Our readings of texts like Stewart's Earth Abides, McCarthy's The Road or Callenbach's Ecotopia have sharpened our awareness of the necessity of water and the fragility of the infrastructure that delivers it to our faucets.
Today, much of the news is consumed with our decreasing oil supply and the potential crises resulting but the human body does not require petroleum products for survival - we survived for millennia without it. However, water is central to human survival and a mere 7-10 days without water would kill most people by dehydration.
Published in 1863, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge has left us with a line that many of us have heard and repeated:
"Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink."
While they almost seem cliche, with these lines Coleridge left us with an important reminder of a significant fact about life on earth: 97.5% of the water on Earth is not drinkable without reverse osmosis desalination processing which is very expensive and maintenance intensive according to a United Nations Environment Program Report:"...significant costs associated with reverse osmosis plants, aside from the capital cost, are the costs of electricity, membrane replacement, and labor."
Though reverse osmosis is the predominant technique for desalinization, there are several other desalinization processes used today. One of the most recent and most promising approaches to desalinization called "forward osmosis" is being developed at Yale.
For more info, listen to Living On Earth's report "Low Salt Water with Low Energy Technology."
