… or, more accurately, harvesting the fog. Sami Grover @ Treehugger.com has the lowdown on how farmers finally take the tease out of fog:
If you live halfway up a mountain in rural Peru, and if you have no access to running water, farming can be a difficult task. In a town called Villa Lourdes, villagers receive deliveries of fresh drinking water three times a week from Lima—and they used to have to schlep a good deal of that water up the hill to irrigate their crops. That’s until a different, all together more elegant solution presented itself:
Fog.
Using ‘Atrapanieblas’—large nets erected on the hillside—farmers like Maria Teresa Avalos Cucho take advantage of the daily fog to capture condensation, harvesting between 200 and 400 liters a day from each panel—which is then stored in tanks, and gravity-fed to the crops below.
Which is fascinating and certainly worthy of approbation, and yet I have one niggling little thought: what is the unexpected side effect? What depends on the fog and now is thirsting after something for itself? I’m certainly not condemning the effort, for as Sami points out, the alternative is to truck the water in – or abandon the village. But this is a change in an interconnected system, and it’s not clear to me whether humans are an insignificant part of this system – or a big part that may, through this innovative solution, be causing an even bigger problem down the line.
We could draw analogies with other technologies, such as irrigation, which is a wonderful idea when our impact is relatively small – but now we reroute entire rivers to feed formerly arid valleys, leaving other parts of our own country dry and gasping, damaging eco-systems and perhaps ourselves. It’s not so much a question of scalability as it is fitting in: how can we be part of this world without overwhelming it and, ultimately, cutting our own throats?
