The Nature of Water
Water is an amazing creation. In his sermon January 5th title “Dialogue as a Creative Event” Mark Hayes said “In the
physical world, sometimes the combination of two materials results in something completely new and different.
When the two gases hydrogen and oxygen combine, the result is water, a substance with qualities not seen in either
of its component elements. Not only are those qualities lacking in the original gases – there is nothing that would
allow us to predict what they will be. The coming together of oxygen and hydrogen in chemical interaction is a
creative act, producing something entirely new.”

Water has many unusual characteristics. Cold water is denser than ice, so that ice floats on top of cold water. If this
didn’t happen, there would never have been any Ole & Sven ice fishing jokes. There would never have been an ice
bridge across the Bering Strait. More importantly, ice insulates the under-lying water from winter temperatures,
allowing plants and animals to survive until the next spring.

Water is a polar compound, with hydrogens sticking out one side and electrons sticking out the other side
{demonstrate}. There are a lot of implications of this polarity. It means that water molecules bind together so
strongly that it takes a lot of energy to make it evaporate (or melt). It takes a lot of energy to heat water up, and as a
result the temperature at the surface of the earth is buffered in a range that is reasonable for survival of plants and
animals.

The large-scale evaporation and condensation of water is responsible for “weather”, that is the transport of energy
and materials from warm parts of the planet to cooler parts of the planet.

The beginnings of life as we know it depended on the presence and polarity of water, and the fact that “oil and water
don’t mix”. Primordial organic chemicals were pushed out of the aqueous “witch’s brew” because they were nonpolar,
and they aggregated into vesicles that became unicellular organisms.

I marvel at everything else on our planet. Soils represent the very thinnest of coatings on the surface of the earth.
Soil is much smaller, in comparison to the earth, than the coat of paint on the outside of your house. But that thin
and fragile coating of soil is the basis for our foods. Plants anchored in that soil produce the O2 that we breathe. I
marvel that the whole system is so robust in spite of its apparent delicacy.

Earth, Air, Fire & Water
It’s no wonder that nearly every culture has praised the mystery and power of water through stories of creation and
purification. In the Judeo-Christian story of creation, as in most stories of creation, there was water before there was
anything else.

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved
upon the face of the waters.”

Then came light. After light came heaven, then dry land Earth, then grass and fruit trees, and the sun and stars and
seasons, and animals, and then (maybe God, like most of us, couldn’t find a way to stop with a good thing) God
created humans and gave humans dominion over everything.

And then God rested just when the humans started messing everything up and the problems started coming in
buckets.

Our spiritual stories often focus on water. John (3:5) has Jesus saying “Verily, I say unto you, unless a man be born
of water and of the spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.”

Of course it’s not just the Bible and the Gospels. In the Moslem faith, the ritual washing of hands and feet before
entering the temple is an act of spiritual and physical purification. The Hindu dead, with great luck, may be cremated
on the banks of the Ganges, the fires doused with water from the holy river, and the ashes returned to the river so as
to flow beyond these earthly bounds. Even UUFCC uses the water service each fall as to celebrate our wanderings
during the summer and our regeneration as a Fellowship each fall. And so on …

I find it interesting that our UU patron saint, Joseph Priestley (lately of Northumberland PA) was a firm believer in
earth, air, fire and water. He believed that everything was made from those elements.

Our Water Supplies
As a side note to the Genesis account of creation, where “the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” …it’s
reported that the total inventory of water on earth has not changed over geological times. If you were to take all the
known supplies of water in the world it’s the equivalent of a 2.7 km (1.65 mi) depth over the entire earth. You’ve
probably heard before that of the total, most is in the oceans or brackish, and not useful without expensive
technologies to remove the salt. About 3.4% of the total inventory of water is “fresh”, about equally distributed
between ice and deep groundwater. Only 0.007% of earth’s water is in freshwater lakes and rivers.

Even so, available fresh water could cover the entire earth to a depth of about 6 feet. That amount of fresh water is
recycled several times a year. The problem is, it might not be where we want it and it might not be as clean as we’d
like.

