Water – is there enough for all plants, animals and people?

Idon’t know how many of you got up last Wednesday and immediately opened up all the doors and let the breeze come through.

What an amazing change from the past weeks, 78 beautiful degrees. I know it won’t last but was so good to have outside air in my house. The wind, of course, was not a positive for our growers who have fields of transplants in the ground and newly seeded lettuce beds. Hopefully everyone had their sprinklers up and running and there was not too much damage to the young plants.

The paper has been reporting on a supposed deal with the Cibola area or CRIT Tribes. The articles were not clear on a proposed water transfer to Queen Creek. It amazes me that developers are allowed to promise a 100-year supply of water, per the Groundwater Act, when they do not own the source, they are just renting it. What happens when the landlord changes their mind?

Water is probably the natural resource we all know best. All of us have had firsthand experience with it in its many forms – rain, hail, snow, ice, steam, fog and dew.

Yet, in spite of our daily use of it, water is probably the natural resource we least understand. How does water get into the clouds and what happens to it when it reaches the earth? Why is there sometimes too much and other times too little? And, most important, is there enough for all the plants, and all the animals and all the people?

Water covers nearly three-fourths of the earth; most is sea water. But sea water contains minerals and other substances including those that make it salty, and are harmful to most land plants and animals. Still it is from the vast salty reservoirs, seas and oceans that most of our precipitation comes from – no longer salty or mineral laden. Water moves from clouds to land and back to the ocean in a never-ending cycle. This is the water cycle or the hydrologic cycle.

Ocean water evaporates into the atmosphere, leaving impurities behind, and moves across the earth as water vapor. Water in lakes, ponds, rivers and streams also evaporates and joins the moisture in the atmosphere. Soil, plants, people, animals and even factories, autos, tractors and planes contribute moisture. A small part of this moisture (or water vapor) is visible to us as fog, mist or clouds. Water vapor condenses and falls to earth as rain, snow, sleet or hail depending on the region, climate, season and topography.

Precipitation on land averages 26 inches a year but it is not evenly distributed. Some places get less than one inch and others more than 400 inches. When water hits the ground, some soaks into the soil and the rest runs off over the surface. The water that soaks into the soil sustains plant and animal life in the soil. Some seeps to underground reservoirs. Almost all of this water eventually enters the cycle once more.

Man can do little to alter the water cycle, so his primary supply of water is firmly fixed. We can manage and conserve water as it becomes available, when it falls on the land. Water management begins with soil management.