Water Management

After studying water issues for almost two decades, it is difficult to decide where to begin with the discussion of water.  Water is a major factor in energy, environment, and economic issues affecting all parts of the world.  Recent readings in Water: A Natural History by Alice Outwater have brought new insights to Triple E.  Outwater carefully describes how fur trading, the logging industry and agriculture evolved from the time North America was settled until the beginning of the new millennium.  Natural resource management or lack thereof substantially influenced water availability and water quality in the US.

Triple E Agent Assignment:
Convey thoughts on history, natural resource management and water shortage in the US...

How does water relate to the rest of the natural world and how do we affect the trends in water availability or quality?


Outwater titles Part I of her book 'Dismantling the Natural System' and dedicates an entire chapter, or was it two? to the North American Beaver.  An estimated 200 million beavers shaped the landscape that would later become the continental US.  Hundreds/thousands of years of work by nature's hydrologists retained water in creeks and rivers of North America, created wetlands, recharged aquifers, and provided habitat and sustenance for countless flora and fauna.  Voracious fur trade began in the 1600s and took the beaver population down to less than 10 million before settlements were even established on the west coast.  What could alter the water balance more than laying-off 190 million hydrologists that worked 365 days a year conserving water on the landscape?

Westward exploration, settlement, and alteration of the landscape from a natural prairie to farmland continued to take a toll on wildlife and the water balance.  Much of the prairie was subject to drought and is considered semi-arid, which means that rainfall rarely infiltrates below the root zone to replenish the groundwater.  There once were perhaps 60 million bison (aka buffalo) on the prairies and billions of prairie dogs.  Buffalo wallows and macropores created in prairie dog towns provided areas where water could penetrate below the topsoil and recharge underlying aquifers.  This increase in subsurface water storage, brought on by the habits of wildlfie, helped to preserve spring- and stream- flows during drier times.

While reading Water so many connections were made, in Triple E's brain, to the book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond and the documentary film The Dust Bowl by Ken Burns.  Collapse covers the history of great civilizations of the past, such as the Maya and Aztec, which prospered until environmental disasters were brought on by poor resource management.  Not unlike the American Dust Bowl that Burns calls the 'worst man-made ecological disaster in American history' following 'The Great Plow Up.'  All three of these are morality tales about our relationship to the land [trees, wildlife, and water] that sustains us - lessons we ignore at our peril.


Study the Past,
Triple E.