It’s common practice to use business or banking metaphors when discussing the human use of water; in both cases, the central idea is to exert control, to manage. In its natural state, after all, water tends to be as unpredictable as booms and busts. It arrives as rain or snow, melts, runs into streams or seeps into the ground, floods, evaporates. Through enormous effort and expense, people have been able to corral that irregularity into something that can be relied on, mostly. You assume that your kitchen faucet will run whether or not it has rained recently, just as you expect you can tap ... Read More