Mother Earth - 3

Let us get out from the center of the earth and look at the part of Mother earth that we live in: air, water and soil. We will start with water. While water is non-renewable, I feel that there is about the same amount of water on and around earth as there always has been. It may be in different forms and in different locations, but it is all still here. For instance, We are told that at one time most of what is the USA was the floor of some long forgotten ocean. You may want to believe the scientists in this respect nut you may want instead to go with Noah's flood. Although my grandkids seem to sometimes think that I have first hand memories of such events, I am not quite that old. You can see how the scientist's theory overlaps the bible. Either way, this country was once under water. The flood receded or the ocean went away, but that covering of water is no longer with us. Many of the lakes and rivers of the upper part of North America were carved out by the glacier; another form of water. Water changes from solid to liquid to gas but it is always there in one of its forms. I may be wrong, but this is why I believe that the volume of water on earth is the same as it has always been. There are a couple of things that humans can do to water that are not good. They can use up fresh water faster than it can re-purify itself and they can pollute it. Using the water up too fast is partly due to more people being on earth to use it. It is also partly due to some of the uses being a waste of water. Many times when watering lawns, washing cars or even doing laundry, much water is wasted. This water then needs time to purify itself, with the ever increasing population and coinciding need for more water, this waste could present a problem.

Pollution of the water is the second problem. once again, water will purify itself from pollution, but it takes time. The process of purification can be helped along by mankind. I remember back in the nineteen seventies when Lake Erie was declared a dead lake. The pseudo-scientists and pseudo-environmentalists had themselves a field day with this. I remember reading articles that fish would never again live in Lake Erie and that the rest of the Great Lakes would be dead in a few years and nothing could be done about it. Well, Lake Erie is now cleaner than it has been in many years and has an excellent fish population. Record size walleyes are now being caught from "dead" Lake Erie. It took some changes, some new laws, some work and some time, but it got done. The doomsayers once again exaggerated the problem and under-estimated American ingenuity.

Another problem which relates to water is the loss of wetlands. Are we losing wetlands? Yes. There is no doubt that we are losing wetlands, we always have. There are many natural causes for some of the loss. Rivers change course, springs dry up, sever droughts occur and many other natural thing things. remember, if the entire USA was covered by water, we lost a lot of wetland. However, in this case I believe that mankind has as much or more than nature to do with the loss. This has to do with population, manufacturing, farming and a number of other reasons. I will cover more on wetlands on chapters on those various subjects. Wetlands play a vital role in the lives of certain birds and animals. They are also a part of the water purification that I mentioned earlier. While something needs to be done to correct this problem, I do not believe we nee a knee jerk response. There are those who would probably go around after every downpour of rain and fence off and make off limits any puddle they could find. Because a puddle formed after a deluge or the melting of a foot of snow, they would call it a wetland. This makes even less sense than doing nothing at all. All this type of thinking does is irritate landowners and make them harder to deal with. This problem needs to be looked at in a sane and logical manner. Later in the book I will describe how wetlands are being brought back on National Wildlife Refuges.

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