To Save the Water Cycle: Stop Building Cities

As we all hopefully learnt at some point in our educational history, water cycles through its different phases. It spends time in the sky in clouds before it precipitates down onto land and bodies of water, where it can seep into the groundwater or lakes. Eventually, it will get drawn back up again to renew the cycle. But what if I told you that we're breaking that water cycle?

You've probably heard about how we're over-drawing from our groundwater sources. We do so because groundwater tends to be cleaner, having percolated through layers of dirt and sand and thus free from the chemicals and trash that our rivers are now polluted with. Groundwater has also allowed us to move to areas our ancestors could not. But as we are drawing from our groundwater faster than it can refill, we are risking the future stability of our civilisations as well as creating an increasing desertification effect as plants and their roots can no longer draw from groundwater.

There is plenty to be said about how to reduce our water consumption—shorter baths, don't water your lawns, just don't waste water, for god's sake! But I aim to provide a more nuanced, systematic way to fix the system instead of focusing on individual change. And in this case? Our cities are to blame.

More specifically, our roads. Generally, roads are waterproofed. Cities are nearly completely paved, making the entire area of the city essentially, waterproof. There is no way for the water to make its way underground because it has been entirely blocked. This doesn't even consider the toxic materials that asphalt are made out of, leading to water run-off from roads to contain micro-particles of this toxic material. As a side note, paved roads also substantially raise the temperatures of cities, but as we are talking about the water cycle, these two facts are not main considerations.

Teresa Coady on the Green Dreamer Podcast (which is fantastic by the way, as is Kamea who runs the Green Dreamer Podcast) pushes the point one step further. Cities, she says, are effectively deserts. Coastal areas are rainy and by being a wet biomass, provide the grounds for condensation that eventually lead to cloud formation. But coastal cities, as effective deserts, do not provide the condensation necessary and as a result, create the drastic wildfire events that we have seen escalate in the past few years.

It's all, of course, very scientific and can be hard to decipher. But in essence, not only are we overdrawing from our groundwater, we're stopping the groundwater from re-entering our aquifers because of our waterproof cities. This, in turn, further stops water from entering our cities via rain but also in other areas further inland. Our cities are acting as an unnatural barrier and pose a grave risk to our water cycles. To break it down, in order to fix our water cycle, we must break our cities. We have to plant trees in our cities to help recreate particulates that will seed clouds and plant native lawns and roofs that don't require intensive watering the way grass lawns do. Doing so may provide three benefits for our water table and climate change.

Firstly, we may provide soft dirt that allows water to actually re-enter the water table. This depends on a variety of factors, but allowing native green spaces to exist again extensively will be a necessity for water absorption and filtering to help replenish our aquifers. Secondly, the trees will hopefully eventually grow deep enough roots that we can stop desertification from occurring. Obviously, trees are not meant to be planted everywhere—deep-rooted grasses in the Great Plains should be planted. But the idea still stands. We must return native vegetation at least in part to our cities. And finally, a greener city will help provide shade as well as other methods that cool our cities down. This in turn can help lower other methods of cooling (namely, air conditioning, that is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, contributor to the carbon footprint of South East Asia). And as a bonus benefit, being in green spaces have massive benefits towards people's mental health. Interacting them multiplies their benefits.

So there we have it. So easy, and yet so hard. We must break our cities and plan better ones, ones made for humans and not around the roads our cars need.

I've linked this article above, but this is an excellent reading and deserves to be linked twice.

If you enjoyed this, consider checking out my other sustainability articles, such as the one linked below!