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Roots and Shoots Meeting: Water
 The August Roots and Shoots event was August 30 at Janice's, a beautiful sunny day after our homeschooling market and swap. Sarah Kelly, an Americorps member from the Michigan Department of Agriculture visited to tell us about groundwater stewardship. All ages found it interesting, and even little ones sat attentively through the whole talk!
 This was a really neat item she brought, a sort of fish tank full of soil in layers. It showed the soils under our feet in cross section, and how groundwater moves into wells and into the lakes and groundwater from things like leaky gas tanks and septic tanks. Ewww!
Here she is putting samples of bentonite in cups, which we then filled with water to see how the bentonite reacted. Bentonite is used to seal unused artesian wells. There were also activities. One was a treasure hunt mapping activity of how water moves through the water cycle. Another was a guessing game, done by fishing a numbered duck out of a pool, with both easy questions for the little children and some tough ones for the teens and adults! by Jack Carlson
Our August 30th Roots and Shoots meeting was on fresh water, the water cycle, and protecting our groundwater here in southwest Michigan. The National Geographic Magazine's September 2002 issue also has two articles about water. "Water Pressure", by Fen Montaigne, is about the world-wide problem of getting enough drinking water, and another article, "Down the Drain", by John G. Mitchell, is about water in the Great Lakes.
At the Roots and Shoots meeting, Sarah Kelly, an Americorps member from the Michigan Department of Agriculture, gave us information about the world's water. We learned that nearly 97 percent of the world's water is salt water and oceans. About 2 percent is frozen in polar ice sheets and glaciers, and a tiny fraction of 1 percent is available for drinking, irrigation, and industrial use. Sara Kelly showed us this prospect quite well by comparing a very large beaker of water (representing the oceans) to a small drop on the bottom of a cup (drinking water.) According to the "Water Pressure" article in the National Geographic, there are constantly new studies confirming what a World Bank expert calls the "grim arithmetic of water." Recently the United Nations said that by the year 2025, 2.7 billion people would face severe water shortage at the current rate of consumption.
Sarah Kelly had some activities for us that showed how the water cycle works and that it takes about 100 years for water pumped out of wells to return to groundwater. In many places, water is pumped out faster than it can return. The National Geographic article "Water Pressure" tells about this worldwide water problem and some things people are doing about it. The U.S. is pumping out its groundwater and using up its rivers in the west, but still has lots of water in most parts of the country. Other places are less fortunate. Throughout the world, developing countries do not have enough water. Much of their water has been polluted, wasted, or pumped from the deep groundwater and used for very inefficient irrigation methods. According to the article, nearly two billion people are suffering from severe water depletion.
Many villages in India are running out of clean drinking water. Because there is not enough money to build big dams, an organization called Tarun Bharat Sangh helps villages build small hand-built dams, called johad, instead. The johad are able to supply drinking and irrigation water, and some water also seeps down to replenish overpumped groundwater.
In Zambia, Africa, another group has developed treadle pumps that take water from seasonal wetlands, called dambos, to irrigate the crops and increase the amount of food produced without deep wells that use up the groundwater. In the South African city of Durban, water consumption went down even though the population grew when they repaired leaky pipes and installed water meters.
In the U.S., in some cities water demand has been reduced by up to 25 percent by repairing aging pipes and retrofitting plumbing fixtures, like toilets and shower heads, in people's homes. At the Roots and Shoots day, Sarah Kelly had us make a "Personal Water Meter" so that we could see just how much water an individual uses or wastes.
The second National Geographic Magazine article, "Down the Drain", is about the world's largest freshwater system, our own Great Lakes. At the Roots and Shoots day, Sarah Kelly had a water-filled model that showed the layers of soil in western Michigan and how all the lakes, rivers and groundwater runs into Lake Michigan, along with runoff from septic tanks and leaky fuel tanks and other pollution. "Down the Drain" is about the very low water levels now in the Great Lakes.
Lower water levels have happened before, just the decrease was not so fast. Low water levels are caused by below-average precipitation, increased water temperature, and heavy consumption. Chicago, for example, uses 2.4 billion gallons of water a day from Lake Michigan- and does not send any of it back, instead what's left over goes into the Mississippi river.
Lake Michigan water levels were at nearly their historic high levels in 1997 and 1998 but have fallen rapidly since then, to almost as low as in 1964. The extremely speedy decline since then is what has people worried. Lake Michigan has been lower than it is now, but the actual decline of the level was much slower. Although winter of 2002 did have enough snow to raise the lake levels through the summer to almost the levels of last year, the levels in September are falling again.
According to the National Geographic Magazine article, the current lake levels are starting to hurt businesses. Cargo ships must pull hundreds of tons, and thousands of dollars, out of their cargos just so the ships won't hit the bottom and tear open their hulls. It is going so far that even canoe rental places are getting back canoes with bangs and dents worse than ever before- the canoes keep hitting rocks that are now popping up because of the lower water levels.
Groundwater is a natural resource, and we should not waste it. While we in the United States are blessed with lots of it, the groundwater will not last forever. Many other places in the world have very little usable water. It takes an incredibly long time for water to seep back into the ground, at least a hundred years to complete the groundwater cycle. We need to pay more attention to our use of water, and the changing amount of water available, both in the United States and in the rest of the world.
There is a good chart on lake levels on this web page:
http://huron.lre.usace.army.mil/levels/mich_hrn.pdf.
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