Support
Your Local
Aquifer
Sustainability has been a hot topic of discussion for the last few decades. There have been incredible efforts on renewable energy, recycling and moving towards electric vehicles, but there’s a larger crisis that is already effecting us more than our thinning ozone layer and ever-expanding landfills: water, more specifically water consumption. Our aquifers, being precious natural holding tanks for our useable drinking water, is being used so much faster than the earth can replenish it. It’s tragedy of the commons where the individual users uphold their needs as more important than the common good of everyone else. We already see news about how droughts can affect our aquifers in the headlines but most of us don’t think too much about it because we think we can just drill another well into the ground and find more water. That is not the case; we need to understand that if we want to move towards a sustainable future we must think about one of the most important essentials to life, water.
The reason we can’t just keep drilling wells into the ground is because the layer in which we receive our water, the aquifer, genuinely stays at a certain level called our water table. The reason water is created is through porous rocks in the aquifer that generate water molecules. The rates at which these porous rocks generate is different for each aquifer. So, if the water table decreases, it decreases for the whole aquifer and affects EVERYONE using that aquifer and may take a while to regenerate. Aquifers can go completely dry from over pumping and that’s what is happening in our own back yard.
California has been going through a drought throughout their winters for the past 4 years. State governor Jerry Brown announced a state of emergency for the drought in January of 2014. Although it’s not uncommon for California to go through extended periods without rain in the winters, over pumping has permanently affected their aquifer and how much water it can store. According to an article reviewed by NASA, over pumping has dropped the clay beneath the surface 3 feet in California’s San Joaquin Valley. This aquifer, which starts from the east of San Francisco and runs about 60,000 miles all the way to a little south of Bakersfield, has lost about 336,000 to 606,000 -acre feet of storage capacity due to this drop, which is equivalent to 117.1 – 197.5 billion gallons of water storage lost! This loss in water storage is detrimental, especially when in a drought.
Most would argue that climate change is the biggest issue of all when it comes to sustainability. That is true in most cases, but when you look at what climate change is affecting, it’s everything. Climate change touches upon almost every topic that has to do with the environment. But an important thing to remember in whole systems thinking is that we must look at each individual part and understand it to the best of our ability to help the natural system that is our planet replenishes itself in its resources. We must look at our water crisis first because when it comes to carbon emissions, scientist have been trying to figure out a way to take out the carbon in the atmosphere and store it underground, a system called Direct Air Capture (DAC). Now this technology isn’t as advanced as environmental scientist would like it to be and there is not enough government funding in sustainable technologies to implement or even test these ideas. Additionally, this might not be the most sustainable solution since it requires just storing the carbon rather than finding some use for it.
So, what we do need to focus on is the more pressing matters that we can fix now or at least try to, like the over pumping of aquifers. We use so much water, it is estimated that the average person uses about 80-100 gallons of water each day (Perlman) and that’s only in first world countries. People in some third world countries don’t have this kind of access to water, so they evidently use a lot less, and because of that most die from dehydration. That’s upsetting when you think about takes approximately 2,700 liters of water to produce the cotton for one t-shirt (WWF), and a person only needs a minimum of about 2.7 - 3.7 liters of water a day (Perlman). Also, the average shower uses up to 5 gallons of water per minute, so think about that the next time you’re taking that long warm shower.
By: Emily Shealy
Click here to know how
43