Billy wrote:
....
Gaia's Garden, Second Edition: A Guide To Home-Scale Permaculture
(Paperback)
by Toby Hemenway
http://www.amazon.com/Gaias-Garden-S...culture/dp/160
3580298/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271266976&sr=1-1


CHAPTER FIVE

Catching, Conserving,
and Using Water

In truth, our planet should be called Water, not
Earth. About 70 percent of the globe is blanketed
by this life-giving liquid, roughly 331 million
cubic miles of it. But most of that is not available to
us. All but 3 percent of Earth's water is salty; and, of
the remaining dab of fresh water, three-quarters is
locked in ice. It gets worse. About half of what's left,
Earth's unfrozen fresh water, is 2,500 feet or more
below ground, embedded in rock. That's too deep
to recover economically. Are you following these
shrinking numbers? The accessible fresh water
in lakes, rivers, groundwater, and the atmosphere
makes up only half of one-quarter of 3 percent‹for
non-Einsteins, that works out to 0.375 percent‹of
Earth's total water. It's precious stuff.

by my rough calculation that comes to 1.28 billion
liters of accessible fresh water per person. that
sounds like plenty, but i suspect when you start
tallying up lakes, rivers, wetlands and the water
needed to keep the plants growing that feed and
support us and all the rest of the creatures we
rely upon that number is going to rapidly shrink.


songbird