Complete Issue - Shippensburg University

1IntroductionJ o s e p h Zu m eS h i p p e n s b u r g University“Water is the mother of the vine, The nurse and fountain of fecundity, The adorner andrefresher of the world” (Charles Mackay).“Water is life’s mater and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water”(Albert Szent-Gyorgyi).Water has an overbearing influence on MotherEarth and her inhabitants. Few will doubt it is the mostimportant substance man has ever known. Its refreshingtaste is obviously unmatched by any other earthlyliquid. Personally, there are times that gulping down aglass of chilled water makes me wish for a tail I couldwag like a spoiled dog. For as long as I can remember, Ihave cherished water as being more precious than gold.As a little boy, growing up in a small village innorth-central Nigeria, I had no idea there was a tapone could simply twist and water would gush out. Myentire village relied on a scattering of hand-dug wells,which were very productive during the rainy seasonbut completely parched in the dry season. Even duringthe rainy season, we had to expend enormous amountsof time and energy to manually draw water from theearth. It was generally the children’s responsibility togather water for the household—a burden that weighedheavier on girls than boys. Some unfortunate littleboys like myself, whose mothers had no daughters,or daughters who were too little to help, had to weardouble hats, performing both ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ tasks.The onset of the dry season forced us to travel longdistances in search of streams that still had a trickle ofmoisture. During these times, we prayed our familieswould conserve water and our quests would not takeus too far. Once water was found, we would collect itin pails that we carried on our heads; the heaviness ofour loads made our journeys home almost unbearable.The hardships we faced offered constant remindersthat water was a scarce resource. Every drop was worthprotecting. These early experiences played a crucial rolein my decision to specialize in water science.As I read and studied, I developed a greater andgreater recognition that my formative experiences withwater had been widely shared by the majority of theworld’s population across vast distances of time andspace. Water is believed to be the only substance thathas a name in every human language. I suppose whalesand porpoises send sonar messages regarding watertemperatures via sonar. Perhaps ants send chemicalmessages to their colonies when they uncover muchneeded supplies of the resource.Water covers 70 percent of the earth’s surface andis buried like treasure under much of its crust. Forcenturies, the availability of water has influencedhuman settlement patterns worldwide. Many ofthe great ancient civilizations were anchored alonglarge rivers; the technological and labor demands ofirrigation played a crucial role in the rise of early cities.Mesopotamia, for example, was located between theTigris and the Euphrates rivers in present-day Iraqand Turkey. Similarly, the Egyptians centered theircivilization on the Nile, and the Chinese on the Yellowand Yangtze rivers. Regional geographers argue it wasEurope’s numerous connecting waterways that ignitedits art of shipbuilding, which eventually facilitatedits colonization over the rest of the world. Morerecently, the discovery of a huge amount of historicclimatic information stored in the earth’s oceans andJoseph Zume, born and educated in Nigeria, earned his doctorate in geography/ground water hydrology from theUniversity of Oklahoma. He joined the faculty at Shippensburg University in the fall of 2007. His teaching andresearch interests are in hydrology, climate variability, near-surface geophysics, and water resources economics.