Water
is not precious. It is vital to our health, wealth, and the safety
of our homes and cities. It is not scarce; it is common and often
abundant. Precious things are not vital to our life; they are scarce
and therefore highly prized and priced. But water-rationing rates in
cities are pricing water like it is perhaps semi-precious, and are creating fresh water shortages, by stopping a lot of sprinkler irrigation that evaporates water
and cycles it into the air.
In 2000,
our Landscape Management teacher said, “Sprinklers evaporate half of what they
throw,” and “Evaporation is waste.” It is not waste; it is one step
in the water cycle, the one most controllable by man. He was selling us on selling drip irrigation
to our customers, because we were headed into a 20-year drought cycle. If there is anything that drip does well, it’s
preventing evaporation of irrigation water. No wonder we went into 20 years of drought.
The
water cycle is much like the money cycle; the less we use, the less there is to
use. When we are afraid to spend money, we get recessions and
depressions. When we are afraid to water enough to keep our lawns and gardens alive because it has become so expensive, we get drought, fire and floods on the dry western side of continents,
and more hurricanes and floods on the wet eastern sides and in the tropics,
from lower, warmer river water warming the oceans, powering tropical storms.
Use it or lose it. Don’t use it, and it will only go down to the
sea, when much of it could be circulating in the air and making rain to
replenish it. The water cycle works better for us when we rev it up
by throwing water in the air and all over the ground.
Watering stores water in
the surface of the land and cools it and the air by evaporation, transpiration,
and respiration, keeping plants and animals alive. Land cooled by
watering has more and cooler runoff that keeps fish healthy. Here in the
West, irrigation water vapor flows upstream and uphill on the prevailing wind to make rain
in the hills (whatever does not fall where it came from) and refill creeks,
rivers, and aquifers, when we water enough to keep our lawns and gardens
alive.
From
the time we started building water treatment plants until the ‘90s, we watered
our cities to prevent fires, though we later thought it was only for beautiful
property, homegrown food, and flowers. Burning cities had by then become history, a distant memory. Cities had occasionally
burned in summer before we had pressurized water to fight fires and grow
plants. We didn’t run out of water even though it was cheap and
sometimes free to use. Our irrigation vapor spread out for miles, keeping
forest fires away from us.
Since water-rationing rates have spread around the world, we have
had serious droughts that last for years and never really end, with fires
burning through small towns, cities and suburbs. We have returned to the conditions we had before we had water treatment plants.
But those conditions
were not how it was before Europeans discovered beaver in America. Beaver dams and their ponds filled river
valleys and creeks across North America, and the woods were full of game. Fur trapping companies led the European
invasion, trading their goods for beaver skins with Native Americans in the
East. This eventually allowed settlers
to farm former beaver ponds, (flat verdant meadows with deep black soil), travel
the rivers, and build roads and cities. Lewis
and Clark had to portage up the Missouri and down the other side of the Rockies
because the rivers were clogged with beaver dams and ponds.
West of the Mississippi, Native Americans would not kill beaver,
whom they revere for keeping water in their otherwise dry land. So American Mountain men trapped beaver for
the trading companies. Britain gave
control of much of Canada to the British Hudson Bay Company (HBC), including
the Oregon Territory, which was jointly held by the United States and Britain under
the Treaty of 1812. But HBC controlled the
Oregon territory first, and its factor tried to discourage American settlement
in Oregon territory by trapping all the beaver, rather than leaving breeding
stock, the normal HBC practice. After
the Western beavers were exterminated by HBC and American trappers, much of the
West became desert with deeply incised gullies and washes where there had been
beaver dams and ponds.1
We have been trying to restore beaver to our wildlands for the last
100 years and have found ways to control their flooding habits near human
constructions. But we need
to do a lot more in the West to restore them at least to ranches, wilderness and national parks to hold
water in their ponds and the ground around them, growing water-loving trees
that don’t burn, creating better habitat for all animals, including livestock
and salmon, by keeping creeks running during droughts, while transpiring water from
all the plants in their swamps, making rain.
Most of the American West is not naturally desert; it is man-made
desert. We somewhat replaced beaver by
keeping water in our land for about 70 years, building dams and watering our
cities and farms with sprinklers, banking water in the soil. Both man and beaver build dams, store water, grow food and
modify their habitat for comfort and safety.
We didn’t know what we were doing when we made war on beavers and other wildlife for three
centuries. But we know now,
and we can restore some of the damage to our land, water and weather by
bringing them back where and when we can.
For at least 70 years, people on the West side of continents outside the tropics enjoyed dry heat along with the ability to affordably water our property and grow
plants, to cool and humidify outside air and collectively bring forth
thunderstorms, to cool our weekend evenings.
