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Post by bluemingidiot on Aug 29, 2023 11:23:05 GMT
and who knows? Maybe we are right!
Aquifers supply 90 percent of the nation’s water systems Overuse is draining and damaging aquifers nationwide. Nearly half of tens of thousands sites have declined significantly over the past 40 years as more water has been pumped out than nature can replenish. In the past decade, four of every 10 sites hit all-time lows.
America Is Draining Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Some people say that the planet has capacity limits and that this is a result of overpopulation, but I believe it is caused by climate change.
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Post by countrymom22 on Aug 29, 2023 23:43:23 GMT
I believe that it is caused by both climate change (which has always been going on) as well as an increase in demand for water. As our leisure time has increased, so has the use of golf courses and swimming pools, just to name a few uses that have increased in the recent past. In the last 20 years, 4 new golf courses have gone in within a 15 mile radius of our place alone. It's crazy how much water those places use!
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Post by bluemingidiot on Aug 30, 2023 1:34:45 GMT
A hundred years ago most people probably took one bath a week. There were less than 2 billion people in the world. Today, most people probably bathe/shower daily. And there are over 8 billion people in the world.
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Post by grannyg on Sept 8, 2023 20:12:34 GMT
We are still in a drought...no rain...temps have been in the triplet digits for over 58 days...107 today.....it evaporates quickly when watering animals...everything is suffering...we have the promise of cooler temps in three days....
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Post by Woodpecker on Sept 9, 2023 0:34:27 GMT
Prayers for you grannyg, that sounds really tough for you, keeping the faith you’ll have rain & cooler temps very soon🙏 |
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jenn
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Posts: 226
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Post by jenn on Sept 14, 2023 12:37:20 GMT
I've always been aware of water issues. Grandma was telling us in the 1960s that one part of her yard (in the house/barn area of the quarter section in the Dakotas) couldn't be a garden anymore because prior tenant had used well water on it. She collected rain water and used that, along with grandchild labor to pick potato bugs. I loved that iron-laden, cold from the well water* (a faucet halfway to her garden- I was in college when they got indoor plumbing) and couldn't stand the taste of the "soft" water she would get from her sister's farm a few miles away for washing hair and for the adults to drink (afraid of gallstones? I dunno- maybe it made better tea and coffee). I found out when living in the UK that the famous Bath water- drunk for people's health supposedly- tastes the same as that artesian well does when it's cold (but it's a hot spring, and they drink it hot- and it tastes nasty and sulfury that way).**
Then in Texas- caliche side- the farmette we bought had a wondrous garden bed system with irrigation plumbed to it. I did the soil pH and it was insanely high because of the well (and later even city) water used on it. I got 6 2500 gal cisterns to collect rain water from the house and barn and used that instead.
The lack of water in Texas and whispers of the First Nation civilizations that vanished from the Southwest as the water did convinced me that if we wanted a place to leave to our kids it shouldn't be in central/west Texas. So I count that towards why Alabama ain't so bad a place. Plus memories of Mom telling us how the Promised Land- the Middle East- was verdant garden until too many people lived there and cut down the Cedars of Lebanon etc turning a garden into a desert.
*Last time I drank it was as an adult visiting the abandoned farm. The tap still worked. Now you have to go through tick laden waist high grass to get to it so not for a few decades now.
**Glastonbury- the famous English site of the music festival and rumored to be an Arthurian site- has two separate springs- one reddish and irony, the other less so- they say the one is for women and the other for men. Higher iron, makes sense. IIRC branches of them ran out in a ditch near the main site, pretty close to each other but different in the staining they left upon the ground.
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Post by bluemingidiot on Sept 16, 2023 9:12:55 GMT
"the Promised Land- the Middle East- was verdant garden until too many people lived there and cut down the Cedars of Lebanon etc turning a garden into a desert."
A desert is preferable to a city.
Where was your farmette in Texas?
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jenn
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Post by jenn on Sept 17, 2023 11:40:48 GMT
"the Promised Land- the Middle East- was verdant garden until too many people lived there and cut down the Cedars of Lebanon etc turning a garden into a desert." A desert is preferable to a city. Where was your farmette in Texas? Lampasas County when DH was stationed at Fort Cavazos (formerly Hood). 1 acre home and yard (and pool and greenhouse and alkaline garden beds), 2 acres peach orchard and wellhouse and chicken house, 3 acres barn and pasture where prior owners'd had goats and I had sheep. Happy 4 years there. |
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Post by bluemingidiot on Sept 17, 2023 12:22:40 GMT
My grandparents had a ranch in northern Lampasas County near Izoro. They raised Rambouillet sheep and Black Angus cattle.
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Post by bluemingidiot on Sept 23, 2023 21:27:21 GMT
Fuel ethanol consumption in the United States was around 14 billion gallons in 2022.
They currently use approximately three gallons of water to produce a gallon of ethanol.
That's about 129 acre feet of water.
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