Seminary Journal 2008 (August) - Virginia Theological Seminary

else of water and to empty rivers and
underground water reserves in the
process.
The water “footprint” of Western
countries on the rest of the world deserves
to become a serious issue.
Take cotton. Cotton grows best in hot
lands with virtually year-round sun.
Deserts, in other words. But it needs
huge volumes of water. It empties
rivers across the south. Old British
colonies like Egypt, Sudan, and
Pakistan still empty the Nile and the
Indus for cotton growing in deserts,
as they did when Britain ruled and
Lancashire cotton mills had to be
fed. In order to grow cotton, Pakistan
consumes almost a third of the fl ow of
the River Indus and enough to prevent
any water reaching the Arabian Sea.
Australia does much the same on the
River Murray, which is drying up as a
result. Anybody who has seen recent
headlines from there will know they
are in deep trouble.
When Russia transformed the deserts
of Central Asia into a vast cotton
plantation, it began the destruction
of the Aral Sea by tapping the rivers,
like the ancient Oxus, that kept it full.
The Soviet Union has since collapsed
but cotton production continues.
Uzbekistan is the second biggest cotton
exporter in the world. Almost any
cotton clothing you buy currently may
contain cotton that helps dry up the
Aral Sea—though I have been unable
to fi nd any retailer or manufacturer
who will admit to this.
Other water-guzzling crops, such as
rice and sugar cane and fodder crops,
have similar impacts. Two-thirds of all
the water taken from nature round the
world goes to agriculture. So whenever
you eat Thai rice or burgers made of
meat from Central America, or clothes
made from Pakistani or Uzbek cotton,
you are infl uencing the hydrology of
those countries—taking a share of the
River Indus, the Mekong or the Aral
Sea—or the Costa Rican rains.
How have we come to this? Well,
though our planet is still largely covered
in water, we are coming up against
practical limits. Here are some more
numbers to illustrate this.
Earth is the water planet. But more than
97 percent of it is sea water that we
cannot drink and cannot, except in very
local circumstances, afford to purify. Of
the remaining fresh water, two-thirds is
locked up in ice caps and glaciers and
one-third is in liquid form. But the great
majority of this is in the pores of rocks,
often deep and unavailable or contaminated
with salt or arsenic or fl uoride,
and the great majority of it is not being
replaced by the rains. When we take it,
we are often mining it.
Our prime source of renewable water
is at the Earth’s surface—moving water
that nature constantly replenishes by
evaporating it from the oceans and
returning it to the Earth in clean rain.
The natural water cycle is still recycling
the water in which the dinosaurs bathed
and the fi rst fi sh swam. It is the basis
of life on Earth, and of our civilisations.
So how much water runs through this
cycle? And how much is available to us?
The answer is that in a year, about
120,000 cubic miles of water gets
recycled. Because most of it falls as
rain onto the ocean, this is not of much
practical use to us. But for the rest, we
are beginning to home in on the bit of
the water cycle where we currently get
most of our water.
60 VIRGINIA SEMINARY JOURNAL AUGUST 2007