We didn’t even know we were doing it; it was just weather.
The 1980s, when we started hearing, everywhere, about the
crying need to save water, and also about global warming from carbon dioxide, was considered a wet decade. It was also the height of sprinkler
irrigation around the world. We paid for
our water plants with base rates, and the water was almost free, covering only
marginal unit costs, (when it wasn't all paid with base rates) and we
used it freely, for all beneficial uses.
Except when we were facing a drought.
The summer after this gardener moved to Grants Pass, we had thunderstorms
nearly every weekend of the summer. Not
enough to replace watering, but enough to wash the plants and cool things
off. I formed a gardening superstition
that summer: If you don’t water because you think it’s going to rain, it won’t
rain enough to matter. It was true,
because if one thinks it is going to rain, so do a lot of other people. I learned to water regardless of the forecast
and leave off watering only after an inch of rain has fallen.
The next summer, we were told that we were in a drought from low snowpack in our mountains, so "don’t
water your lawns or wash your cars." We
had 100 days in a row without rain that year, 96 the next. No surprise at the time; we were in drought. But now it seems that rationing
water in response to low snowpack in the mountains is always the wrong response, choking
off the main source of rain, our own irrigation, and setting up a rain-blocking high pressure bubble by making the land dry and hot.
Water moderates our weather. It is the
only major greenhouse gas at 1%-4% of the atmosphere, while all the
other greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, are “trace”
gases, measured in parts per million (CO2), billion (methane),
or trillion (all the rest). Water holds heat in the air in its
thermal mass and by cloud blanketing, keeping heat from radiating into
space. No other greenhouse gas can do this.
Water cools by cloud shading, evaporation, and rain. At
the point of evaporation, 41 degrees F, liquid water sucks in a lot of heat to
make the phase change to a gas, cooling everything around it. The reverse happens when it gets below 41
degrees and condenses on a surface, such as a particle of dust in the air, releasing
heat and warming the environment. It
cannot condense except on a solid surface, so dust in the air is necessary to
make clouds. Without dust, water vapor can be super-cooled without freezing until it meets a solid surface.
When water changes from ice to liquid, the same process happens, sucking
heat in and cooling its surroundings, and from liquid to ice, releasing heat
and warming the environment. Thus, when
it starts to snow, it gets a bit warmer as the snow crystalizes in the
cloud. The first flakes are small, but they stick together and get bigger as it warms, and then as it gets colder, the
flakes stop sticking together as much and get smaller.
Water vapor carries heat from the ground to the tops of
thunderheads as they form from rising hot air and water vapor. Along the
way, it condenses onto dust, shedding heat at the phase change, which fuels the updraft. But the heat disappears as the droplet rises into lower air pressure: the heat is
spread thin as the air thins. Near the top of the cloud, the droplet freezes,
shedding more heat to space. Sometimes
the winds in the cloud are turbulent enough to make hail that melts as it falls and refreezes as it blows upward,
picking up moisture along the way and gaining weight, repeatedly, until it gets
too heavy, and falls, cooling lower cloud layers and the ground.
That's the way it works when there is enough water in the
air. Over the last couple decades of water rationing rates, thunderclouds
rarely make enough rain to put their lightning-caused fires out. Over the
last 20 years, we have come to fear thunderstorms in the West.
The combination of the heating and cooling effects
of sufficient watering of cities and farms adds up to more warmth in winter and less
heat in summer, with warmer cloudy winter nights and cooler, cloudy
summer days and balmy summer nights, when we have enough water in the air. It counteracts some of the city’s “heat
island” effect from pavement, buildings, cars, indoor air conditioning and
electricity use.
In the desert, summer days are hot and nights are chilly; winter
days are sunny and cold in daytime and colder at night. It is said,
“There is nothing between Texas and the North Pole but a barbwire
fence.” That’s in winter; summer monsoons moderate daytime heat
and nighttime cold with high humidity, clouds and thunderstorms when the heat
rising off dry, hot land draws in humid, warm air from a warm ocean.
We don’t have a warm ocean on the West coast of the U.S., so we
don’t have monsoons; Eastern Pacific currents off our coast come down from the
North Pole. Cold water doesn't evaporate well under a high pressure dome. The coastal ranges catch all the fog. We
don’t usually get rain in summer unless we make it with our irrigation,
particularly by using sprinklers and misters. We have had less and less rain, even in late fall and early spring, as we use less and less water and pay more and more
for it.
But in late 2018, Congress legalized hemp, and changed our weather
for the better in 2019. Rural counties filled up with hemp fields in
California, Oregon and Washington that had to be watered. Many of them
had a late start, but Grants Pass had some good thunderstorms, starting in
June. There were no big fires anywhere near Josephine County all summer. A few
days of fall-type rain in September was the signal for the cannabis harvest, as rain
molds the buds. All irrigation of cannabis and a lot of other property
ended. So did the rain, until December and January.
