Hydrosols

WHOLLY WATER !

It would be impossible to talk about hydrosols without addressing the issue of water. Water is one of the most critical elements in health and wellness, and unless we recognise its value and the relationship between water and hydrosols, we will be missing half the point! Water and the control of water supplies made Egyptian and Roman empires great, and some historians attribute the fall of the Roman Empire to the use of lead water pipes that slowly poisoned the population.

Water is now regarded as a commodity to be harnessed for its power or sold for its cleanliness. The temporary contamination of the Perrier springs in France several years ago, and the resulting recall of millions of bottles of spring water, was a national catastrophe causing great economic turmoil. The global policy of damming and diverting lakes, rivers, and other waterways is changing the face of the world and our weather.

When phase one of the James Bay dam in Canada was opened, it caused a shift in the earth's crust, and over a million acres of fragile environment was permanently flooded. The damage we have done to water all over the earth and the problems of supplying adequate quantities of high-quality-drinking water are two of the biggest issues facing us as we move into the twenty-first century. Consider the distribution of water on earth.

The bulk of our water is in the oceans, ice caps and glaciers, and groundwater. Over 97% of the water on earth is salty and therefore unusable by us, and 90% of the fresh water is unavailable, being deep underground or frozen. "only about 0.0001 percent of fresh water is readily accessible. " We have managed to pollute most of it in some way, and especially high concentrations of poisons are being found at the polar ice caps, where they have been building up for many years.

Of the available fresh water on the earth, nearly one-quarter is in the lakes and rivers of Canada, which has 98,667 cubic meters per person, compared with the United States with 9,277 and Russia with 30,298 per capita. Sadly most of this fresh water is in the Great Lakes and their watershed, an area of land that has become contaminated with some of the most toxic chemicals known, including huge amounts of PCB (polychlorinated biphenyl).

Such are the problems of accessing fresh water that the city of Tampa, Florida, is looking to desalination of seawater as an option in supplying the ever increasing demand of that region. Jerry L Maxwell, a leading proponent of the desalination project and general manager of the Tampa Bay Water, was quoted in a front-page story in the new York times "We are where we are because of the travesty of development in Florida." The first problem is demographic. The area has seen a fivefold increase in population in the past fifty years.

The second is environmental: "depleted aquifers, dry wetlands  and fallen trees, all casualties of pumping water from the ground to supply rapidly growing communities, often carried out with little heed for the consequences." It is just this kind of situation that illustrates the complexity of managing water supplies. Water is life. The adult human body is about 60 to 70 percent water, depending on the amount of body fat; the approximate water content in various parts of our bodies breaks down as follows.

We lose around two and one half litres of water per day just sitting still. Activity and climate can increase this water loss dramatically. Racing-car drivers sweat out several litres in a single race. "Basically, each of us is a blob of water with enough macro-molecular thickening to give us some stiffness and to keep us from dribbling away."

Reference: Hydrosols The Next Aromatherapy : Suzanne Catty