Global average sea level has risen 8–9 inches (21–24 centimeters) since 1880
Around one-quarter of the world's population, 2 billion people, reside near a drying lake. Fifty-three percent of the world's largest freshwater lakes are in decline. An increasing number of droughts of increasing severity.
We are placing ourselves between the hammer and the anvil. Sea levels rising and aquifer levels dropping, we can’t drink or irrigate with the first and we need the second to survive. It would seem improbable that we would also pollute the second to the point that we have. Water is essential to every known organism, even if, as i sometimes the case,in microscopic quantities. It would seem strange that a species that has a theory of mind and a capacity for foresight would behave in such a bizarre way with something so vital to it’s own survival, yet this is the case.
Holistic water management has been at the heart of Permaculture design since the latter was introduced to the world. Keyline design, swales, half-moons, micro-dams, mulching, shading, grey water reuse, stopping wastage etc etc are all techniques that any good Permaculture designer knows and uses, we’ve been doing this for upwards of 40 years now. We have been listening to the warning signs and have developed strategies designed to avoid or mitigate droughts and water wastage. The very idea of designing a farm and then onwards to designing villages, suburbs, towns and even countries has it’s origins in what Yeomans developed as Keyline design.
Today the warning signs have become much stronger and more and more people are becoming involved in a variety of different appoaches to address this critical situation. Unfortunately, once again, these approaches tend to be piecemeal and not the holistic intergrated ones we need. It is difficult sometimes to convince people of this need for an integrated holistic approach despite the evidence around us that sorting out a bit here or a bit there isn’t enough. It helps but it is also shortsighted and not wide enough as an approach. If we take, as a case in point, what some people are now promoting as ‘regerative water’ or ‘growing water’ we can see people acting for the good but at the same time not thinking enough about the bigger picture.
It is evident that we must address how agriculture uses and wastes water, we must revise how so many industries use, waste and contaminate water. We cannot seperate all the different bits and bobs that together are wasting water, destroying water resources, contaminating and polluting water, damaging aquifers and poisoning ground water.
There are some fine people who are working to improve city rivers, streams and lakes. They are opening up the sometimes buried rivers and streams and brining them back to life. There are others who are working to improve how we deal with urban water runoff. In the same way there are some equally fine people working to reduce erosion and improve groundwater recharge. There are people who are planting forests or encourging secondary growth because they understand the link between trees and precipitation. They are great people who deserve to be recognised more than the sad internet influencer peddling the latest face cream. They are running great projects. In a world that better understood the Permaculture way they would all be linked together and each initiative would be designed to help the other ones. Cities and urbanised areas have massive impacts on precipitation and runoff as do forests and steppes and of course the oceans. So do people and their usage and wastage of water. We have changed some of the great atmpospheric and oceanic flows and these too are impacting precipitation, this needs to be urgently addressed as things are changing fast.
Not so long ago, amongst those scientists who were studying what the future might bring if we continue business as usual postulated that dry regions would get drier and wet regions wetter. Experience is showing that ths is not really the case, Temperate areas are being hit by more frequent and more severe droughts. The postulate, from the 1980’s, that extreme events would become more frequent and more extreme is being shown to be correct. This is something that has to be designed in to our current, and too few, for the moment, initiatives that seek to improve our use of water. Cities and towns, the areas covered by tarmac, and the agricultural areas, and domestic water use and treatment must be looked at in a holistic way. Cities, towns etc will have to be radically redesigned, so to the agricultural areas and industrial water use. Linking all these aspects together is really the only way forwards, we cannot imagine that plantng some forests, which can be good, will help deal with all the leaks in water supply systems. Each area that is urbanised, concreted or tarmaced over has a big impact on rivers and lakes.
Take this as an example, many people are unwell and they take medications, pharmaceutical residues are transported to sewage works which are utterly incapable of treating them. These molecules remain in the water supply and interact with each oher, as the sewage works cannot remove them they flow back into the drinking water supply. We have no idea what the consequences of this may be, molecules interact with each other to form new and frequently unknown ones, their impacts on the environement and on human health are the subject of a lot of research. For a Permaculture designer the first question isn’t about how to remove these molecules from the drinking water flow, the question is about why do people have to take so many medications? This is just an example of holistic thinking and Permaculture design, to whit, working out the source of a problem and then acting to address the caue and not the symptom. Food, lifestyle, chronic stress, the built environment and suchlike impact people’s health in such a way that they turn to pharmaceuticals as a relief. Changing the conditions that provoke ill health thereby improve the quality of drinking water.
In a similar way, replanting forests isn’t adressing the problem of why deforestation takes place. Transforming agricultural systems to agroforestry systems does go a long way to dealing with the cutting trees to grow food, fuel crops or range cattle problem.
At national levels some countries are taking measures which have negative consequences on others putting them in even greater water precarity. Yet we are supposed to be an intelligent species.
We have a long way to go to sort this mess out, we have the tools, it is vital that we don’t make it any worse by well intentioned but insular or myopic initiatives, this is why for the last 30 plus years I have been a Permaculture designer.