“A Twenty-First-Century Catastrophe” - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 174

CHAPTER 19
“A Twenty-First-Century Catastrophe”
TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING
When water chokes you, what are you to drink to wash it down?
—Aristotle
Throughout history, people have built communities near reliable drinking supplies and
created vast hydraulic systems—soaring dams, astonishingly long pipelines, and massive
canals—to collect, purify, and distribute drinking water. So successful were these wa-
terworks that by the twentieth century humans began to take water for granted and
forgot about its destructive nature. People built in areas previously considered out-of-
bounds—deserts, floodplains, filled-in wetlands, and low-lying coastal zones. But condi-
tions are changing in the twenty-first century, and now communities around the world
are increasingly vulnerable to rising seas and “extreme weather events,” such as flash
floods.
While many experts are racing to find ways to avoid our running out of water in com-
ing years, others are deeply concerned about the opposite problem: too much water, of
the wrong kind, at the wrong time. Most countries have systems to collect, purify, and
distribute water, but few, including the United States, have sufficient infrastructure to
keep water at bay.
Floods are a natural occurrence that can be highly beneficial to the ecosystem—by
providing nutrients that fertilize soil, cleaning silt from channels, removing invasive spe-
cies, maintaining biodiversity, recharging ground-water supplies, and providing hydra-
tion to arid regions. But floods can also be devastating, tearing boulders and trees from
embankments, scouring out old channels and creating new ones, and setting off mud-
slides. In many cases, human interventions—straightened rivers, destroyed marshes, new
canals, old levees, cities built in floodplains—set the stage for catastrophic flooding.
As the world urbanizes, naturally absorbent wetlands, fields, and woods are converted
to “hard-scape” paved roads and concrete buildings, which amplify the effects of storm-
water runoff. According to the USGS, hard surfaces in urban areas increase storm-