Worldwide Watering Wonder

There are science books and then there is nature. One of those two is always exciting.

We need words but a big word for something miraculous almost feels wrong. It isn't, of course but we often mentally block exciting things because we associate it with academic work.

Do yourself a big favor and don’t miss the miracle, don’t miss the ingenuity, don’t miss the beauty, don’t miss the orchestrated interaction everywhere in nature. It’s everywhere and for folks like me, it is declaring more fun than a Christmas season. It is screaming superior intelligence. OK, I will not talk about God or aliens but I refuse to surrender reasoning.

Technology. We love it. Clever design. Efficiency. We love solar power, wind power, windmills and

dams (water power) because we are tapping energy that is free (then we pay for it).

Nature’s technology is often copied but nearly all of nature has such grand innovation and detailed design, we aren’t smart enough to REVERSE ENGINEER it. We tell students we know how it works, but know what? We can't duplicate it.

You went to school. You know how an eye works. Photosynthesis. How blood clots and then the skin heals. You know animals have instincts smarter than the creature and even too smart for scientists to figure out exactly how they know to do things.

We call it instinct but frankly it's fantastic programming that we cannot match.

We also cannot make seeing eyes, or manmade plants that can do photosynthesis, or living blood, or healing skin.

We want to understand. We are working hard to learn how we might make those things. Nature does stuff every day that we see but cannot really understand how it works. We are not smart enough to make most things in nature from cells to creatures. That means nature is smarter, doesn't it?

If nature is smarter, does it make sense to say it takes no brains to be smarter?

We can enjoy simple things like the beauty of flying a manmade kite thanks to the wind. We celebrate the magical silence of sailing a manmade sailboat, thanks to the wind.

But what is a good way to water all the plants and trees in the world?

How do we provide drinking water to all the creatures on the planet? How do we transport water from the oceans and rivers to all the land around the world?

Obviously, a huge task but thankfully, it is not left to man to do this job with a worldwide network of canals and plumbing.

I cannot begin to calculate the cost of materials and labor.

There is a better way

Nature's way is utilizing the ocean and the snow and it all happens 365 days a year without charge. I will skip the dramatic importance of the weather, the seasons, earth’s orbit and get right to the system here.

First, our world is 70% ocean. The ocean salt water evaporates. Rising moisture is always forming clouds. Our first transport of water is airborne but in that process it loses its salt. Predictable wind patterns blow these freshwater clouds that continue reshaping in size and density.

The big tall clouds you see weigh more than 1 million pounds yet there they are floating.

Every area on earth has year round rainfall averages from deserts to jungles to your neighborhood. The rain falls refilling lakes, rivers, streams and ponds. Like a coffee filter, the water also trickles through the soil which surprisingly, purifies the water. Yes, the dirt purifies the water. Underground are countless lakes, streams and rivers. When we discover water wells

it is tapping into the water underground.

All the streams and rivers above and below ground head in one direction, right back to the ocean. This, dear reader, is a cycle. Science calls it the Hydrologic Cycle but don’t focus on the word, focus the wonder of it all, the simplicity and power of the entire earth continually watered and recycling that water over and over and over again without electricity (except some lightning), without pipes, without man’s help.

The result of this process is every flower, every tree, every blade of grass not maintained by man thriving luxuriously and providing food for the earth’s creatures and homes for all life.

It would be such a terrible waste for this to be happening every day of our life and us not take pause to take it in, I mean how can we take in something of this magnitude? I suppose with a nod of appreciation for the things upon which we depend and cannot control that are consistently there for us.

Share the insights and cause for gratitude.

Thanks.