by Kim Pederson…….

I started reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Water Knife a few days ago. To give you a capsule summary, here’s how Jason Heller’s NPR article “The Water Knife Cuts Deep” describes the book:

In his equally powerful sophomore novel [after The Windup Girl], The Water Knife, he [Bacigalupi] takes a similar approach to an inorganic substance without which human life wouldn’t exist: H2O. But where The Windup Girl takes place hundreds of years from now in Southeast Asia, The Water Knife hits closer to home for US readers. Its setting is the American Southwest, at a time in the near future when Britney Spears is toothless and old, the country is plagued by climactic calamities and the Southwest’s dwindling water supply is controlled by robber barons.

A toothless Britney Spears, believe it or not, is the least chilling thing about The Water Knife— although “chilling” might be the wrong word for Bacigalupi’s speculative vision of Arizona. Hit by “Big Daddy Drought,” a perpetual catastrophe that has become the horrifying new normal, the Grand Canyon State is the new American dust bowl — or sand bowl, if you will — where refugees crowd the ghettos of suburban Phoenix and rapacious “coyotes” smuggle people not from Mexico to the U.S., as they do now, but from Arizona to California.

Then, to bring home the looming specter of futuridity (future + aridity), a day or so later NASA issues its report on renewable groundwater stress. The world’s largest underground aquifers, The Washington Post notes, “are being depleted at alarming rates.” In fact,

Twenty-one of the world’s 37 largest aquifers — in locations from India and China to the United States and France — have passed their sustainability tipping points, meaning more water was removed than replaced during the decade-long study period, researchers announced Tuesday. Thirteen aquifers declined at rates that put them into the most troubled category.

Yikes. Those of us lucky enough to live in developed countries obviously don’t think about water often enough. Nor do we appreciate it as we should. Did you know, for example, these things about H20?

Physical Density — Water is the only substance occurring naturally in all three phases as solid, liquid, and gas on Earth’s surface. This facilitates the transfer of heat between ocean and atmosphere by phase change.
Dissolving Ability — Water dissolves more substances in greater quantities than any other common liquid, which is important in chemical, physical, and biological processes.
Surface Tension — Water’s is the highest of all common liquids, a quality that controls drop formation in rain and clouds and is important in cell physiology.
Density — Water density is determined by (1) temperature, (2) salinity, and (3) pressure, in that order of importance. The temperature of maximum density for pure water is 4°C. For seawater, the freezing point decreases with increasing salinity. This controls oceanic vertical circulation, aids in heat distribution, and allows seasonal stratification in lakes.
Heat Capacity — Water’s is the highest of all common liquids and solids. This prevents extreme ranges in Earth’s temperatures (i.e., it is a great heat moderator).
Boiling and Melting Points — Water’s are unusually high, which allows it to exist as a liquid in most places on earth.

Whew. And that’s just to name a few. It seems like it’s time for everyone to sit up and take notice about how great water is and what an endangered species it is becoming. Given what’s been happening in California, can the world of The Water Knife be far behind? Are we looking, as the inhabitants of the novel are, at a future “true apocalypse, the world after all the rules…stopped existing”?

Here in the Florida Keys, we get nearly every drop of our water via a closed aqueduct that comes all the way from the Biscayne Aquifer on the mainland. Besides us, it supplies water to most of south Florida. It’s a shallow, surficial source (close to the surface) and, as Daily Kos reported in March, seawater is being drawn toward it by the sucking straw action of taking water out for our use. The aquifer gets refreshed by rainwater and water from the Everglades, which are also in trouble. As sea levels continue to rise and if major preventive work is not done, the salt water will intrude further into the aquifer, eventually contaminating the wells, sewer systems, and wastewater treatment plants that serve the (at present) six million people of southern Florida.

Yikes just doesn’t cover it. Sorry for the long-winded diatribe here but it’s an issue I can no longer ignore and I hope you will not either. Today, I’m starting back on my regimen of one-minute showers (it can be done). The average shower in the United States runs eight minutes and uses seventeen gallons of water. With a good Water-sense shower head, my one minute shower will take less than two gallons. That’s a savings of 5,475 gallons each year, an amount that would fill a 15-feet-across above-ground swimming pool. It might not seem like much of a dent but, as they say, if everyone…. And I’ll leave it at that (for now).

*”Water droplet blue bg05″ by Taken byfir0002 | flagstaffotos.com.auCanon 20D + Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 – Own work. Licensed under GFDL 1.2 via Wikimedia Commons.

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