WC136 MayJune 2024 - Magazine - Page 7
Water Always Wins
WHERE’D THE WATER GO?
ONGOING DROUGHT in British Columbia
is exposing deficiencies in how water
usage is monitored in the province.
Spring run-off from the mountains is
running dry earlier, resulting in driedup wetlands and marshes. This, of
course, is affecting irrigation for farmers,
water supplies for municipalities, and
ecological concerns. It also spells trouble
for the forest fire season. What’s more,
the province doesn’t keep track of water
licence holders, so it doesn’t know how
much water is being pumped from
groundwater aquifers.
According to our story A Snapshot
of Water Use in Canada on page 28,
commercial use in the province accounts
for 16 per cent, agriculture 12 per cent,
industrial use 12 per cent, and municipal
use one per cent. The category of “other”
accounts for 44 per cent, but the province’s
Ministry of Land, Water and Resources
was unable to specify who those licence
holders are and how much they’re using,
noting that water scarcity is a recent
challenge the province has yet to address.
The result is municipalities, responsible
for the least amount of water usage, are
now asking residents and small businesses
to cut back on water use for fear of
running out mid-summer. In April, the
City of Cranbrook, already in Stage 2
water restrictions, implemented new
water usage rules for its residents after the
Phillips Reservoir and its tributaries ran
dangerously low in 2023. With mountain
snowpack at 30 per cent below normal
in 2024, it is feared water scarcity will
continue, and nobody knows where the
available water is going.
Getty Images, GenomeBC, CVRD
JOURNALIST ERICA GIES travels to Mesopotamia, Peru, China, India, and other far-off
locales, as well as her home state of California, to learn more about how humans have
tried to manage water. As it turns out, our
past practices of slowing it down, speeding
it up, straightening it, building on wetlands,
draining aquifers, burying urban rivers, killing
beavers, cutting down forests, and ignoring
floodplains is not going to do us any favours in
the future with climate change lurking. Enter
the water detectives, people around the globe
who study how water wants to act, and how
we can help restore it to its natural behaviour.
Water wants to run slow and steady, delivering sediment and nutrients along the way in
a methodical, predictable fashion. It wants
to begin in the highlands in wetlands and
bogs, and percolate down to rivers, lakes, and
streams, providing consistent nourishment
and nutrients to everything from the tiniest
insect to apex predators. Instead, due to our
infrastructure and hardscapes, it rushes
and floods, it fails to nourish, and it kills and
destroys. Now, writes Gies, it has become
clear that instead of fighting water, the time
has come to work with it, to let it run naturally, and give up on the illusion that we can
control it. To preserve ourselves, biodiversity,
and our environment, we need to reconsider
what water wants because, inevitably, water
always wins.
MORE NEWS
AND UPDATES AT
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WATER C AN ADA • M AY/JUNE 2024
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