Dealing with "information smog"

Either animals or machines can carry the water to where it is needed. The means of moving the water from place to place has consequences. There is a vast difference between automaticallly and manually moving water from its source, like a well and its destination, or sink. And in that vast difference of how much irrigation is made possible.

Now people, rather than animal labor or machinery may carry the water. So consider the three means of moving water and the amount of water you would expect each method of delivery to produce.

Water delivery systems have a signifcant influence on how vast the impact of irrigation is on the landscape, vegetation and water of a region. Irrigation is a major factor in the productivity of agriculture and the influence that this has on the climate and conditions is widespread.

The movement of water profoundly alters the source areas and the receiving landscapes dramatically. Source areas are called watersheds. These are vast areas of vegetated landscape where falling rainwater is gathered and stored in surface or underground land forms. These undergound areas are called aquifers, while surface accumulation of water, either moves or stays in one place.

These two different forms of water create surface features that comprise essential parts (listed from smallest to largest in area) of a watershed:

moving water	stationary water
brook	puddle
creek	pond
stream	reservoir
river	lake

The case of moving water from one place to another is a significant problem, due to three factors, physical constraints, biological realities, and social concerns. Before social concerns can be appreciated physical and biological limitations must be understood as contributing to the complexity of simple problems.

The evaporation of water is a physical constraint since either moving or stationary water will --under the daylight sun-- turn from a liquid to a vapor form. As water is a medium in which life flourished, the amount of oxygen in the water body affects the kind of creatures that live there, thus the measure of dissolve oxygen (DO is a physical constraint), is related to the need of creatures to use that oxygen, called biological oxygen demand (BOD is a biological reality). There is of course the social dimension of the problem of moving water and usually the quantity of water is a basic concern, based on how much water a society uses (consumption is one example of social concerns).

Problem | Examples | Questions | Lesson

Three aspects of any case	examples
Physical	ionization & evaporation
constraints arising from conditions	rainfall and runoff
Biological	populations
realities arising from ecological relations	species diversity
Social	percapita consumption
concerns arising from people's aggregate needs for water to drink, wash, grow, make or dispose of waste.	quality of water to promote or retard human health

John Muir, a founding memeber of the Sierra Club in 1892, once remarked that if we look at any one thing, we can't help but suddenly realize that "it is hitched to everything else." While this is quite a difficult concept to explain, the law of entanglement is very real. Conditions under which the law of entanglement arises has to do with the material conditions of existence. By law of entanglement, I mean that when looking at the matter of water delivery, for example, the physical properties of water make it an ideal substance for several competing uses, while living creatures inhabit water as well as need water in order to survive. This means that when we follow one biological thread, say fish in a stream, we discover that the thread gets tangled in both what the fish eats, the amount of water the fish need and the fisher who may feed off of the fishery. For example trout are eaten by people, and a host of other animals and other fish specifically; they all live in water and their population is affected by the amount and the quality of that water. So looking at the fish in the stream entangles us in the physical quantity, biological quality and social concerns of people who eat trout, if we are to understand the importance of water to our own lives.

See ecological ideas discussion.

Problem | Examples | Questions | Lesson

Quantity is different from the peculiar quality of the water we need:

quality	quantity
pH	flow
DO	cubic meters per second
turbidity	acre feet
fecal coliform	gallons
nutrient load: P, N, Hg	consumption

The apparent decline of our water resources' quality and availability has provoked many hydrological problems for cities and towns. But the demand for more frequent and more varied uses of water by human populations further contributes to rising demands that affect water quality. Additional water may, or may not affect the existing water quality of a body to which new supplies are introdcued. Effects of increased water flow has three probable outcomes:

quality	quantity
+, improves	+, increases
Ø, no net change	+, increases
-, declines	+ ( or - )

The relation is not a simple one to one bond where changes in availability or quantity always have the same impact on the quality of the water body. That is because quality and quantity or availability of water is related to biological realities, we have not yet discussed.

Problem | Examples | Questions | Lesson

Biological realities are always more complex than physical constraints allow for because living creatures adapt in a variety of ways to the prevailing limitations imposed on them.

While physical constraints can be categorized as quantitative in that there is a source for a given amount of water and there is a sink representing a certain size of the demand percapita, or quantity to be consumed, the quality of the deliverable supply can be affected by the two other factors in addition to quantity.

The factors that entangle physical contraints with biological realities are four in number: quantity, quality, timing and distribution of water in any watershed.

Physical factors	examples of tangled relations:
quantity,	How much do fish, fowl and people need.
quality,	How dirty, smelly, polluted or stagnant it is.
timing,	When does the flow of water change?
distribution,	Where are the sources and the sinks located?

The physical and chemical properties of water make it an ideal substance for three reasons, in addition to the four factors governing its availability.

soluble	ideal solution for dissolving materials
buffer	capable of separating antagonistic reactions
medium	a sizeable habitation for microscopic and larger life

Physical factors add to the complexity of these biological realities:

Physical factors	Biological relations
quantity,	How much is needed to clean human waste?
quality,	BOD can exceed the DO and fish may die.
timing,	Water flow changes affect plant productivity.
distribution,	Water availabilty alters vegetative ground cover.

Problem | Examples | Questions | Lesson

Frequently serious ecological problems present themselves to us as a hidden, or an entangled series of challenges.


These challenges of understanding the entanglement of water and ecological problems are like the challenge we all have in a new job where the work we are doing or information we are learning is different from any previous situations we have encountered. Consider the description of a desert, what makes the place distinct? What do we associate with a fountain?

How is it we understand a mirage?

Where do we encounter underlying hidden details that influence, if not fully determine, an outcome?

Lesson:

Often there is more than meets the eye, or the mind's eye-view of a situation and thus, what we do not know can hurt us as much as what we do know can get us into unexpected troubles. Solving problems through the exercise of critical thinking, is a mwans to see below the surface simplicity, into the complexity of a situation.

Dewey's pragmatism

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