"Water is Life" by Barbara Kingsolver

Dozens of them hurtled up from the grass ahead of our feet, launching themselves, white-bellied, in bouncing arcs, as if we’d been caught in a downpour of amphibians. It seemed to mark the dawning of some new aqueous age.

On another day we met a snapping turtle in his primordial olive drab armor.

The little, nameless creek tumbling through our hollow holds us in thrall.

Before we came to southern Appalachia, we lived for years in Arizona, where a permanent runnel of that size would merit a nature preserve.

Cities there function like space stations, importing every ounce of fresh water from distant rivers or fossil aquifers.

Retirees from rainier climes irrigate green lawns that impersonate the grasslands they left behind.

Water is life. It’s the briny broth of our origins, the pounding circulatory system of the world, a precarious molecular edge on which we survive.

It makes up two-thirds of our bodies, just like the map of the world; our vital fluids are saline, like the ocean.

We’ve lately raised the Earth’s average temperature by .74°C (1.3°F), a number that sounds inconsequential. But these words do not: flood, drought, hurricane, rising sea levels, bursting levees.

Shifting rain patterns flood some regions and dry up others as nature demonstrates a grave physics lesson: Hot air holds more water molecules than cold.

In arid places the same physics amplify evaporation and drought, visible in the dust-dry farms of the Murray-Darling River Basin in Australia.

In arid places the same physics amplify evaporation and drought, visible in the dust-dry farms of the Murray-Darling River Basin in Australia.

Last summer brought us a string of floods that left tomatoes blighted on the vine and our farmers needing disaster relief for the third consecutive year.

The past decade has brought us more extreme storms than ever before, of the kind that dump many inches in a day, laying down crops and utility poles and great sodden oaks whose roots cannot find purchase in the saturated ground.

When the Earth seems to raise its own voice to the pitch of a gale, have we the ears to listen?