Water: A bigger picture

Those who live on and advocate for lakes can easily (and appropriately) obsess over everyday demands. What’s happening with the Secchi readings? Will we get that new invasive species grant? How can we do more to protect natural shorelines?

But now and then it’s useful to step back and see water in the big picture: How it’s used, moved, managed, consumed and (dare we say?) abused around the country and the world. Judith D. Schwartz’s book, Water in Plain Sight: Hope for a Thirsty World, provides that kind of broad perspective.

It’s not the newest book about water (2019, Chelsea Green Publishing), but it explores problems and solutions still entirely relevant today. Schwartz isn’t a scientist; she’s a journalist who reports mainly on nature-based remedies for worldwide environmental and economic challenges.

For one thing, Schwartz argues that by allying with the water cycle, humans can reinvigorate worn-out landscapes. In one case study that seems counterintuitive, she describes a project in Zimbabwe where restorative grazing has helped a river flow miles farther than in local residents’ recent memory.

She describes a “fruit-filled food forest” in Tucson, Arizona, grown by harvesting urban wastewater, and a dew-harvesting facility in hot and dry west Texas: a metal roof that cools overnight allows water to condense and run off into a collection tank on humid mornings. The 50- by 50-foot roof can collect as much as 74 gallons of dew per day.

Schwartz introduced me to the term effective rainfall. It’s an antidote to desertification, which occurs over time when the vast majority of rainfall evaporates or simply runs off the land by the next day. Contributors to desertification include wildfires, removal of forests, poor management of livestock grazing, unwise tillage practices, and poorly designed irrigation systems.

Schwartz observes, “Degraded and desertified land is the backdrop for much rural poverty, which ultimately means urban poverty as well, because when land won’t produce, people see no option but to flock to the cities.”

According to one of her African sources, rainfall is effective “when the bulk of the rain (or snowmelt) soaks into the soil and only leaves the soil through plant growth, or perennial flow to streams, springs or underground storage, including aquifers.”

Schwartz’s observations aren’t limited to the developing world. Even a water-rich country like the United States has pockets of water stress and scarcity, notably in parts of California and much of the Southwest, where attention is turning to highly advanced treatment of wastewater to to reuse as part of the drinking water supply.

For decades, water has been taken for granted. Now, as anxiety over it increases, Schwartz details how people are finding new pathways to water security, with implications for greater access to food and more resilient economies.

As one reviewer observed, “The water cycle is Earth’s greatest gift to life, yet it is now badly broken. Through fascinating stories, Judith Schwartz reveals how we can work with nature to make the cycle function again—and in doing so lessen climate change, build healthier landscapes, and boost our odds for sustained prosperity. There is no message more important today, and it is time to act on it.”