Our water could run dry
Letter to the Editor

Some of us, old enough to remember smog-free summers and four definite and distinct seasons to the year, recollect too our education being augmented with proverbs, such as "look before you leap," versus "he who hesitates is lost," or "a penny saved is a penny earned," or "pride goeth before the fall."

Gems of wisdom; one of which is especially apt today, in light of deep concerns about fresh water resources - "You never miss the water until the well runs dry."

The macro world situation has relevance to local micro ones when one ponders the forecasts of increasing water scarcity. Water security is the most pressing issue of the 21st century. Many still rely on the myth of water wealth, convinced the proverbial well will never run dry. One could say they are "mythstaken."

The United Nations estimates that 1.1 billion people lack access to potable water, and that by 2050, if present trends continue, that figure will double to more than two billion. With climate change, we are looking at dire consequences. Sprott Asset Management of Toronto argues that small temperature changes could trigger changes in rainfall patterns that can lead to massive droughts.

At the 11th hour, some governments are making efforts to mitigate the severity of global-warming effects. Some efforts are token, some realistic. Now many cities and towns, especially in the United States, are not waiting for the feds, but are implementing essential measures of their own. In Canada, B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell has called for the province to reduce its greenhouse gases by 33 per cent by 2020, which would also reduce evaporation of lakes and glaciers.

In Alberta, a challenge is confronting Okotoks, a rapidly growing town near Calgary. If town council and the electorate succeed in their plans, population will be climbing no higher than what the aquifers will sup- port. The Sheep River runs through the community, a river the town considers its life blood. Many consider the Okotoks town plan ahead of the curve. The Sheep River is part of the Bow River watershed. Okotoks is in the outer orbit of the quickly expanding city of Calgary (sound familiar?) The sheep river replenishes the aquifers, under good conditions, supplying the town with fresh water.

Because of lowering levels and ever-increasing demand, the situation is becoming critical. Not long ago, the mayor Bill McAlpine spoke out about the necessity of limiting Okotoks' population to what the fresh water aquifers will sustain. There are, of course political obstacles too overcome. Environmental agencies are going hammer and tong in their efforts to bring everyone on board the environmental, waterconservation train. In Ontario, for example, Sierra Legal is leading a highprofile push to have millions of hectares of Boreal forest set aside to help combat global warming. Forests also retain and store water.

Concurrent with droughts on this fragile planet, there are instances of unprecedented flooding. Recent heavy rains brought down entire hillsides in North Vancouver; hillsides, incidentally, devoid of trees. Think of Hurricane Hazel's ravages 50 years ago; a grim reminder for residents in the GTA and beyond of what can happen when Nature is stripped of her flood restraints. We witness her resultant fury.

For untold millennia, the unfolding design, bogs, marshes and swamps became water reservoirs; "holding tanks." Very few are left, most having been drained or dried up from lack of supporting woodland; often they have either been put to cultivation or built upon. So much that is essential to Nature's balance is increasingly being paved over, sacrificed to urbanization. Perversely, humankind learns after the fact, in costly hindsight; especially as it pertains to basic elements for survival, like water, soil and air. Intuitively, perhaps with moral twinge, how often is it sensed that what is being done is wrong? The 92-yearold historian Thomas Berry speaks of a "deep cultural pathology" which desacrilizes and demonizes rather than respects and befriends the natural world.

Can we envision a society, perchance, where first and foremost, trained ecologists and environmentalists would be assigned responsibility for determining if, where, when and in what form development would occur?

"Unthinkable," some might answer in the context of today's culture and dominant economic drivers. But unthinkable perhaps only until it becomes a question of survival. The World Glacier Monitoring Service states that most of the world's glaciers are retreating at a quickening rate. Inuit people, Greenland tourists, skiers and polar bears will all testify to the fact, as well as, it so happens, the City of Seattle. Rivers fed by glaciers are being depleted. Two thousand scientists meeting in Brussels said they expect the warming trend to increase.

Environmentalist David Suzuki has described our plight thus: "We are in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone's arguing over where they're going to sit."

Lakes and rivers are also drying up due to evaporation. In the American southwest, for example, Lake Powell and Lake Mead have been drying up, threatening the water supply needed to run the Glen Canyon and Hoover dams. Widespread drying is occurring across much of Europe, Asia, Canada, Africa and Australia. Our own Lake Erie has warmed four or five degrees more than surrounding land. Think evaporation. We know Lake Erie is shallower, more tempestuous than its sister lakes, but how long will it take for the others to follow suit. No need to detail here what abnormal warming does to lake water, not to mention the increasing number of invasive species. Can we then, in the longterm, look with assurance to Lake Ontario as the lastresort source of fresh drinking water?

Most of the earth's water (97 per cent) is held in the oceans (the oceans have now warmed to a depth of three kilometres). Threequarters of the rest lies frozen (but now gradually melting) in the polar ice caps and mountain glaciers. Most of the remainder is buried underground, and that's where we on the moraine come in. What's left of these aquifer reserves must above all be conserved and replenished. Future generations will pay heavily for our folly if we deplete the aquifers.

At the moment, we are faced with a more immediate threat. Together, freshwater lakes and rivers, aquifers and water vapour in the air make up only about .01 per cent of all the water on earth.

More heavy rain means that when rain comes down in sudden, intense gushes, the water doesn't soak into the soil, but runs off, often taking the nutrient rich topsoil with it, causing sewers, rivers and other bodies of water to overflow, causing flooding.

Now, for us in King, in light of all of the foregoing, we arrive at the crucial question. Since we are being hooked up to the big pipe, what can our councillors, Regional and especially local, do in the way of introducing measures to prevent depletion of moraine aquifers, and measures too to mitigate the impact of potential floods on a scale heretofore unknown?

John Whalley,

King City