I think we take water for granted but should not. Friday’s Financial Times (Feb 17, 2012) reports that “Chinese officials have issued a stark warning over growing water shortages saying the situation is worsening every day and that more than two-thirds of cities are affected”.
Texas last year had the driest year on record, but the good news is that the drought may be receding and only 14% of the state is now in “exceptional drought” compared with 41% 3 months ago. In Georgia we continue with intrastate disputes between farmers in south Georgia concerned with metro Atlanta’s water consumption, and interstate disputes between Georgia, Alabama and Florida.
I try to meet the challenge by limiting irrigation to food producing vegetables, shrubs and trees and by capturing rainwater either in containers for later irrigation or directly into the ground (see the tab on “Rainwater harvesting”). My Atlanta running trail is on the banks of the Chattahoochee River, a major river in Georgia which is more than 400 miles long. After it has rained the river is swollen and fast moving and I think during my runs, of all the precious water rushing south and lost to our use. If we were smarter we would retain the rainwater in the earth or containers so we could use it later. If we were smarter we would also reduce our water use – do we have to plant lawns and plants, which require heavy irrigation in the summer? Other than food bearing plants, which we pressed into servitude and must be hydrated to produce to our expectations, why don’t we use plants acclimatized to our weather patterns. Once established with some tender care, and mulched, they should be left to fend for themselves, assisted by our snaring rainwater into the ground for their use.
I continue to be intrigued by a rainwater ditch which winds through the north facing slope of my woodland. Initially I thought it was a contour ditch and a lot of it is on contour. But as I have traced it along it now appears that it slowly winds to lower levels of the hill. I think the intention was to have it on contour (horizontal) but to ensure that when rainfall was heavy the water would not wash over the ditch and erode it, so instead the excess water escapes to lower levels where it follows the contour for a while and then moves to lower levels. The idea apparently was to hold as much water in the ground for as long as possible. I may have mentioned in a previous post that there is a spring at the bottom of the hill which I believe originated from the water captured by this long winding ditch. All this comes to mind from an intriguing book I am reading -“1491” by Charles Mann, which postulates that the inhabitants of the Americas before Columbus were a lot more sophisticated than we think. I know it is a far stretch of the imagination to assume that the water snaring ditch on my woodland was built by earlier peoples, but who knows? And there are terraces also in two of the smaller valleys – who built them?
I do know that I should put this speculation aside and get seriously active with my bobcat in the main watershed area in the woodland by creating contour ditches/swales to forestall the loss of rainwater. A project for me in the coming months.