The Water Cycle
Even though the climate over the last 10,000 years had been relatively mild and predictable compared with the many millions of years previously when Chaos ruled the earth, during this period we have been systematically destroying our climate, our aquifers and our land. The sequence: deforestation, agriculture, irrigation, salinity and aridity has all too often been repeated in too many places for two many years. It is plain to see that our failure to live harmoniously with nature and understand the natural water cycle cannot continue. We must change the way with think to solve the problem.
In years gone by forests and grassland covered most of our planet. When it rained much of the water naturally percolated though leaf litter and natural mulches that performed vital functions of slowing down evaporation and the rate of transport to rivers and streams, purifying rather than polluting and adding salts to water and replenishing natural aquifers. Our legacy has been to plough and pave this natural landscape with two major consequences - pollution and salinity.
Given global water shortages, the salinity poisoning our land, pollution, the cost of handling the volume and rate of flow of runoff we need to change our practices so as to mimic the way it was for so many millions of years before we started making so many changes.
The Water Cycle[1]
The water or hydrological cycle is powered by the sun and water changes state and is stored as it moves through it. Human intervention is removing natural filtration processes and reducing the time it takes for water to return to the oceans resulting in less moisture on land, salinity and aridity.
TecEco have invented permecocrete so that roads no longer need to upset the natural drainage of the land.
printer friendly
[1] Introductory article written for Civilization, the Magazine of the US Library of Congress, October-November 2000, by Guest Editor Mikhail Gorbachev.