Water, water everywhere?

By the look of things to come, Noah and his ark--not Hollywood's George Clooney--might have ridden out the real "Perfect Storm." Patrick McCormick issues a water advisory for a planet that's too quickly draining its supply.

EL NINO IS HISTORY, HURRICANE SEASON IS OVER, and all our spring and summer downpours and surging rivers have gone to sleep as winter snow and icy ponds. Hard to believe now that the year was so full of tales of raging waters--stories of storms, floods, and other waterborne catastrophes. Of course the big "it's not safe to go back in the water" story this year was The Perfect Storm (HarperPaperbacks), Sebastian Junger's riveting account of a Gloucester fishing crew lost in a 1991 northeaster. Already in its third year on the bestseller list, Storm bought a new lease on life this summer when George Clooney and Wolfgang Petersen brought the storm only Hitchcock could love to the big screen.

But Junger's stormy tale was by no means alone. Over the year there were several other fictional and real-life sagas of angry waters. Peter Maas' The Terrible Hours (Harper-Torch) told the frightening-but-true story of U.S. Navy officer Swede Momsen's 1939 rescue of the submarine Squalus off the New England coast. Jonathan Mostow's film U-571 had Matthew McConaughey leading a daring band of WWII submariners in an undersea hunt for a German code machine. And in August, millions of us hung desperately--and hopefully--by our radios for hourly reports about the doomed crew of a Russian nuclear sub sunk deep in the Barents Sea.

Then there was The Hungry Ocean (Hyperion), Linda Greenlaw's muscular account of her life and work as the captain of a North Atlantic swordfishing boat, giving lie to any romantic notion that women belong on widow walks waiting for their men to come home from the sea. And in Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea (Viking), we read of the sinking of the 19th-century whaling ship Essex by a sperm whale, a real-life catastrophe that became the inspiration for Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

Sometimes, however, we didn't need to go out to the sea to encounter its rages or dangers. Occasionally, as in Erik Larson's Isaac's Storm (Vintage), the angry sea came to us. On Sept. 8, 1900 an unnamed and disregarded hurricane came ashore in Galveston, Texas and swept the sleepy resort community and nearly 8,000 of its citizens into a watery grave. Even a century later it remains the worst weather catastrophe in U.S. history.

The most interesting story about angry waters this year is probably the oldest one. In their 1999 book Noah's Flood (Simon & Schuster), geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman argued that about 7,000 years ago rapidly melting European glaciers caused the Mediterranean to flood into the Black Sea and submerge whole civilizations under its expanding waves. And this September, a National Geographic expedition discovered the ruins of Neolithic settlements 300 feet under the Black Sea's no longer stormy waters, confirming Ryan and Pitman's theory about an ancient deluge that changed history and inspired the story of Noah.

These tales of the angry sea and raging waters frighten us. But what is even scarier is the growing complaint of many scientists that we ourselves are creating some of these storms--or at least helping make them more frequent or violent. That's the thesis of New York Times science reporter William Stevens' book The Change in the Weather: People, Weather and the Science of Climate (Delacorte). According to Stevens, human-induced global warming is probably behind much of the recent increases in wild weather and raging waters, and could very likely be generating much more of the same in the future. Talk about your "storm warning."

AND YET, IT'S NOT JUST STORIES OF WATER'S EXCESSES that terrify us. It's also tales of water's absence, of its disappearance. We are hearing more and more of these tales today, and almost none of them are fiction.

In July, Jacques Leslie's piece in Harper's on "Running Dry" warned that we may soon be facing a global shortage of freshwater. Last year Sandra Posters Pillar of Sand: Can the Irrigation Miracle Last? (W. W. Norton) asked some uncomfortable questions about the pressure modern agriculture is placing on global freshwater resources. And in 1998, former Senator Paul Simon authored Tapped Out: The Coming World Crisis in Water and What We Can Do About It (Welcome Rain), raising the specter of our nation's and planet's overuse and pollution of freshwater supplies. These and a number of other recent texts point to growing concerns that the supply of fresh water may soon not be able to meet our increasing demands.

There are about 326 million cubic miles of water on the planet, with each cubic mile representing more than a trillion gallons of water. That's a lot of water. But only about 2.5 percent of that is freshwater, and about two thirds of that freshwater is frozen in ice caps and glaciers, making it tough to drink, wash, or irrigate our crops with.

In the last two centuries we have gone from less than 1 billion to more than 6 billion people on the planet, and estimates indicate that our water use triples every time the population doubles. We've increased the lands under irrigation by more than thirtyfold. We've built more than 40,000 large dams and 800,000 small ones. Our industries and agriculture have polluted much of our waterways and significantly increased the salinity of our rivers and croplands. And we have made massive and unreplenished withdrawals from our underground and groundwater reserves of freshwater.

WATER SHORTAGES HAVE ALREADY begun to surface in many regions, particularly among the poor. About one fifth of the world's population (1.2 billion) has no access to clean drinking water. Around 3 billion have no sanitation--underground sewage, toilets, or latrines. And more than 5 million die each year of easily preventable waterborne diseases such as diarrhea, dysentery, and cholera.

In the U.S., the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the world's largest underground water reserves, is already half-depleted from irrigation for crops. In India most groundwater is being taken out at twice the pace nature can replenish it, with aquifers dropping 3 to 10 feet each year. Indeed, many of the world's poorest and most populated countries have long been engaged in "deficit spending" when it comes to groundwater use. In several coastal nations, groundwater has dropped so low that saltwater is seeping into the aquifers.

And its not just groundwater that's in trouble. The Aral Sea, once the world's fourth largest lake, has shrunk to less than a third of its former size. The Colorado River often runs dry before it reaches the sea, as do the Ganges in India and the Jordan in the Middle East. In 1997 the Yellow River in China failed to reach its mouth on 226 days.

In Genesis 2:7 we are told God formed the first human from the soil. The word adam means a "creature of the earth." But Genesis 1:1-3 reminds us that all creation began with water, with God hovering over the deep. Modern science agrees. Long before our ancestors were primates or mammals, they were water creatures. Even today, we are mostly water. An average 150-pound adult contains about 42 quarts of water and needs another 2 to 4 quarts each day. At the beginning of life we float in our mother's water, and at the end a drop of water is often that last thing to pass our lips or soothe our fevered brow.

Water is a sacrament of our shared humanity, even of our shared creaturelyness. Theologian Monika Hellwig once wrote that to be human, to be alive, is to be hungry--and that our hunger connects us with all other creatures that struggle to feed themselves and their young. It summons us to a global Eucharist at which no one is hungry. But to be human, to be alive, is also to thirst--and our need for water connects us with every other being on this planet. We are all water creatures, water siblings, joined by the stuff that makes us up and sharing a common need. Like Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well, we all need to ask others to give us "something to drink."

In Genesis 9:8-17 God makes a covenant with Noah, his descendents, "and with every living creature," promising that "never again will there be a flood to lay waste the earth." And in Genesis 2:15, humans are placed in the Garden of Eden to "take care" of the rest of creation. As Noah's descendents, we are parties to that covenant with God and creation. As the children of Eve and Adam, we are stewards of all God's creation. More than 7,000 years after the flood that washed away civilization along the Black Sea, we need to ask ourselves if we are taking care of the earth, of each other, and of all the other water creatures God has fashioned "hovering over the water."

By PATRICK MCCORMICK, an associate professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.