This is a view of where my local water comes from - the stunning Lake Eklutna just up behind our house in Chugiak. Through a combination of snow melt, forest and gravel filtering and only minimal engineering intervention we receive some of the purest water on the planet, all for @$30/month! A bargain! I almost feel bad using it to water the garden or wash my car as it seems a waste of an increasingly scarce global resource.
The "ecosystem services" provided by the Eklutna watershed are typical of most such services in that we often take them for granted or (even worse) under value and under appreciate them. Economists such as Bob Costanza have tried for a long time to estimate those values. Costanza and his colleagues estimated that all such services are valued at some $33 trillion c.f. $18 trillion for all global GNP - see http://www.uvm.edu/~gundiee/publications/Nature_Paper.pdf.
Those huge umbers can be hard to fathom and are subject to much debate among academics, but the "true value" of the drinking water we enjoy in Alaska really became apparent to me at Gimpo airport in Seoul the other day as I poured a paper cup of enhanced water. The photo below shows what it takes to replicate the purity of water that the Eklutna watershed provides "for free".
Think about it next time you fill a glass...
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