From my understanding, water has a pretty complex life cycle that can boil down to (hehe) this : it’ll move around in the ground and in the air forever, sometimes passing through alive creatures in the process.
But water is water, if I buy 100L of bottled water and pour it to the ground, is it really wasted? It’s just moving through the cycle and it’ll come back just as clean eventually. The waste is financial for me or for the cleaning process in the water treatment plant. But really the water on the planet is always the same amount, right? It’s finite, but both abundant and “self cleaning”, no?
When I see the rivers being dry I can’t help but think the water is just elsewhere, which is just a matter of reaching it.
Bonus question : How does toxic waste affect that cycle? Is evaporating enough to be clean again?
In: 65
Let’s just pretend the water cycle itself was a big magical machine that took in dirty water from all around the world and spit out clean, usable water from a big ol’ hose, always at a constant rate, 24/7. And for simplicity, let’s just say it’s indestructible, will never shut off, break down, or even slow down. It just hums away, always.
The machine dumps out its fresh water into a massive reservoir where anyone in the world can come and take their fill.
You may look upon this and think, “This reservoir is so huge. And it’s always being filled by a machine that will never break, and never run out. Surely fresh water is functionally infinite?”
Kind of. That magical machine is very big, and it processes a tremendous amount of water. But there are a lot of straws dipped in that reservoir. And they are all *very* thirsty. No one of them can match the output of the machine, but *all* of them combined?
The reservoir level is dropping. The machine can’t keep up. It’s running fine, just as fast as it always has, and it will continue to do so. But the straws keep getting wider. And longer. And *thirstier*…
The reservoir gives us the illusion that everything is fine, so far. Since it has banked up for centuries, millennia, even, we have a large buffer to satisfy us. But that just means we’re on borrowed time. If things keep up as they are, the reservoir will run dry, and we will all huddle up around the machine, fighting over every drop that comes out of it, because even though its supply over time is theoretically infinite, its supply *right now* is finite, and sadly, less than what we’re demanding of it.
That is, perhaps, an extreme dramatization, but the takeaway point is that even if it’s renewable, the rate at which it’s renewable is what’s important, as that is the bottleneck for how much there actually is to go around.
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