Colorado River, Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Conservation can help decrease demand while addressing climate change can help with increasing supply but our free/cheap water is not going to help us intensify our efforts. 

Subsidizing our water use or burying costs in property tax bills will not help us focus on our consumption, conservation or climate. The State and the Feds are paying people now not to use their agricultural water to solve the shortages of the Great Salt Lake and Colorado River.  Most of the unappropriated free water in the west is long-gone and water is now something to buy and sell.  Now water has a price as well as a worth and a value.  It is becoming a commodity, no longer free, going to those who can afford it.

What are we to do?  Ideally, we can conserve and concentrate on water use efficiency and priorities to reduce demand without sacrificing the public health and welfare.  We can stop burning stuff and address climate change for the long term supply issues. We can listen to scientists and engineers on how this can happen and elect people that will strive to fix it and adapt resiliently.  We can pay the true unsubsidized price and worth of water, and then we will know its value.  We can appreciate the magic and luxury of our water resources and stop squandering them.  We can stop pooping in the Perrier, just because we can.