Running On Empty - water conservation

THE CROW laments our fast depletion of the planet's resources through abuse and misuse.

My mother was a very levelheaded lady. In contemporary jargon you might say that she kept her cool in most of life's minor crises. But there was one thing that always drove her to distraction: the sound of a dripping faucet. My siblings and I had a hard time understanding her obsessive preoccupation with such a seemingly trivial matter. For in our privileged existence, water was as abundant as the air we breathed and often less polluted. If someone had told us that bottled drinking water would one day be a staple item in food stores, we would have considered him a dead cert for a oneway ticket to the funny farm. And if that someone had predicted that we'd live to see the day when filmgoers would be willing to pay big money for a pint of filtered tap water, we would know that he was a nut case.

As we grew up, we gradually learned the source of our mother's paranoia. For her father, a young barrister from Manchester with dreams of becoming a gentleman farmer, had acquired a 70acre property in southern California, on the outskirts of a tiny settlement near the Mexican border called San Diego. This was in 1888, when the US transcontinental railroad had recently been completed, mother was three, and the population of California was less than 1/100 of today's 34 million. Unfortunately, however, the property agent had neglected to inform my grandfather that it seldom if ever rained in the Sonoma desert, the sear site of his sprawling spread. And irrigation by diverting the Columbia River, which today makes California's Central Valley one of the world's most fertile food baskets, was but a glimmer in the eye of some eccentric hydrologist up in Sacramento, the state capital.

After the proverbial seven lean years, during which my mother learned to conserve every drop of water, grandfather's house burned to the ground with all its contents except for a single silver spoon which inadvertently had been left in a dishpan, with just enough water to keep it submerged, out of reach of the greedy flames. Grandpa never recovered from the loss and died a broken man, but his wife eventually returned to England with her two surviving children. Mother lived to the ripe old age of 104, legally blind but sharp as a tack 'til her dying day, and never forgetting how precious our natural resources are.

Well, as the saying goes, 'What goes around, comes around', and today more than 100 years later the state of Florida, which sits on what used to be one of the largest aquifers in North America, is experiencing the worst drought since rainfall amounts were first recorded in 1895 a drought similar to the one that afflicted California around that time. The worst part of the present peninsular scenario is that the damage to the Florida aquifer is irreversible; as we pump out the fresh water accumulated over millennia, it is rapidly replaced by infiltrating sea water. Perhaps Spinoza was right: 'Nature abhors a vacuum.'

But it is not the few remaining individuals of the Florida species of genus pantera who are consuming the once abundant water, any more than it is the dozen or so surviving California condors who are causing the recurrent brownouts in their state by bumping into power lines in their nocturnal hunt for prey. Rather, the environmental crisis currently afflicting both these coastal states is the direct result of an exploding population, unable or unwilling to see beyond the tip of its collective nose, and seemingly oblivious to the fact that consuming in one century what it took nature one hundred centuries to accumulate comes with a heavy price a price which our children and grandchildren will have to pay, due to my generation's deplorable dereliction of duty.

Personally, I find it a bit bothersome not to be allowed to wash my car or water my lawn on penalty of a stiff fine but as long as there's Perrier and Canadian spring water to be had in the supermarket, the prospect of dying of thirst is not uppermost among my health concerns. But, according to the World Health Organisation, one fifth of the earth's 6 billion people already want for safe drinking water, and the day will soon come when potable water will become one of the most highly priced commodities for all members of the human race, searching for sustenance and elbowing each other for space on a crowded planet.

Meanwhile, the silver spoon salvaged from a fire far away from my present abode more than a century ago, is now in my possession a silent reminder to its new owner not to waste the riches that Mother Nature so generously has bestowed upon us human ingrates. And, just like its present owner, it has acquired the dull patina of a genuine antique!