Human history is closely tied to large engineering feats with the objective of bringing water to places where it was
needed, or protecting civilizations from the destruction of flood waters. Huge hydraulic engineering projects were
built in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Peru, and China in ancient times. Immense hydraulic projects have been built in the
Western US. I suppose that most of us have watched documentaries of the epic construction of Hoover Dam, which
was emblematic of our government pulling society out of the depression and into the promising future. Hoover Dam
is still an important provider of electricity, and an even more important provider of water to the Southeast and
especially to Las Vegas.

We could get by on very little water. We need a half-gallon of drinking water a day to survive. It’s reported that we
need about 15 gal of water per day to take care of basic sanitary needs, but on average in the US each person uses
150 gallons of water (including commercial and industrial uses). In Phoenix, incredibly, average rainfall is only 7
inches a year and the average suburban family uses more than 700 gallons of water each day. This is more than
conspicuous consumption, it’s profligate and maybe it’s immoral. Maybe it’s a lifestyle that can’t last much longer.
But for now, there are watered lawns, fountains, swimming pools, and cars being washed. Las Vegas is an even
greater anomaly. You find Venesian canals, fountains of Bellagio, and green lawns in an area that receives about 4
inches of rain a year.

Is that behavior immoral? Is it unethical? Those are the questions I want to address.

What about our behavior in State College? We receive almost 40 inches of precipitation per year. There are dry
years when the ground water level falls too far and that leads to temporary problems in producing enough water, but
there’s more than enough water in the ground to supply us for a long time. State College Water Authority alone has
developed over 20 MGD of supplies while they’re pumping about 5 MGD.

However, Slab Cabin Run seems to completely dry up every summer now. Seventeen miles of Spring Creek were
recently identified as “non-attainment”, i.e. the water in Spring Creek does not comply with water quality
regulations, due to urban runoff.

So is it immoral or unethical for us to use as much water as we do and to allow the construction of more impervious
parking lots and rooftops, all of which results in decreased water levels and deteriorated water quality in our streams?
 

Are there Technical Solutions to the Problems?
Of course there are technical solutions to the problem!! They’d take away my unprofessional engineering license if I
didn’t say that!

Locally, we have the beneficial reuse project – converting wastewater to a resource - as a demonstration of our ability
to apply technology to solve an environmental problem.

In fact, I do believe that technology has enabled us to do more with less. There are lots of examples. I can go into
the laboratory today, and analyze hundreds of samples for very low concentrations of trace metals, quickly and
without introduction of hazardous materials and with low energy input. If I’d had to perform the same task fifty
years ago I’d have been able to analyze only a few samples per day, with poor precision and limit of detection, and
with the generation of lots of hazardous waste.

There are better examples in the areas of communications, space heating, and production of materials of all kinds. I
think the same is true in the case of transportation, but transportation provides a clue why, in spite of our
technological achievements, we are still in trouble. It’s because our desire and ability to do more exceeds the
benefits of the new efficiencies.

Take driving as an example. It’s been demonstrated time and again that when we build more and faster highways,
we drive more. We move to suburban areas with no or poor mass transit, and few neighborhood stores. We have to
travel further and more often to get where we want to go, which too often is a big parking lot. The end result of the
technological innovations in transportation is the pollution of air, land and water – exhausts spewing into the air,
green space consumed by what we unabashedly call “developments”, and water polluted by the construction of cars,
fuel, and roads. Our local water balance becomes completely changed by conversion from pervious soils to
impervious roads, parking lots, and roofs.

Kenneth Boulding called this the “cowboy economy”. He said that …

“The closed earth of the future requires economic principles which are somewhat different from those of the open
earth of the past. For the sake of picturesqueness, I am tempted to call the open economy the “cowboy economy”,
the cowboy being symbolic of the illimitable plains and also associated with reckless, exploitative, romantic, and
violent behavior, which is characteristic of open societies. The closed economy of the future might similarly be
called the “spaceman economy,” in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of
anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical
ecological system which is capable of continuous reproduction of material form even though it cannot escape having
inputs of energy.” {from Living Within Limits by Garrett Hardin, p. 58}

There may be other drawbacks to technological solutions to environmental problems – political and social problems
that occur when governments use large-scale solutions such as dams and irrigation systems. Karl Wittfogel alleged
that ancient civilizations developed despotic governments when agriculture or cities required installation of huge
“hydraulic systems”. We see this today when huge populations, as in China or India, are displaced so as to build
huge reservoirs.

