We
get up in the mornings and turn on a faucet and water comes running out. How
often do we think about where it comes from and how much there is?
Our
bodies are strange things when it comes to nutrition, we can live several days
without food but we can survive only two days without water.
What
if we ran out of water? Think about it.
Most
of our lakes, rivers, and streams have been polluted to the point that it is
not safe to drink and the fish that live in them are not safe to drink.
For
centuries raw industrial waste has been dumped into waterways, raw sewage
joined it along the way. Things got so bad that at one time Lake Erie was
declared dead and the Cuyahoga River actually caught on fire.
Some
improvements have been made in the partial clean up of direct outlets of
industrial waste, however, the agency charged with enforcing the Clean Water Act
has neither the financial or manpower resources to monitor the polluters.
Cities
have done a better job of cleaning up the sewage before dumping it into
waterways. It is all too little too late and there are so many new threats that
before this century is over, there will be no safe drinking water available to households
anywhere in the world.
Every
year farmers and gardeners, and folks treating their lawns use tons of
fertilizer, insecticides, and herbicides. Not all is absorbed into the product
nor is it retained in the plot of ground where it has been applied. A large percentage
runs off into our waterways. There is no plant that cleans those items from the
water.
The
newest threat to our waters comes from drug pollution. There are several sources
including drugs used for farm animals that get into the water supply via animal
waste and run off. No treatment plant in the world is capable of cleaning out
the pharmaceutical drugs that people put into the water supply through our
waste or by the medications we flush down throw toilet.
Many
of our aquifers have been polluted or are in danger due to the sources
mentioned above and because of the many pipelines crisscrossing the country carrying
everything from crude oil to gasoline, and natural gas.
The
supply of water is dwindling because we are using more that nature is
replacing. In California today, many communities have been shut off from the
Central Valley Project. The drought continues to get worse as rain fall is at
the lowest level in over a century and the snow pack in the Sierra Nevada,
where the water for the Central Valley Project comes from, is less than
twenty-five percent of normal.
At
the same time, areas that have not yet faced severe shortages of water continue
to water their lawns and hobby gardens. Let faucets run when not necessary, and
fill swimming pools each year. Just flushing a toilet wastes, on average, six
gallons of water. Surly there is a more efficient use of water to wash away our
waste.
There
are a few large companies coming to our rescue. They are buying large chunks of
land that are located over fresh water supplies (aquifers) and drilling large
wells with the ability to pump water from any depth. Since many states have a law that basically that the guy with
the biggest pump gets the most water. So, while the water table is being
lowered and wells in the area are drying up, those few companies are pulling
the water from the ground, trucking it to a processing plant, bottling it and selling
it back to the same people that they just screwed. Company cost is about eleven
cents a pint that they sell to the customer for one to two dollars for the same
pint.
Do
you think it is time to start conserving the water we do have and cleaning up
what we can? There are many things we can start doing at once. More about that
another day. For today, just give our water problem some thought.
I
will write more about water in the coming days. I will keep you posted on what
may be in store for all of us someday soon.
For
information about what you can do right now, visit the following page:
http://www.nrdc.org/water/
PEACE
PEACE
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