It has been excellent weather for the vegetable garden, thank
you Ms. Weatherwoman. The peas, beans, carrots and corn are jumping so it looks
like we’ll have veggies galore later this summer, and into the fall.
This is truly good fortune because a well stocked veggie
pantry means I won’t have to drive down to Shoot’em Up City to turn in my guns
for food vouchers. I want to keep my
guns for when Premier Pinocchio announces a guns-for-electricity-vouchers
program.
At any rate, the weather gods have been generous in my patch
of the world. There have been bright stretches of sunshine interrupted by brief
showers of light to moderate rain.
I have watered only twice this season, more good fortune because
our only water source is rain barrels. When the barrels go empty, the garden
goes dry.
The barrels ran dry two or three years ago and I had to
refill them by trucking water from a pond. Hauling water, then doling it out to
individual veggie plants is not my idea of fun, but it did give me a new
appreciation of the importance of water.
Like most Canadians my appreciation of water was not as
intense as it should be. Many of us live surrounded by lakes and rivers so we
believe we are water wealthy, much water wealthier than other nations.
In fact, Brazil and Russia are the world’s water wealthiest
nations. Canada basically is tied for third place with Indonesia, the U.S. and
China.
Surveys have shown that more than 50 per cent of Canadians
consider freshwater our country’s most important natural resource. Eighty per
cent of us are concerned that a water shortage will develop if we do not take
steps toward conservation.
Despite this we are among the world’s leading water wasters.
We rank only behind the U.S. in per capita water consumption among developed
nations. Europeans use one half the water that we do.
A Canadian Water Attitudes Study some years back found that
Canadians believe they use an average of only 66 litres of water a day for
showering, laundry, washing dishes, in toilets and, of course, for drinking.
Actual use per person is far beyond what we believe: each of us uses on average
329 litres of water a day.
Experts on water usage say that has to change because the
warming of earth’s atmosphere is dramatically altering the world’s hydrological
cycle. Rainfall and snow patterns around
the world, once fairly predictable, have become erratic and likely will become
even more so.
The result already is being seen: more severe droughts in some
places, more severe floods in others. Both have high impacts on the water we
all need for life.
As the climate changes the politics of water will intensify. An
example of the fighting over water that can be expected is seen in the current
plan of Waukesha, Wisconsin to divert 8.4 millions of gallons of water a day
from the Lake Michigan.
Waukesha, a city of 70,000, now gets its water from groundwater
wells, which now are found to contain high levels of radium. A court has
ordered the city to find other sources of water by 2018.
Canada and the U.S. have an agreement forbidding the diverting
of Great Lakes water to any area outside the Great Lakes basin. Waukesha, a Milwaukee
suburb, is working a loophole to get an exception to this rule.
The city itself is outside the Great Lakes basin, but the county
in which it resides is within the basin. So Waukesha believes it should be
granted an exception to take the water
it needs.
We can expect to see more of these water fights as climate
change continues to upset precipitation patterns.
Hopefully the rainfall patterns will remain stable for my
vegetable garden. If so, the veggies will flourish and my only worry will be
the animals.
Last year my scarecrow fell asleep on the job and the raccoons
snuck in and feasted on the corn. They left us one small cob.
A couple of nights later the deer, obviously upset that the
raccoons beat them to the corn, ate our prized sunflowers.
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