Thirst: Ecosystems and the Worlds Water Supply

Water is the best of all things, said Pindar, the Greek lyric poet some twenty-five hundred years ago. How right he was! We cannot do without it, and few pleasures are more satisfying than a cool drink from a mountain spring when we are truly thirsty. But perhaps Pindar should have said that fresh water is the best of all things, since only about 2.5 percent of Earths water is fresh. The rest is salt water, which will hardly slake ones thirst, as the Ancient Mariner noted. Moreover, of that small fraction of our water that is fresh, some twothirds is totally inaccessible in ice caps and glaciers. Only about 0.77 percent is in lakes, swamps, rivers, aquifers, pores in soils, the atmosphere, and the bodies of living organisms. But Earth has correctly been called the water planet, and as a result that 0.77 percent is a huge amount of watermore than 10 million cubic kilometers. The renewable freshwater supply, that flowing through the solar powered hydrologic cycle, is much less. The cycle lifts about 430,000 cubic kilometers of water by evaporation from the surface of the oceans. Roughly 390,000 cubic kilometres of that water falls right back into the oceans as precipitation. But some 40,000 cubic kilometres are carried by winds from the oceans to the land surface, where they add to the rain, snow, sleet, and hail that fall there. That water with its source in oceanic evaporation, accounts for a little over a third of terrestrial precipitation; a little less than two-thirds has as its source water evaporating from the land surface and pumped out of the ground by plants. Of the renewable 110,000 cubic kilometers, only a third or so runs back to the sea in rivers, streams, and groundwater flows. And only about 10 percentsome 12,500 cubic kilometersis reasonably accessible runoff. That much sloshing liquid may seem like a vast supply, except that humankind is already appropriating more than half for its own use. Furthermore, both the human population and its per capita demand for freshwater are still growing. Two of the key roles wild organisms play in the hydrologic cycle (from the point of view of humanity) are helping to maintain quality and supply. Plants and micro organisms play a major part in this process, as they do in other cycles of the natural internet. Vegetation slows the flow of water over the land surface toward stream systems and thus provides time for it to soak into the ground. Plants break the force of heavy rains and protect the soil. This is particularly obvious in tropical rain forests where torrential downpours are intercepted by the tree canopy so that, although the ground is very wet, the water soaks gently into the leaf litter and soil. In addition, the roots of plants in a well-vegetated watershed both hold the soil in place and help to retain nutrients in the system. Soil secured in this way absorbs rainfall and then gradually releases the water into streams and rivers. The result is an even flow that is generally beneficial to humanitymaking it easier to use water for transport, power generation, irrigation, recreation, and the like. When soil is eroded away, this water-metering function is impaired and the results downstream can be alternating droughts and floods. The loss of the flood-control service supplied by plants in natural ecosystems is demonstrated dramatically in southern California every year or so. Much of the vegetation in the coastal region is chaparral. It consists of many species of shrubs that are highly flammable so that, after a season of dry weather, it tends to burn fiercely over large areas. In the winter, when

the rain comes, the burnt-out areas are inevitably plagued with mudslides and floods, for the vegetation has not yet recovered sufficiently to control the flow of water. In the Midwestern and south eastern portions of the United States, disastrous spring floods are frequent. One reason is vast upstream areas where agriculture has removed much of the native vegetation that once broke the fall of rain and held soils in place. It appears that the most famous flood/mudslide disaster of the late 1990s, caused by Hurricane Mitch in Central America, was made worse by the removal of natural plant growth from hillsides needed for cultivation. Similarly, areas of India and Bangladesh are more subject to inundation than previously, owing in part to deforestation in the Himalayas and the resulting diminution of the floodcontrol ecosystem service.