The Ocean: Our Fresh Water Future Lies Within

The recent drought and continually unpredictable water situation in California is a highly visible realization of our lack of water awareness and its destructive undermining of the financial structure and social organization we have built in that most progressive state in that most successful global economy

If we fail in California, how can we succeed anywhere else?

At the most reductive level, the traditional water supply system in California has been overwhelmed by climate, industrial agriculture, and water consumption that cannot survive without revolutionary change. If there is not enough water on the mountaintops to supply the watersheds, rivers, and reservoirs, then where will the requisite water come from?

In 2012, the San Diego County Water Authority signed an agreement with Poseidon Water to build the Carlsbad Desalination Plant, the largest such desalination plant in the United States. The process of converting seawater to fresh is not new. According to the International Desalination Association, in June 2015, 18,426 desalination plants operated worldwide, producing 86.8 million cubic meters of desalinated water per day, providing drinking water for 300 million people.

Plants continue to crop up, and exist in over 120 countries around the world including Italy, Australia, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Japan, China, India, United Arab Emirates, Malta, Cape Verde, and Cyprus. Saudi Arabia leads the world, meeting 70% of the daily water needs of its population.

Increasingly, the ocean is an enormous contributor to new strategies of resilience, maintenance, and enhancement of global biodiversity and capacity, essential to the life-support system of the earth from the beginning, but ever so much more needed now.

As we continue to deplete underground aquifers, to increase irrigated land, to disrupt and pollute streams and rivers, the ocean becomes even more valuable as a primary component of the world water cycle, a necessary circulation, filtration, and purification system, and as outlined above, an inevitable source of desalinated drinking water to meet future global demand.

As the ocean is essential to our need for fresh water, as water security and food security are linked, as food security and the alleviation of poverty are linked, and as alleviation of poverty is key to civilization, justice and peace, the ocean simply cannot go the way of the earth, be brutalized, ignored, taken for granted, or abandoned.

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The Ocean: Our Fresh Water Future Lies Within is an
excerpt from "The Once and Future Ocean: Notes Toward
a New Hydraulic Society" by Peter Neill.
Published in April 2016.

Media

Taxonomy

• Ecosystem Management
• Desalination
• Sea Water Desalinisation
• Sustainable Desalination
• Desalination Pre-treatment
• Access
• Oceanographic Survey
• Fresh Water Ecology
• Ocean engineering