Protecting Our Water Resources Before It’s Too Late

Water. The vital natural resource that’s intertwined in every living thing around the world. Without it, we’ll die. Without access to clean water, we’ll get sick. Without access to a reliable and clean water source, we can’t survive as a civilization, and we’re at the precipice of collapse. Protecting our water resources is imperative to our survival.

I don’t write stories of collapse lightly because I might get accused of being an alarmist or a conspiracy theorist. I write this from an empirical standpoint as a semi-retired civil engineer. Climate change is changing the weather because things are getting out of natural balance. Rising ocean temperatures push more water vapor into the air, and higher ambient temperature holds more water vapor. When clouds can’t hold all the excess water vapor, it comes down as rain, and a lot of it fast.

We’re seeing high-intensity and short-duration storms that flash flood low-lying areas and erode water channels and banks. We’re seeing long-tail rainfall events happen with more frequency. In other words, expect more extreme weather and damage as the planet heats up.

Yes, this is all grim and scary for humans and the ecosystems we rely on to live, but the Earth doesn’t care. The heating Earth is out of balance, and this extreme weather is just the way for the Earth to come back into balance. It’ll be here long after we’re dead and gone, and that’s the real question. Do we even deserve the Earth in the first place and be allowed to live on it?

Drought in Spain

My partner celebrated a milestone birthday this year, and we decided to take a 15-day trip to Portugal, Spain, and Italy as low-key travelers. We had a lovely time and lived out of two small carry-on suitcases. We traveled light, used mass transportation for the majority of the trip, and walked. Boy, did we walk a lot.

From the moment we stepped onto Portuguese soil, we noticed that everything was very dry. We expected things to dry out as we headed south from Porto since the northern part of Portugal is in a subtropical oceanic climate zone and Lisbon is in a Mediterranean climate zone, but it was dry all over.

When we got to Spain, things were considerably worse. The southern part of Spain was still in a severe drought. Barcelona and the Catalunya region of Spain were rationing water, and all public fountains and beach showers were shut off.