Water: Liquid Gold and False Abundance
While searching for datasets that would present a possible topic of social concern, my brother began to tell me about two separate stories. His first story was about a city in South Africa some years ago that was running through their water supply at an unsustainable rate, and through massive change to water usage habits, the city’s water supply lifespan was stretched out indefinitely. The next story was about a city in Central/South America that sat upon a subterraneous water supply (also called an aquafer), and because of rapid consumption and modernized environments, the city was actually beginning to sink. These stories, regardless of their root, in fact (which will be mentioned later) reminded me that my home state of Nebraska, as well as 8 other states, sit atop one of the largest aquafers in North America. Water is one of the most valuable resources that we have on the planet and is necessary for all life, but we have believed the lie that freshwater is as abundant as the pictures of Earth seen from space.
Since the beginning, human civilization has never strayed far from water resources that were available about ground, from the Indus valley to the Nile River water has always been essential to life. This innate knowledge paired with the biblical ideas of abundance and generosity raise a red flag in the area of water usage; these are the driving forces behind the investigation of water usage around the world and how it is coming to our home if it is not already there. Dataset Merit
The primary dataset used in this investigation is called “groundwater depletion in the United States” by the United States Geological Survey. The organization tracked the average annual depletion of various aquafers from 1900 until the end of 2008, there is also a separate dataset that focuses specifically on 2001 to 2008. With aid of supplemental research that has been done by other third parties it became that if humanity is now brushing up against water’s finite presence there, then the staggering 353.3km3 of water taken from the Ogallala aquafer in the past 100+ years is not a pace that can or should be maintained. This study was published in 2013 and breaks the major impact metrics into three categories: area name, size of the are in km2,and depletion volume in km3. When confronted with numbers this large the first bells that rang in my mind were reserved only for discussions of national debt, that is to say amounts which to the average person would seem to simply not be plausible. Debt, to many, is a bubble waiting to pop and the freshwater reserves of up to eight steps (and the world in the macro) is a depression no one can recoup from. By changing personal habits and attitudes we as a people will be able to avoid a global shortage of water and quite literally save our planet. This is a matter of social change regarding waste, selfishness, and greed as well as an opening to avoid a modern-day de-creation, a reverse flood of our own making.
Analytic Process
I am much more of a visual and kinetic leaner. Opening an excel spreadsheet at first is a very intimidating experience that can muddle clear thinking and simply be numbers on a page. After downloading the spreadsheets I immediately searched for any kind of program that might aid in making the data more approachable and the answer was Tableau public. It is a free program that takes datasets and based on the kind of story a person wants to tell, offers various ways to visualize the data. For the purposes of habit examination, the most important divisions were the size of the aquafer and how much water was depleted on average per year. Noteworthy Data and Potential Trends
In the year 1900 the population of the United States was about 76 million people, and the United States Census Bureau puts the combined population of the eight states that sit, at least partially, atop the Ogallala aquafer at 7.63 million people. Since then there has been an increase of over 33 million people in these same eight states as of 2008 (Census.gov). When viewed from a large overview the usage of US aquafers looks like this:
Figure 1
Water depletion 1900-2008
Note. Color is correlated to aquafer size and block size is correlated to total depletion volume. Created in Tableau Public.
The Ogallala (or High plains) aquafer is the second largest in the United States, but it is clearly the most drawn from. A total of 1.164978156e+19 tons of water have been removed during this 100+ year stretch. The population boom is the most intuitive reasoning for such massive amounts of water usage, but the tale to the trillions lay in the demands of humanity. Only 1% of the water on Earth meets the drinkable standard and on that sliver 70% is dedicated to agricultural purposes. After the population grew exponentially, we can get a taste of the kind of usage that is averaged today.
Figure 2
Water Depletion 2001-2008
Note. Color is correlated to aquafer size and block size is correlated to depletion volume per year. Created in Tableau Public.
The High plain aquafer held its seat as the most drawn upon. Of that 11.83km3 used 8.28 went toward agriculture which is an industry that is concentrated in midwestern states. NBC covered the Ogallala and our abuses of water as the effects of wastefulness are already appearing. Wells that once pumped at 2,000 gallons a minute are now pumping closer to 600 gallons and in 2012, just after the geological survey was completed, the depletion of the aquafer was accelerated to two feet drop every year (NBC News Learn, 2020). To understand scale, an aquafer is only replenished about an inch a year through percolation of rain and other waters, at this rate the entire supply would be drained by 70% by the year 2060 (Frankel, 2018). Water that is not only used to water crop but complete everyday tasks, and most importantly drank for survival; this story is not unique to the Ogallala, but it is a microcosm for the existential crisis we are brushing against every day until change is made.
How We Can Change
A problem the size of a state requires the cooperation of the state and one the size of the world requires the effort of the same magnitude. Trillions of gallons of water are pulled from the High plains aquafer for agricultural reasons which then branch out into every industry known to man. The ground level social change is first to learn moderation. Vox media, in partnership with Netflix, made a documentary on the dangers of current water habits globally. In it there is a small breakdown of everyday commodities based on how much water they require to make currently: a 20oz bottle needs 28 liters, a cup of coffee requires 130 liters, a t-shirt needs 2,500, and hamburgers need 25,000 liters per kilogram (Netflix, 2020). The way we consume is not sustainable and as the rest of the world closes the wealth gap to the United States their consumption is matching ours; unfortunately, the earth has no possible way of supporting appetites (both literal and in other areas) that large on a global scale. Change requires both personal and governmental influence; learning from Cape Town’s crisis is crucial to how we go forward. To avoid day zero (water supplies running dry) the government turned off certain taps to homes and heavily taxed those who exceeded their ration of water (Onishi and Sengupta, 2018). Some Americans may hear ‘rations’ and fear the worst but it has already touched the western and southwestern side of our country during drought. When truly faced with reality the people responded in accordance and eliminated as much waste as possible. Places like the High Plains are responsible for the lives of many and as such there needs to be a nationwide focus on both levels to adjust habits and implement limitations on agricultural water usage as well as heavy discouraging of over production on products that need over 10 liters of water to be produced.
Resources
Aucoin, J.L. (2011). Investigative Reporting. In The International Encyclopedia of Communication, W. Donsbach (Ed.). https://doi-org.ezproxy.liberty.edu/10.1002/9781405186407.wbieci089.pub2
dictionary.cambridge.org. Accessed 2021.
Frankel, Jeremy. (2018, May 17). Crisis on the High Plains: The Loss of America’s Largest Aquifer – the Ogallala. Water Law Review.
NBC News Learn. (2020, May 1). Sustainability: Water - The Ogallala Aquifer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxMlGXPo7e0
Netflix (2020, April 17). Worlds Water Crisis. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C65iqOSCZOY
Onishi, Norimitsu & Sengupta, Somini. (2018, January 30). Dangerously Low on Water, Cape Town Faces ‘Day Zero.’ The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/30/world/africa/cape-town-day-zero.html
United States Geological Survey. (2013). Groundwater Depletion in the United States. https://water.usgs.gov/GIS/metadata/usgswrd/XML/sir2013-5079_Groundwater_Depletion.xml#stdorder
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