What is Renewable Water?

Renewable Water was the natural order for hundreds of millions of years.

What we have done over the last few hundred years is degrade Nature’s ability to sustain Renewable Water by overloading and overwhelming this natural order.

In many ways this is understandable. We got carried away with the euphoria of the empowerment we gave ourselves with the technological advancements of the Industrial Revolution. This set up virtuous circles of population growth, agricultural growth and economic growth that created the “first world” economies and the “first world” urban lifestyle. These virtuous circles powered what were referred to as “economic miracles” for decades, that the rest of the world understandably aspires to emulate.

But this economic model and urban lifestyle is water intensive because it requires a lot of water for bathing and water borne sanitation (a public health necessity for high-density urban living), and for food production both in the agricultural sector (growing crops and livestock) and in food processing (making beverages, packaged food etc).

And the water resource management model that it was built upon is not sustainable.

The “Energy Crisis” that has been so topical for the last half century is founded on two key principles:

  1. Degradation – burning fossil fuels creates environmental degradation that is unsustainable
  2. Depletion – fossil fuel resources cannot be replaced or renewed at the rate they are being consumed and will eventually become depleted and run out.

The solution is “Renewable Energy” but ironically there is no “renewal” of the energy at all. “Renewable Energy” is actually accessing the energy at source rather than renewing it, because there is in reality only one source of energy and that is the Sun. There is an infinite supply of new energy from the Sun and what we are doing is tapping into that primary energy as photovoltaic (solar), or kinetic (wind, wave, hydro) energy rather than as secondary energy in the form of the fossil fuels – the fossilized product of ancient photosynthesis (which is Biomass formation utilizing the Sun’s energy).

In the case of the Water Crisis these two principles conflate: – it is the degradation of the aquatic environment that depletes the resource. The “resource” being usable water.

But there is no infinite primary supply of water from the Sun or anywhere else that we can switch to. The amount of freshwater is essentially fixed and finite. The reason there is always fresh water available is because of the Water Cycle by which Nature recycles and renews it.

This means that water is genuinely “renewable”. Clean freshwater can be used and contaminated, but the contaminants can be removed, and quality restored to that of clean freshwater again.

Our planet’s more advanced life-forms are critically dependent upon the fact that Nature has a Water Cycle which ensures that freshwater resources are cleansed, replenished and renewed in this way.

Renewable Water cannot be engineered or manufactured. Renewable Water can only be sustained by Nature. So the only route to Renewable Water is by supporting, not undermining Nature.

Menu