I read a shorter article about this in the Daily Courier. This article is much longer and answers some of my questions. But the writers and the worriers seem to think that the water in the Columbia and other major rivers comes only from rain and snowmelt.
The water in our rivers mainly comes from springs that pours out of cracks in the Earth's crust from the mantle, which is soaked with water. Otherwise, our river would run out in the 100-day droughts we have had in recent years.
The Columbia River is a mighty river indeed. The Rogue River doesn't compare. But the 3.9 million gallon water right that Google bought with their land is nothing next to what the City of Grants Pass pulls out of the Rogue every day. Our plant can produce 20 million gallons of clean water per day. We put much of it back in the river, cleaned to drinking water standards after sewage treatment, and so does Medford and its suburbs.
Associated Press reporters seem to think that water is a scarce and precious resource, when it is the most abundant and automatically recycled resource on Earth, next to air. The water cycle plus modern water and sewage treatment make it really hard to waste water, except by letting it run straight to the sea without being used along the way.
"About an hour’s drive east of The Dalles, Amazon is giving back some of the water its massive data centers use. Amazon’s sprawling campuses, spread between Boardman and Umatilla, Oregon, butt up against farmland, a cheese factory and neighborhoods. Like many data centers, they use water primarily in summer, with the servers being air-cooled the rest of the year.
"About two-thirds of the water Amazon uses evaporates. The rest is treated and sent to irrigation canals that feed crops and pastures."
And "evaporation is waste," we were told in Landscape Management by a teacher who was selling us on drip systems. It is a common trope among modern water conservationists. But evaporation is not waste; it makes humidity, clouds and rain.
West of the Rockies, our water vapor, from any source, makes clouds and rain in the local area first if there is enough of it. (Water-rationing rates in our cities keep that from happening as much as it used to.) What is left blows uphill and upstream on the prevailing western wind, making rain as it rises, filling creeks and rivers before the remainder goes over the mountains to join vapor from other sources, like irrigation, and make more rain.
Drought is a self-fulfilling prophecy in Oregon, because it is declared every time we don't get enough snowpack to keep our reservoirs full. They fail to take into account the effects of irrigation, evaporation, and the water cycle. Real conservation of fresh water is keeping water from running to the sea so fast.
Beavers did it before man came to North America, building dams and swamps until every rivulet, creek and small river valleys were filled with their dams and swamps. Water tables were high and the continent was full of game. After they were nearly wiped out, man began to do some of what they did with bigger dams and watering farms and cities, storing water in the soil that not only grew plants but kept rivers higher from runoff, above and below ground.
Now our cities are mostly dry ground with only a portion of the residents actually watering their properties, and have started burning because of that dryness, not only within them, but in the countryside around them, because there is less watering vapor to spread out and keep things moist.
Water is the basis of life. That doesn't make it scarce or precious; it makes it vital to living and living well. Brown and yellow is not the new green. It is the ugly color of fire danger and less life, because there is less water in the land, even right down next to the river in the photo with this article.
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