merefaith: discipleship in the ruins of empire

Letting water fall on your roof and run off your yard into the storm drain, and then pumping an equivalent amount of water from miles away for use inside your home doesn't make a lot of sense. Like other wasteful and inefficient modern city systems, the failure to harvest and use the water that rains down on our houses results in wasted energy, almost invariably fossil energy, with the concomitant carbon emissions.

Much urban and rural water arrives at taps after being pumped (using fossil energy) from underground aquifers. Some of these aquifers are now stranded, meaning they are not being recharged. Water from these aquifers is often referred to as fossil water, because it accumulated over thousands if not millions of years and will not be replenished in a humanly relevant time frame once depleted. Aquifers that are capable of being recharged do so faster when water is released slowly over a long period of time so that less is lost to runoff.