Water; tune of the weekend |
February 7th, 2010 |
| politics, tuneoftheweekend, water |
There are a lot of plentiful resources that we have been using up
faster than they replenish. The fossil fuels are the most standard
example, but this also applies to soil, wood, and fish. And water.
We've sucked water from aquafers that would take a long time
(decades, centuries? I don't really know this stuff) even if we
stopped all our water use. I've been reading "When The Rivers Run
Dry", a book by Fred Pearce where he looks at why so many rivers
don't even reach the sea any more. I'm only just a little ways in,
but it has me thinking: if by far the biggest use of fresh water is
crops (cotton, rice, soy, rapeseed/canola, ...) what would it take
to modify some of these corps to run on salt water? I need to think
about this more, but it probably is more efficient to make your
cotton ignore the salt than to use electricity to desalinate water
to give cotton. If we could get even one of these major crops to
run on salt water that would hugely increase the amount of water
available for other crops.
The book also has me unhappy about the way water rights work and trying to think of ways to fix them, but if we can decrease the demand for fresh water that's a lot better.
Also, the tune of the weekend is the March of St Timothy. Which happens to start with the same melody as a beatles song: "have you seen the little piggies lying ..."
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