February, March and April of 2020 were dry, and we had record water sales in March and April. Rain started in
May with the cannabis irrigation season. June had rain as well, and the
start of the summer was cooler than usual.
July 2020 was cloudy, as our Water Master had started telling hemp
farmers that they couldn't use their wells or creeks for commercial use without
water permits. (Grants Pass Daily Courier) Many farmers started buying hauled water. Grants Pass sold record amounts of bulk water to haulers. The farmers likely put in drip
systems to use the pricey product. August was clear and hot, in the 100-degree F
range, which lasted into September.
Nights were chilly.
Temperature differences create winds. Bigger temperature
differences between day and night, caused by dryness, create bigger winds,
including katabatic winds that start from dry, cold, still, dense air at night
on mountain tops and high plains under high pressure. When it
gets too dense and heavy, the air slides off the high places into river
valleys, heating up and speeding up as it flows into higher pressure
downhill. In very dry conditions, the winds become a furnace blast,
sometimes getting to 100 degrees F and 100 miles per hour, blowing up sparks
into conflagrations.2, 3
This is what happened on September 8, 2020, in the inland valleys on
the west side of the Rockies, after weeks of 100-degree daytime temperatures
building up the biggest high-pressure bubble that this gardener has ever seen,
stretching from Mexico to Canada, and out almost to the tip of the Aleutians.
Katabatic wind driven fires used to be a late fall and winter
event, mainly in Southern California with their Santa Anna winds, particularly
after California cities started water-rationing rates. The winds
blew up fires in Northern California in the last decade, still in late fall or
winter. 2020 saw them blowing up fires from Southern California to
Washington in September, much earlier than normal. The further north
one goes, the earlier the nights get really cold on nearby high plains and
mountains. But the huge high-pressure bubble put all three states in the
same bubble at the same time.
Ironically, the many fires of September 8th, 2020, made so much
smoke that it blocked the sun all the way to the coast by mid-afternoon and
stopped the heating that made the high-pressure bubble and the hot, hard East wind, though it
took about a week to rain, put out most of the fires and clear the smoke in Grants Pass.
Wood smoke is full of water, because wood is made from water and
carbon dioxide, to which it returns when burned. We can feel the
humidity when nearby fires fill our air with smoke and ash. It’s
sticky. Years ago, the Douglas fire in Douglas County, just north of
us, was a huge conflagration and made a lot of smoke that we were breathing in
Grants Pass. It was eventually pulled together by a low-pressure system
that dumped about 2 inches of rain on the fire, putting it out. We
got an inch in Grants Pass.
Smoke is hard on people and animals, but not on
plants. To plants, smoke and ash is shade, humidity and food. They grow better the next spring. Smoke
shading and plant feeding are the silver linings in the dark cloud of choking
smoke. I prefer my smoke far away, a high overcast, blocking some of
the sunlight and keeping things a little cooler.
There is no danger that our world will ever run out of fresh water.
This is a water planet. There is 3 times as much water in the boundary
between the inner and outer mantle of the Earth than in all of our oceans.3
It comes out of the mantle through cracks in the crust, particularly in
volcanic zones, and is remarkably pure water if it is a cold spring.
These freshwater springs are the source of many of our rivers, which is why our
rivers do not dry up when we have no rain. We have hot and cold springs
in the upper reaches of mountains. Volcanic eruptions feature a lot of
steam.
But if we want to be safe from wildfire and its smoke, we must
provide the water to keep it away from us.
The good news is, it is at our fingertips; we have but to use it. But to make it affordable for everyone, we
have to return our water rates systems to pricing water to sell it, not to ration
it.
The place to start is with your own city council. Act locally to do your part in fixing our water
prices and weather. Contact them once a
month and spread the word: the water rationing rate revolt has begun.
******************************************************
All of these books are worth reading, and each of these authors
should read the other two. My thanks to the Grants Pass Daily Courier for a list of days without rain, and information on hemp growers, City water sales, and the activities of our Water Master.
1 Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The surprising, secret life of beavers and
why they matter. Chelsea Green
Publishing, White River Junction, Vermont, USA and London, U.K.
2 Daniel Mathews, Trees in Trouble: Wildfires, Infestations, and
Climate Change. Counterpoint, Berkley, California.
3 Christopher Dewdney, 18 miles: the epic drama of our
atmosphere and its weather. Toronto, Ontario, Canada, ECW Press.
7-17-2021, published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com
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Rycke
Brown, Natural Gardener 541-955-9040 rycke@gardener.com
