Selling Canada's Water

Watershed
Reflections on Water
Copyright 2000 NeWest Press
193 pages,
ISBN 1-896300-35-9.

What answers does tomorrow's technology and inventiveness hold for the world's domestic water needs? One of the first and largest desalination plants in the world was in Kuwait, funded by the country's prodigious oil revenues. Kuwait was also one of the few markets in which a barrel of fresh water might have commanded the same price as a barrel of oil. Canadians and others will hear more about desalination practices when energy costs are further reduced. Then the long-awaited hope of making salty or brackish water acceptable for use in homes, factories and irrigation will become standard practice.

Students of these new practices in water use should not be allowed to forget that they are still a part of the all-encompassing water cycle. Human beings, quite fairly, have seen it as their privilege to capture portions of that underground water, generally through wells, as it continues on its way. Recently, experts have determined that North American groundwater exceeds in volume all the surface water in lakes, ponds and rivers. These estimates cast new light on the wealth of the continent's abundant water resources, while raising new fears about damaging the intricate environmental system which took millenia to develop.

Still, what could conceivably become the most compelling new achievement in water invention? It could well prove to be a long-awaited scientific breakthrough that would give tidal power the better economic face it needs. If and when it happens, Canadians can expect Nova Scotia's fortunes to surge like a Fundy tide. North Americans living near the Bay of Fundy witness the biggest inflow and outflow of tidal water in the world. They should be reminded of what this can mean in potential hydro power.

Ocean tides, it seems, never rest; they reflect the periodic rise and fall of the incoming flood tide and outgoing ebb tide as they respond to the gravitational influences of the moon and sun. Herein lies one of the unique features of tidal power: the same water is capable of generating power when it is both coming and going on successive tides, and the height of tides rarely vary by much. Unfailingly regular, they act as if they were serving the role of the earth's official timekeeper, with their two high tides and two low tides in each lunar day of twenty-four hours and fifty-one minutes.

The potential energy that tides represent has long been recognized. In fact, the powerful tides of Maritime Canada's Bay of Fundy were the first form of hydro power to be harnessed in the western hemisphere. At Port Royal in 1607, the French installed a water wheel and mill supervised by Baron de Poutrincourt, fellow worker with Samuel de Champlain. The tidal water powered the grist mill there for several years, presumably with satisfactory results. Tidewater may appear boisterous at times but it is never still and should be used more effectively.

As the end of this book on water draws near, this author is reminded that this project began on a theme of conservation and is now being inexorably pulled, as if by magnetic attraction, toward that same, solemn theme. When this final chapter was underway, one of the most striking headlines in the world's press reported the death of what scientists called the last member of a now-extinct species, the Polynesian tree snail. It didn't seem to matter much that the lowly animal was one that most people had never seen, nor, indeed, heard of before. What mattered was that here was a species which, according to scientists, had been a global resident for one-and-a-half million years before giving up the struggle and entering the long black night of extinction.

Every living race has had its distinctions to set it apart and the tree snail was certainly no exception. It seems unfortunate that most humans would be content to wait until the species had disappeared before taking note of the animal world's champion of slow motion, whose average rate of locomotion was just sixty centimetres a year.

The tree snail's rate of travel was, of course, its own business. But it should not go unnoticed that, of the many thousands of living species that have disappeared forever, only a few cases have been historically documented. Where this information does exist, it furnishes the best lessons in wildlife conservation, as in the instances of the passenger pigeon and great auk. These are stories that should be told and retold at every possible opportunity, especially to the young.

It was on September 1,1914, that the twenty-nine-year-old passenger pigeon known as Martha died in the Cincinnati Zoo and took her race with her. A race that once numbered billions of birds, the passenger pigeon may once have been the most conspicuous bird in the North American skies. It is a sad story but one that should be accorded special recognition on Conservation Day, held annually on the first day of September.

Utterly unlike the passenger pigeon, the great auk was a large, penguin-like bird capable of staying for long spells under water. Like the passenger pigeon, one of its misfortunes was that its flesh was extremely attractive to human consumers. This ultimately led to its sudden demise. The death of the last remaining birds came, it seems, by means of clubs in the hands of hunters who went to Eldey Rock on Funk Island in the North Atlantic to collect a supply of auk meat. On June 3, 1844, finding only one pair of the game fowl on the island, the hunters clubbed and bagged the two birds. Taking the two birds was an easy exercise, but tragic in its finality. Canadians and other visitors to the islands have no hope of ever seeing the beautiful and fascinating "Atlantic penguins" again.

It is something that is happening every day beyond our notice. It shouldn't be beyond our care. What the extinction of the Polynesian tree snail should remind us of is the interconnection of all living things. The disappearance of another species from the earth affects the quality of human life, regardless of whether we immediately recognize it. In our drive to develop, we have altered the nature of the intricate interrelationships between ourselves and our environment. The world's precious reserves of fossil fuels, fish, air, forests, wildlife, soil, water and much more are showing signs of either depletion or deterioration. Water itself is the most "renewable" of resources and is wonderfully resilient. The increasing use of water, in step with the accelerating pace of human activity, is putting extraordinary pressure on the mighty water wheel's ability to cleanse itself. Our ability to pollute water outstrips its ability to purify itself by a wide margin. We must find a new balance between our expectations, our seemingly limitless appetites, and the supplies of water that ensure our survival. Miraculous though it often strikes us, water cannot flush away the problems of our own making.

Change begins with a sense of stewardship which itself grows out of understanding. The more we seek to know our environment and the history of our relationship with it, the more we will see a much clearer course for change. The concern that grows out of understanding should fuel our desire for concerted action. The time has come for us to make hard and judicious choices that will have a great effect on those who come after us. The care and responsibility we show for our water demonstrates much about our values, including our level of concern for the quality of life of future generations.