WATERWATERWATER

Last class we talked a lot about the resources that the Adirondacks have to offer, like mining, logging, farming, trapping, and tourism. At the end of class Janelle posed a question that really struck me, a question about resources that don't fall into these aforementioned categories: "Is it not useful because it's not useful to us?"

This got me thinking about all the natural resources that we tend to take for granted if we don't have an active part in obtaining them or if their utility to humans is not immediately obvious. Resources like lumber, crops, furs, and minerals have to be actively cut, farmed, trapped, and mined and once they're obtained they can be adopted for human use pretty much immediately afterwards--but what about all the ecological resources and services that humans don't play an active role in? Things like water filtration, the decomposition of wastes, crop pollination, and carbon sequestration to name a few, cannot be measured in crop yields or furs sold. And while their benefits for humans might not be as immediately apparent, they constitute some of the most vital services that allow us (and every other living thing) to inhabit this earth. It would be easy to look at how the Adirondacks is not conducive to crop cultivation, write it off as "not useful" and bulldoze the whole thing for development. But what we would lose then would be all the indirect, yet irreplaceable ecological services that don't have to do with people plowing land or excavating mountains.

What we sometimes don't think about is the fact that when you turn on a tap in someplace like New York City (which gets most of its water from the Hudson River and Catskill watersheds), there's a huge chance that that water was naturally filtered by wetlands in the Adirondacks, where the headwaters for the Hudson River are. Without the Adirondacks, it's unclear where Manhattan and many other New York communities would find enough clean water to support their growing populations--and that's just one example.

Thinking about all of this reminds me of Chris's presentation on mining in the Adirondacks versus the Gold Rush in California. Nowadays California is experiencing some pretty extreme water shortages even with all of the water diversion from the Colorado River and the various other projects they have to sustain their consumption. I think a lot of the reason that California is struggling to maintain their water supplies sustainably (aside from the ecological make-up of the land) is because they have huge populations around Los Angeles and the Bay Area that require huge amounts of water withdrawal. And since mining is a particularly earth-invasive process that can easily infiltrate watersheds and groundwater stores, it's a scary thought to think about what the region would look like today if mining had been as successful in the Adirondacks. With the pressures from what would have been larger populations accompanied by general waste, pollution, and ecological disruption, undoubtedly the landscape would look entirely different and the resources and services that the region provides would not be the same as they are today.

P.S. If you want to learn more about water conservation efforts in the Adirondacks, click here!
http://www.adirondackcouncil.org/uploads/special_reports_archive/1341942164_Adirondack_Waters___Resource_at_Risk.pdf