Water
Published by Spinsheet - September 2017
Water – one of the essential earthly artifices that sustains life. Like oxygen, without it we no longer exist, ourselves the flora and fauna as well. More so, for those of us who live, work and play on this great Bay, find water a sustainer of the purist intrinsic happiness. Yet the adage, “water, water everywhere – and not a drop to dink” may be truer than we realize. Here are some fantastic stats to contemplate. 97% of the world’s water is ocean, leaving about 3% to fresh water. However, 79% of that fresh water is in ice caps and glaciers. The remaining 20% we find in ground water (non-accessible). The 1% remaining is accessible surface water. Translated that .03% of the world’s water is accessible and of that miniscule amount– 52% are lakes, 38% is soil moisture, 8% is vapor, 1% are rivers and 1% is the moisture held in living things. Clearly making our accessible fresh water supplies maybe one of our most limited commodities that has been lent our generation to nurture and protect.
It’s the .0003% of our world’s water supply that I find interesting today, the rivers; the rivers I fished in as a boy, canoe and kayak as an adult and those I observe around agriculture as an academic. These same rivers, essential to our existence are essential to the same existence of our great American farming operations. They have long been fought over, well depicted in Bonanza and many of our favorite pioneering movies. We still fight over them, struggling to insure the fairness each citizen deserves in having air, water, food and freedom. I currently work at a University who has a dairy operation close to a major river and I find myself both supportive of the Agriculture Department I serve and equally hyper concerned about the long-term safety of my local river.
Water flowing down hill, starting from small springs and surface run off, soon becomes tiny creeks combining into rivers. Like the many bordering rivers that feed the Bay, they have started as hardly measureable moisture on land. Recently in DC an executive order was signed to roll back parts of the Clean Water Act that directly impacted the protection for the birthplaces and tributaries of our rivers. Controversial without a question, this order garnered good arguments on each side of the facts over what were being called ‘puddles’. Ironically, at the same time American Rivers, a non-profit water advocacy group, published their 10 Most Endangered rivers report. Sadly, one of our local rivers made the list as well as one not that far from home. The Rappahannock was number five and Neuse/Cape Fear Rivers were number seven.
I have a home in the Blue Ridge Mountains that feeds ground water into the Rappahannock. I cross it regularly on Rt. 211 where it’s so small you could wade it on foot. I’ve dined by it in Fredericksburg. I’ve crossed it in Tappahannock many times on the way to get parts for my Farr and I have cruised it my wife and kids after the Stingray Point Regatta in Deltaville. And it ranks 5 of the top 10 most endangered. That hits a little close to home. Decisions in DC hit a little close to home. How my agricultural colleagues address water hits close to home. It makes the world feel much smaller than before. It takes obscure far away decisions made by politicians I’ll likely never meet affect my daily movements. It takes untouchable environmental shifts like warming of our icecaps and shoves the issues squarely into my back yard. It’s a gross personalization of an environmental awakening that impacts each of us.
No longer are we able, in a world of information, to listen to DC politics and then simply stick our heads in the sand when we hear something that rubs us wrong because the sand is what’s being impacted. The fracking upstream is polluting the sand we want to hide in. The same sand that laces the rivers we fish from, and the same sand that coats the bottom over which we sail on a daily basis. Being as close to the natural system, as we are as sailors, personalizes the impacts we used to overlook. .0003% isn’t much of what’s left. Fight for the puddles.