People on the other hand, don t make adaptations to use less water. They use more. They find ways to extract more and more water. They, in effect, cheat the system by using their ingenuity, which sometimes seems to me like an unfortunate human evolutionary mistake. This is a mixed blessing.
People overwhelm nature s processes for purifying water.
Pollutants released upstream, for example, do not have a chance to be filtered or otherwise removed before the water is used for drinking downstream. People change the surface of the Earth by clear-cutting forests, which leads to flooding. People can sure be silly sometimes. Most of the water used in homes and business is for washing and flushing away undesired materials. Water is used to take away waste heat at power plants.