I really love water. It’s without doubt the most incredible substance that we know. Water can cool us when we are hot. Water can heat us when we are cold. No life can exist without water. Our human bodies are around 60% water depending on our age. A little more water when we are young, a little less water when we are old.
Water can exist as a gas (steam), as a liquid and as a solid (ice). Water is used to grow our food. Water is boiled by coal furnaces to create our electricity. Humans cannot live for more than a few days without water. The water cycle cleanses and purifies our planets water for free. The water we drink now is the same water that was drunk by the dinosaurs. There is no more and no less water on our planet than has existed for hundreds of millions of years. The brilliant thing is that we don’t even know where it came from.
Water covers 75% of the surface of our planet Earth. Maybe it should be called planet Water? If there’s so much water around why do people make such a fuss about preserving water and taking care not to waste water? For a start less than 1% of all water is fit for drinking. The rest is salt, frozen, inaccessible or polluted. Our oceans are becoming more and more acidic as they absorb extra carbon from our atmosphere created by our burning of fossil fuels. Creatures that create their shells in the ocean like krill and zooplankton are finding it more and more difficult to do what they have always done in an ocean than is more acidic. These creatures are the basis of the ocean food chain and are seen as very important species that we don’t want to destroy.
Remember the big drought we had from 1997 – 2009? More than 85% of Australians were on water restrictions. We even stopped watering our concrete driveways. Thankfully the rains have returned for now but they seemed to have washed away our efforts around saving water. Most of our drinking water comes from rivers that feed into dams, some comes from boreholes that tap into underground water supplies.
Water that we take from our environment is water that cannot be used support our rivers, forests and wetlands. We need to be careful with this delicate balance of nature and balance of human needs. There is plenty of water to go around we just need to show some respect to the source of all life and think more seriously how we manage this incredible resource. I love water.
Jason – Founder and CEO Cool Australia