Moving Towards an Environmental Ethic?
I think that societal ethics spring from individual decisions or maybe just tendencies towards defining right and
wrong. Individual ethics are meaningless unless they reflect a consistent behavior. I’ve always like the part of
Steven Covey’s seven habits books where he says that an ACTION that is repeated can lead to a HABIT, and the
sum of our habits is our CHARACTER. That’s a reasonable definition of personal ethic to me.

Societal ethics function in the same way. Societal ethics are unenforceable until they are clearly adopted by a
significant part of the population. Maybe more importantly, societal ethics must be adopted by a part of our societal
bureaucracy, which to me means government or religion. Then it becomes morality or law, which for me seem very
similar, in terms of their effect on human behavior.

Are we working towards an environmental ethic? I think the answer is YES and NO. We have lots of regulations
and social taboos that didn’t exist fifty years ago. I remember in the 70’s seeing someone get ready to pull away
from a Hardee’s or McDonalds and just throw their trash onto the parking lot. They acted like it was normal, and
although you still see that kind of behavior, I think it’s less common and it’s more likely that someone will challenge
the action based on society’s rules of what is right and wrong.

I attended a talk recently where it was stated that the city of Pittsburgh did not treat their municipal wastewater at all
until the mid-50’s. There certainly is a lot more treatment of wastewater and air pollution now than there was in the
50’s or even the 70’s. Sometimes it seems like two steps forward a step back, but I believe there is progress. We are
trying to deal with the problem of our excessive appetites by enforcing rules about environmental quality. The
environmental tendency in the U.S. of the 21st century is to regulate the quality of air that people breathe or the
quality of water in every watershed, rather than just make rules about maximum concentrations of pollutants in an
individual discharge. That’s a big step forward.

But it seems to me there’s a lot of work to be done. Our personal consumption and generation of pollutants has been
less significantly affected by environmental laws and regulations.

There are a lot of things for which society has had a lot of practice and we still can’t completely agree. Is it wrong to
kill? Although capital punishment and war make it cle ar that “thou shalt not commit murder” is not a unanimous
sentiment, or at least it’s interpreted differently by different people, nonetheless we have a workable agreement
within our society that is reinforced by religious and civil authorities, that we should not kill each other. Same goes
for stealing, even though there is enough corporate crime and white collar crime to make you wonder sometimes if
this is a generally-held ethical belief.

Crimes against the environment, against future generations, and environmental crimes against defenseless groups
seem much harder for society to judge. We’ve seen plenty of roll-backs in environmental regulations during the last
few years, in the name of property rights or the economy. When war comes, who protects the environment?

I have a confession to make. In spite of the fact that I ride my bike to work each day and try to do other things that
are not harmful to the environment, I AM A SINNER. For example, given the opportunity a month ago to go down
to Florida and spend some time in the sun, while it was horrible weather here, I decided to go. Many of you know
that flying in an airplane uses as much fossil fuel and therefore puts as much CO₂ into the atmosphere as riding in a
car with 2 or 3 passengers.

There’s a problem! We benefit from our environmental sins, and there’s not an effective mechanism yet to prevent
us from polluting.

But I have hope! In his January 5th sermon, Mark said that “Human beings are not simply globs of protoplasm or
creatures of fear, fight and flight, we are part and parcel of the creative event. It may be that we are accidental
creations and as programmed as any computer, but we are creators. We create at the moment of human conception
when the male sperm unites with the female ovum. We create when the central nervous system responds to impulses
and Archimedes shouts, “Eureka!” And we create when ideas are exchanged and conditions are ripe. At times as
these, new ideas are born, fresh insights develop, and that which did not exist, exists. . .”

We need fresh ideas about how to deal with earth, air, fire, and water. We need an environmental ethic that will let
us place technology more truly at the service of the entire planet, and not just at the service of this generation. I
should have said, not just at the service of those rich and powerful enough to command the technological resources.

I want to hear how you think we should proceed in working toward a solution to these problems, because the only
way we can make social progress is by developing an ethos that is strong and attractive enough to overcome our
selfish tendencies.