#15 Caring for Mother Nature: Water

Greetings, readers. Today we continue our series, Caring for Mother Nature, by my friend, author and naturalist, Peggy Sias Lantz. This time, she urges us to pay attention to the health and conservation of our planet’s highly essential element: water.

Which reminds me of a poem my mother used to recite, especially when we were at the beach surrounded by salt water:

“Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.”

― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Earth Care: Water

by Peggy Lantz

All the water on earth cycles endlessly, from those beautiful clouds, to rain, to rivers, lakes, and oceans, evaporating from water surfaces and transpiring from plants back to clouds. All the water on earth will never be more or less.

A little over 97 percent of all that water is salty. About two percent is bound up in ice in glaciers and ice fields in the North and South Poles.

That leaves about 1 percent of all the water on earth to serve plants and animals—and humans.

And virtually all of it is polluted.

What has polluted our waters?

It’s polluted with hydrocarbons, pharmaceuticals, toxins, bacteria and viruses, and newly invented chemicals.

Do you remember any of your high school chemistry? (I don’t. I had to look this up.) Hydrocarbons are made up of hydrogen and carbon, obtained from crude oil.

Pharmaceuticals are medicines. They end up in our water whenever you flush your toilet. If you are connected to a sewer system, then it is purified as much as the system can [clean it] before it is flushed out to sea, recycled for agricultural use, or pumped back into the ground. If you have a septic tank, it flows slowly downhill into the nearest body of water. Water scientists have found even caffeine from your every-morning coffee in lake water.

And in Florida about 30 percent of that polluted water is used to water lawns and about 30 percent is used to flush toilets.

Are you concerned yet?

I am.

So what can little me do about it?

What can we do to save water?

I drive a hybrid car so I use less gasoline, and I start up from the stop sign gently and coast a lot to the traffic light. I have solar on my roof so I use less power from that coal-fired or oil-fired power plant. I have no lawn to water. I set my air conditioner at 80 degrees, and it doesn’t run at all for about three months each fall and spring. My canopy of trees cools my house and yard.

Those little plastic bottles of water take several times the amount they hold to make the plastic, and the water is drawn from our Floridan aquifer free of charge by the bottling companies. I vowed to never drink out of them, even if I am thirsty.

I have low-flow toilets.

I use native plants, so I never have to water them, except when I have newly planted them.

Even little things: showers are short, and I turn off the water while I brush my teeth. I use bamboo toothbrushes and bamboo toilet paper, so I don’t use old-growth trees for that (Bamboo is the fastest growing plant on earth: three feet every 24 hours!).

My little efforts make only a tiny, tiny dent in the problem of water use and water pollution. But if I could coax a few more people like you to do a few little things, maybe my little effort would get a little bigger.

Remember my favorite quotation by British statesman Edmond Burke: “No one ever made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”

—END—

Thanks for reading!

Your writer on the wing,

Charlene

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