We need clean water for life.
AND
Too much water leads to disaster.
Water Contamination
With massive efforts to clean up our waterways in the 60’s and 70’s many people assumed things were improving, especially as industrial facilities were no longer allowed to dump waste. Unfortunately, it seems every time we turn around our water is threatened by some new contaminate. Microplastics are turning up everywhere. Heavy metals, herbicides and pesticides continue to contaminate.
While it’s long been suspected that waste from large, pastured cattle herds contaminated runoff water after heavy rains, there has been less general understanding of the impact of the use of nitrogen fertilizers in massive monocrop operations. After the dust bowl, the US Ag Department worked with small farmers to encourage conservation and planting practices that reduced run-off. In the 21st century, farmers with massive monocrop fields have removed grass drainage swaths and collection ponds so that they can plant the entire acreage. Where drainage is a problem, as this podcast from Iowa explains, they have replaced grass swaths and ponds with drainage tiles (pipes) that dump runoff contaminated with farm chemicals directly into waterways, bypassing the natural processes which clean groundwater as it percolates thru natural, vegetation-covered soils.
Drought
Historically, the Middle East was not the huge wasteland we see today. Deforestation, overgrazing and poor farming practices led to desertification. The US plains have the same problem. When plows and cattle replaced buffalo herds continually moving across the native grasses, the US experience the Dust Bowl. Better farming practices made some improvement, but much plains agriculture requires massive irrigation, which is slowly draining the major aquifers. As water shortages cause less robust vegetation, the desertification process begins to start again, as we see particularly in CA.
Flooding
Heavy rainstorms are becoming more common, leading to massive flooding. Tropical storms are causing massive flooding even over inland areas like West Virginia. Areas once considered safe from flooding suddenly find themselves inside the new 100-year or even 10-year floodplain on the latest FEMA map. A combination of rising sea level and local subsidence [Netherlands, New Orleans] requires expensive and not always successful efforts to raise seawalls and build higher, longer levees to protect low-lying areas from flooding.