LIQUID GOLD

 

Journal

LIQUID GOLD

Bill Barksdale, Columnist

Like life itself, Richard Wagner’s epic operas known as The Ring Cycle beings in the water.  The Rhinemaidens guard a magical lump of gold.  Anyone who forms the gold into ring and puts it on while renouncing love will have unlimited powers.  The characters in Wagner’s operas and Scandinavian myth are the sources of every Marvel adventure movie character.  Water symbolically represents, among other things, creativity as in birth.   What is arguably the primary purpose of NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover?  To find evidence of water on Earth’s neighboring planet. 

Life on Earth and water are inseparable.  There can be no life without water.  Clean water is more valuable than gold.  One can live without gold but not without water.  60% of the human body is made up of water.  Given the choice, which is the real treasure?   

The eventual cooling of ancient Earth and formation of water enabled life to gestate on this planet.  Thus water becomes not only a symbol of life but quite literally the environment in which birth itself is nurtured.  The human womb is an environment of amniotic fluid, water-based, in which the fetus grows until the mother’s water breaks signaling the beginning of the birth of a child.  Water is essential to life.

Earth is protected from the Sun’s ultraviolet (UV) radiation by its stratosphere, one important layer of which is ozone which absorbs much of the Sun’s radiation thus protecting Earth from overheating and becoming hostile to life.  This stratosphere holds air in Earth’s atmosphere in addition to its UV filtering properties.  Too much UV exposure is why you get a sunburn, a major cause of skin cancer and other immune system damage.  Widespread use by humans of hydrofluorocarbons and fossil fuel have done widespread damage to the ozone layer exposing Earth’s life to more harmful UV exposure and warming the atmosphere which, among other things, disrupts the cycle of rain which is how Nature distributes clean water over the planet.

The average American uses, depending on what source you look at, between 80 to 178 gallons of water per day.  The city of Portland OR claims to use around 47 GPD per person.  In a small town like Willits with population of approximately 5,000 people, if each person averaged 50 gallons per day (GPD), Willits would require about 250,000 GPD.  A football field 1 foot deep in water would be about 430,848 gallons of water.  Just two days of Willits water use would fill that football field with close to 2 feet of water.  That’s a lot of water.  Clean potable water is a finite resource and it costs a lot of money to purify it for human use.

If you still have an old fashion toilet that uses about 3.5 gallons per flush or more, instead of a modern low-flush toilet that uses 1.28 – 1.6 gallons per flush, you are spending more than twice as much for toilet flushing water with the old toilet.  Replace it and save money & water.  Toilets are cheap.  Water isn’t.  A shower with a low-flow head uses about 2 GPM (gallons per minute).  I’ve gotten my showers down to about 3 gallons of water.  An 8 minute shower uses about 16-17 gallons. A low-flow shower head costs a few dollars.  If you are using a high-flow head, change it.   A bath, 30-50 gallons. 

Dishwashers normally use less water than hand washing, about ¼ to ½ the amount of water.  If you’re washing by hand use a small tub and rinse quickly.  A top-loading clothes washer uses about 20-40 gallons of water per load.  A front-loader uses about 14 gallons per load. 

Although outdated health regulations sometimes make it difficult, you should be using graywater for outdoor landscape watering – shower & bathtub water only.  Government agencies are waking up to the valuable resource of graywater.  A simple valve on your shower drain can switch drainage to an outdoor spigot in the dry season and back to the sewer line in the wet season.  A plumber can easily do this.  Washing machine water often has detergents and bleach that can be harmful to plants.  Never water animals with graywater.  Toilet water is dangerous and is never used for landscape watering.  It should always go into the sewer or septic system. 

We need to be looking at ways to replenish our ground water during our drought-ridden times, not keep extracting it.  The geology of Mendocino County requires rain to fill it up again.  The Franciscan geology of most of Mendocino County   depends on underground pits of fractured rock that get filled each year with rainfall for ground water.  Springs are simply areas that are lower than one or more water-filled natural pits so the water “springs” out of the ground.  The Valley has its own limited underground waterways that are also replenished with rain fall and snow melt.  No well or spring is limitless without enough yearly rainfall. 

Pumping out of creeks and rivers is destroying our fish populations, many of which are already endangered species.  Large agriculture operations in which chemical fertilizers, nitrate contamination and manures are used, run off to pollute and kill the fish while draining the waterways at the same time.  Poorly designed grading and road building and poor logging practices silt up the waterways destroying essential fish habitat.  Over-pumping of wells draws sewage water and unwanted minerals like boron and iron, which naturally occur in the geologic structure, into existing wells. 

Outdated statistic models that depend on “October rain” are foolish and unrealistic.  It hasn’t rained regularly in October in Northern Cal for 50 years.  We need to make water conservation and replenishment a #1 priority if we expect to have our liquid gold here for the future.  As in Wagner’s mythical tale, the evil chunk of gold – greed – doesn’t support life.