Welcome again to this fourth article on water, where we see how water moves about our planet in remarkable ways.
I hope you are enjoying finding out some of the secrets of this amazing element we are so dependent on.
OK, so lets visualise water traveling around the earth.
It starts with the sun’s warmth lifting up billions of tiny water droplets from seas, lakes and the moist earth. Then rising up invisibly it becomes soft humidity in the air and then because of stronger rising warmth, water moves further up to gather together as clouds in the atmosphere above.
These many differing clouds are blown here and there, to fall finally as rain in perhaps far distant places.
Where this rain falls on mountains, the water flows down through gravity’s pull to the hills below, rushing onwards in many streams that pause briefly in dark ponds, then press forwards to a local river that gathers in one mighty flow across flat plains into the sea again.
We know it was on the banks of such great rivers as the Indus or Euphrates, the Yangtze, the Nile or the Rhine that people first gathered in villages that grew to become great cooperative or warring cities.
Why? Because where a river is, particularly when running across a fertile delta near the sea, there is found rich soil, plentiful food and easy transport.
This, as described above, we call the Great Water Cycle.
It spreads water all around our world and at the same time carries health giving nutrients to all living things, while also cleansing and refreshing itself through its own pathways and movements.
But there are also many smaller water cycles within this great planetary one.
The oceans have a water cycle where vast internal rivers, that we call ocean currents, flow through all the salt waters of our world, carrying warm and cold waters to affect various countries’ weather patterns, flora and fauna.
These enormously powerful currents dive down kilometers deep into the watery darkness when they cool near the ice caps and then rise again thousands of miles away in warm waters, spreading food worldwide for what used to be a stupendously rich marine life.
It is interesting to note that the cool dark water around the ice caps is where the richest marine life exists, while in the warm waters the less abundant life-forms express themselves in incredibly varied exotic tropical colors.
Of course, every living thing has its own little water cycle in the flowing blood, lymph, sap and cellular fluids that come in and leave our little bodies. This is our constitutional health.
Back in outer nature, water also cycles deep down into the ground, heating up well over boiling point yet remaining liquid while under pressure.
Rain can spend centuries filtering through cracks in mountains to emerge in pitch black dark caves, the most precious enriched water one can ever wish to taste.
It can also flow in underground shingle rivers not far under the surface of arid deserts,only recently visible from outer space.
And far underground in the Antarctic there are what we call fossil water lakes, with water gathering there for millions of years, as pure as the world is old.
Sadly it is just this type of deep fossil water in other lands that has been used to pressure the last dregs of oil from under performing wells.
And uncountable numbers of irrigation bores have drawn up vast amounts of less deep, underground water supplies in the last century, supplies that took perhaps millions of years to build up and are not quickly replaced.
This leads us to another water cycle, our own industrial water cycle.
Since human beings learned to clean ourselves, wash food and dye clothes, we have pulled water out of its natural flowing cycles, and used it for our own purposes.
As early as 4000 years ago in the Minoan culture on Crete we had underground piping systems engineered for water supply to urban populations.
But it was not until recently in the mid 1700s, when the Industrial Revolution with its clever machinery started in England, that we took hold of water in larger amounts to process, transport, mix and clean our mass production of goods.
In those days human populations were still small, and even the invention of the flushing toilets in London around 1815 made little mark on the pristine waters beyond the lower Thames river.
But now, what is happening? In 1970 the world population was 3 billion. It has doubled since then to over 6 billion!
Industry has more than doubled with it. As well as our factories, our farming is often run with a chemical salts input-output factory mentality, applying water at twice the rate that is needed using the long workable organic methods.
Water that is supplied to the great cities’ taps is water that has gone through town water purification systems and possibly also over 10 sets of kidneys since it was last in the great refreshing water cycle of nature, where it can cleanse and energise itself in nature’s most efficient ways, used successfully since the dawn of time.
Pollutants and excess nutrients from human homes, farms and factories are thrown back into our waterways in amounts that quite simply boggle the mind, as the figures as quoted in terms of cubic kilometers of ruined water.
At this moment we ought to remember what we learned before; that fresh water moving through nature’s great water cycle is only a tiny 0.6% of the world’s total water supply!
It is vital that our human urban and industrial use takes the same approach that nature takes.
‘Improve What You Use’, is the motto we need to apply to our use of this water.
For not only is there chemical pollution but there is also energetic (or information) pollution of water. Nature cleans its own water but also rejuvenates it, refreshing it in very intelligent ways.
Really, we need to learn from nature in order to design with nature, learning from the methods it has used so successfully for so long.
But more on that later.
Best wishes
Iain Trousdell Co-Founder and Keynote Speaker Foundation for Water www.foundationforwater.org
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