Unabashed

So what’s happened to all the water? Where’s the rain? It is true that I am environmentally conscious and this drought has me worried. It’s bad when you have as many trees in your yard as I do and the leaves have all turned brown and are shedding in July, and the grass is crunchy and brown underfoot. Some towns have already gone dry, and Atlanta is forecasted to go dry very soon. What will happen to all those people? Do 4.5 million people just pack up and leave the city? In the midst of this drought, I have a trio of observations to make about just where the water went.

1. Bottled Water. Millions upon millions of gallons of water is sitting on shelves in stores around the world. Not to mention all the other soft drinks which are made with water, but I’m concentrating only on the bottled water, which up until about ten years ago was something you used a canteen or a thermos for. You certainly didn’t go to a store to spend almost two bucks on a bottle of Dasani like we do now. The key is that this isn’t something that was there before. Now there’s a market for it, and Coke and Pepsi, along with a ton of other producers, are doing their best to fill it to the brim. Where does all that water come from? Straight out of the tap. Yep, just the same water you could have poured yourself when you left home, you’ve now spent two bucks for because… well, I don’t know why. It can’t be convenience, because what could be more convenient than filling up a jug of ice water before you leave home for the day? Regardless, there it is, and what’s even worse: how many of those bottle get thrown in the trash half full, with the top twisted on, effectively locking the water inside a container that won’t rupture or leak for some ten thousand years? All of that water in all those bottles,�the ones on the shelves and the ones in the dump, represent millions of gallons of water that has been removed from the environment.
2. Manufactured Ponds. Have you ever seen a piece of property where someone built a house or planted a trailer and then a few months or years later they dig a pond in their front yard? In Alabama this is something that happens A LOT. All it takes is one guy who walks out on his front porch one morning and says, “Durn, that’d be a good place for a lake,” and then he gets his buddy who owns a backhoe to come dig one. It fills up with water, and all those thousands of gallons are suddenly removed from the environment. If it was just a pond here and there it wouldn’t be a big deal, but there are thousands of these small ponds in Alabama alone. Yes–I said thousands. How many billions of gallons of water is that? Water which was once a part of an ecosystem designed to rain down on the South?
3. (And lastly, though this is a very serious situation which could displace millions of people, a lighthearted consideration.) Poopy Diapers. Every time a baby dirties a diaper, those marvelous feats of sponging ingenuity, what happens to the diaper? The parent puts it in a Wal-Mart plastic bag and ties the bag into a knot, then puts that bag into another plastic bag, cinches it up tight and throws it away. What happens to all that refuse? Refuse which once went into the ground, where it was filtered for a few hundred years and then pushed back out into the environmental supply? What about all that other moisture that’s disappearing into plastic bags, feats of ingenuity themselves, which don’t break down for thousands of years?

We’re removing the water from the ecosystem. Is it possible that a combination of these things is causing this drought, or is this drought just something that’s happening in due course, something which will rectify itself as it always has in the past? Is the fertile south about to become a desert?

written by Matt Mitchell