Monday, December 17, 2012
What you can do to help water, and your future self/generations!
I gave you the information on what's being under reported in this world, now is the time to act upon it and tell everyone you know. Soon we won't have enough water brush our teeth!
But first, I just want to let you know that you are not alone, there are many people who have already taken action into bettering our world, saving our water, and our people!
But first, I just want to let you know that you are not alone, there are many people who have already taken action into bettering our world, saving our water, and our people!
- EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) have resulted in agreements in Cleveland, Ohio and St. Louis, MO to improve their sewer systems and flooded waterways.
- Urban Waters, (a community of environmental scientists, analysts, engineers and policymakers developing creative and sustainable solutions to restore and protect urban waterways) urged Political leaders in cities to restore their piping infrastructure and prevent toxic chemicals from contaminating our water.
- Citizens just like you around the world have also resulted to taking quicker showers, recycling and keeping resuable cups to drink water out of instead of bottles; a little change makes a BIG difference!
Hey, check out this Water Footprint Game from National Geographic to see how much water you use, and what else you can do to save water for everyone around the world! Also, Visit Water.org to find people like you making a difference :)
Don't let our world dry out, it's the only one we have!
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| Photo Taken From http://www.johnlund.com/page.asp?ID=1411 |
Here are some disturbing facts about our Water Crisis.
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| Photo Taken From http://www.un.org/works/i/TZ31_267_issue.jpg |
- Global Water Shortage affects 1 in 3 people world wide.
- 3.4 million people each year die from water related diseases- that's almost the entire city of Los Angeles!
- 780 million people lack access to clean water- thats more than 2 and a half times the United States population!
- An American taking a five-minute shower uses more water than the average person in a developing country slum uses for an entire day.
- Out of the 2.5% of fresh water sources on the earth, only .5% clean drinkable water.
- Many major rivers are running dry – Colorado, Ganges, Indus, Rio Grande and Yellow – are so over-tapped that they now run dry for part of the year.
- Freshwater wetland has shrunk by about half worldwide.
- The average person in the developing world uses 10 litres of water every day for their drinking, washing and cooking.
- It takes at least 2,000 litres to produce enough food for one person for one day.
- It takes 2,400 litres to produce a hamburger and 11,000 litres to make a pair of jeans, including the water needed to grow the cotton.
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| Photo Taken From http://inthewild.joby.com/img/uploads/photos/THIRSTY.jpg |
So, what's the big deal?
Well, the big deal of my last informational post was to help you build some knowledge about the current "ecological water peak" as ecologists on Before It's News call it. If you don't know what the ecological water peak is, you might find Global Water Crisis easier to understand. The crisis is the shortage of water all around the world, due to the over consumption of it as well as the contamination of it. Yes, there are cleaning reservoirs that filter out the water and recycle it to various places in America, but that's not the case around the world. Most of the water in some countries are being dried up due to massive droughts happening throughout the past decade. In desert-like places such as Saudi Arabia, ground water aquifiers are beginning to become contaminated and dried up with salt, and the last rescources of water they have are going to irrigation. Saudi Arabia does contain a desalination plant, that separates salt from saltwater creating fresh water; the only downside is that it uses so much water to provde energy to the plant. So for them it is a lose-lose situation, and because of that they had to shut down wheat production in which so many people lost their jobs as well as food; adding on to having no water.
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| Photo Taken From http://www.arabnews.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/galleryformatter_slide/Grim-situation.jpg |
Even in American states such as California and Texas are experiencing droughts, and all our "available" water is being contaminated with pharmesuticals, anti-biotics, and hormones so it's becoming more and more dangerous to consume The world is going under a water crisis, the primary neccesity of survival.
So back to my first post on us taking "thirst" for granted; the only water we have left, we are contaminating it with trash, sewage, and medical disposals. Before you know it, we'll be out of clean water and filled with diseases and most likely die from it.
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| Photo Taken From http://beforeitsnews.com/economics-and-politics/2012/12/water-shortage-imminent-scientists-terrified-us-fresh-water-supplies-drying-up-2447324.html |
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| Photo Taken From http://digdeepwater.org/howtohelp.html |
Attributions-
http://water.org/water-crisis/water-facts/water/
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2011/08/10/chinas-growing-water-crisis/
http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2011/09/14/water-oil-and-food-%e2%80%93-a-crisis-for-saudi-arabia-and-the-world/
"Thirst" is taken for granted.
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| (Image used from http://lifeofearth.org/environment/overpopulation |
From the beginning of the industrial revolution, human kind has had an immense effect on the world's ecosystem. Yes, there is awareness in society today of the damage of rainforests, and oceans, but have you heard anything about our drinking water? Americans every single day, drink from enough water bottles to circle the entire equator with the bottles stacked to the end. In a single week, those bottles could reach to the moon (155,400 miles)! For a better example to imagine, a single American citizen on average consumes enough water to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool in one year! That's a lot of water for just one person, and how and where do we even get all that water?
You're probably thinking that 75% of the world is filled with water, so that's plenty to drink for ages, right? You're wrong. Only 2.5% of the world mass amount of waters are actually drinkable, and our only resources of it are depleting and being misused due to the obscene requests of society today. Decades before the industrial revolution, we always treated our resources like gold because it was very difficult to get and we didn't know the next time when we would find it again. Now that we have access and knowledge to about everything on this planet, we take advantage of it.
So, what's the point of me saying all this? Well, there is frequent use and demand of water all around the world, we use it to feed crops, power cities, and even brush our teeth. Water has to do with every day life. But, with the population of the world increasing, more and more people are taking showers, growing crops, and cities are requiring more power lines to fit the needs of the inhabitants of this earth. So back to the question, where are we getting all this water from to tend to all these needs? The answers are surface areas and ground areas (aquifiers). Surface areas such as lakes, streams and rivers are drawn for fresh water; but that has been going on from the beginning of time. Since the creation of fossil fuel energy, which allowed the pumping of water from deeper depths of ground water supply, something we haven't had access to before, humanity has increasingly lived beyond the margins of its renewable water supply. Also, now that we have the technology to drain surface water areas without it getting the chance to replenish itself from rain-there is nothing to evaporate. This is a serious problem.
About two-thirds of the earth's drinkable water is in glaciers or ice-caps, the rest are in the places I have just mentioned. While surface waters are renewable due to the process of the water cycle, the ground surfaces are not renewable. With our technological advantages, we are pumping underground water sources at an extremely fast rate, and we are coming closer and closer to the extinction of fresh ground water. The same goes for surface water. Surface water is created by the years of melting of glaciers, ice-caps and snow. The faster we take out water, the longer it takes to replenish itself-if there's anything left to replenish, that is.
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