"Thirst" is taken for granted.



(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.