by John Borden

Created on: June 23, 2007

No matter how many times the experts talk about water scarcity and conservation, no matter how hard they try to stress the importance of water as what may very well be one of the most valuable resources on this planet, some people just don't seem to get the idea that water needs to be treated with reverence rather than treated as, well, the stuff that seems to always come out of the faucet or the gardening hose whenever you want it to.

Water was at one time a pretty big deal, civilization always seemed to start where the water was, earlier wars were fought over the resource, gods were given the task of controlling water and how it's distributed among the people, we treated it with the reverence it so deserved.

Many years have passed since those first people settled around the river and formed the foundation of what would become human civilization. Even though it's been such a long time we still have the same amount of water as we did back then, it never really seems to go away, yet for some odd reason all the respect that it had received in the past seemed to...vanish in the industrialized regions of the world.

So why is it treated the way it is now? The reason could probably be blamed on something early man never seemed to get the hang of, heavy machinery. With the birth of industrialization came machines that made a lot of tasks far easier than the were before when they required human or animal power, and they also allowed us to do a lot of things we were unable to accomplish in the past. Making sure a city had adequate plumbing and that a crop got the proper amount of water through irrigation was much easier than before, and now we could drill to depths previously too difficult through human means, which gave us access to underground aquifers rich in water. Still the same amount of water since the first city was formed, but now we have far greater access to it.

Unfortunately, things have changed. Because of the fact that the population has essentially exploded in size comes greater demand for water and the resources that require water such as...pretty much everything if you think hard enough. Combine this with the fact that a great deal of water comes from those aquifers mentioned previously. Some aquifers can actually replenish their water reserves through various means, though the amount we take out often exceeds the amount that goes back in. Then there are the other aquifers that have no means of replenishing their reserves, when they run out they're out

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