Issue 5

Water Pressures Build in the Southeast

The water you drink today has literally been around for eons. The same water has been cycling around and around through the hydrologic cycle since before the time of the dinosaurs—falling as rain, flowing through streams to rivers to oceans, evaporating back into the atmosphere.

Water, its availability or lack, determines where—and in what forms—life exists on our planet. We expect water to be available to us all the time: we humans can only live 4 or 5 days without it. Less than 1 percent of the Earth’s water is accessible fresh water, present on the surface in rivers and lakes, in ground water stored underground, and in the atmosphere. This water is renewed daily by precipitation, cleansed daily by forests and soils.

Across the world over a billion people do not have access to clean drinking water. In the United States, most of us assume our supplies of water are secure, but just over a century ago, clean drinking water was starting to look scarce. From East to West, vast areas of American land had been clearcut and unsustainably farmed, leaving land with no vegetation, the bare soil deeply scored by erosion. Streams and lakes were polluted with sediment and waste; urban water supplies smelled bad and had become a source of disease. (...continued...)