Sometimes I feel like no matter how much text I spew out about climate change and damage to the environment I just can't get the point across that we really are affecting our planet. So I've gathered a few visuals to do the explaining, you can't argue with this.
Last week I put together a report on the worlds water situation here. This week even more news concerning water shortages as Egypt reports that 6% of their population goes without clean drinking water daily. And new reports shows sewage coming through the water pipes as poor care has been taken with their water delivery infrastructure.
Everyday I wade through hundreds of news articles about the harm we are causing through carbon emissions and unregulated pollution. Companies are racing to find a way to scrub power plants, create low emissions vehicles, and develop home-use green products. While these are all very necessary and progressive ideas, one area of conservation gets little attention, and it may be the one resource we need to protect the most; safe, clean drinking water. Of all the water on Earth only 0.7672% makes up the total pool from which we can take our drinking water. That's only 2,548,339 cubic miles of water (which sounds like a big number but it isn't)!
The small sphere on the left represents ALL water found on planet Earth. Now imagine taking less than 1% from that sphere and that is all the water that is available for drinking (and we can't create water so this is a fixed number).
So are we really in that much trouble? I know when I turn my faucet on water will continue to flow indefinitely until I turn it off. If there was such a shortage surely the government would restrict my water usage, right?
Unfortunately no, the government has done little to mitigate our dwindling water supplies and doesn't look to be doing anything about it in the future. Large factories are dumping megatonnes of pollution a year into our rivers and lakes and it is starting to take a toll. Just this week reports about hormone and drug levels in public drinking water have raised the alarm to our water quality. Fish, a great biomarker for effects of water pollution, are now being born hermaphrodites in our polluted rivers and lakes. We are all concerned about genetic manipulation in the lab, but look out in nature and we are doing much worse. All of the intersexed fish have been traced back to pollution from our industry byproducts.
And pollution isn't the only problem in our water, we just plain aren't conserving enough. Atlanta may run dry in the next 10 years and other nations around the world are beginning to struggle as well. Ghana is struggling with not only a water shortage, but also with pollution in the few safe drinking reservoirs the country has. The government has taken some blame but has also rightly put the responsibility to conserve back on the citizens.
China recently doubled its drinking water shortage statistics from 2.43 million to 5.9 million people who do not have access to clean drinking water. From Feb 23 to 28 the number of livestock without sufficient drinking water jumped from 1.89 million to 5.67 million. These are unbelievably high numbers and only highlight the growing worldwide trend.
Pakistan's hydroelectric reservoirs are drying up and several are running at "dead level". Expanding nuclear power seems to be the only solution for Pakistan at this late stage.
On a brighter note, North Carolina Governor Mike Easley has started a three-pronged attack to alleviate water shortages and pollution problems in his state. He says "North Carolinians should understand that the days when water could be used without an eye on the meter and without repercussions for wasting it are over."
Maybe I just worry too much about the water supply (to Czechs water pollution is the biggest issue, go motherland!, but that fact is that we are running out of clean water and soon we may have to turn to the ocean to provide us with clean water. The Netherlands have already started to experiment with getting clean water from the ocean by using some innovative windmill technology. This is all fine, but pollution reduction and conservation must work hand in hand if we are to have clean, CHEAP drinking water for decades to come.
Drinking water, its something so inconspicuous that most of us take it for granted. If you think about it, there's nothing stopping you from turning on every faucet in your house and leaving them on while you go to work (besides the cost). Our ease of access to clean, public drinking water has diminished our concern for the quality of water as well as the planning and management of future water use.
Of utmost importance to those studying our water supply is the protection from point source and non-point source pollution and contamination. Every year we are dumping more and more hazardous or foreign materials into the water table and open reservoir system. This does not bode well for our future and here's why.
Water, just like oil, has a finite supply. There is the same amount of water on Earth now as when it was formed (you may drink water the Neanderthals drank). Freshwater, safe for drinking, has a much smaller supply. Of all water on the Earth 0.76% can be found as fresh groundwater, 0.007% is found as freshwater lakes, and 0.0002% is found in rivers. So our total pool for drinking water is only 0.7672% of all water found on Earth. That's only 2,548,339 cubic miles of water! And this supply is only getting smaller as it takes about 100 years for a water molecule to get from the ocean to a freshwater source. In the US we have 25 states under drought conditions, with 9 suffering from extreme to exceptional drought. Atlanta is going to have their wakeup call before anyone else as its been predicted their reservoir system will be drained in 10 years if rainfall doesn't increase or a more progressive management system isn't utilized.
So yeah the supply of drinking water is a small percentage of total water on the Earth, but who cares? Well I do for one, and here's a few reasons why.
Rocky Mountain National Park reports trout in 5 lakes have both male and female sex organs. These fish have never had a sex determination naturally that ended in hermaphrodites and the cause of this has been pinned on pollution in the water altering endocrine function in the fish. Fish are great biomarkers for the health of water reservoirs because they are constantly exposed to all contaminants and are an early warning sign of what water can do to us.
China recently has had great problems as it becomes industrialized as large plants are dumping toxic chemicals into their river systems (see photo above). Government oversight has been slow to respond to the threats and many people have lost access to public drinking water. In fact, China has 2 of the top 10 polluted places on Earth. Around Tianying the birth defect rate is so high that it passes stroke as the leading cause of morbidity and mortality. Just last month over 60,000 Chinese citizens had to rely on bottled water for their needs due to a massive runoff of a coal plant. And this isn't the first time this has happened in China, in November 2005 a spill of cancer-causing chemicals, including benzene, forced the government to cut off drinking water to 3.8 million people for 5 days.
Another aspect of all of this dumping is that all of the waterways in the world are connected. Throughout the water cycle a molecule will travel from ocean to precipitation to groundwater to rivers, and the cycle has no concern for national or international borders. Russia has had to deal with 3 large chemical spills in China that were washed into Russian territory by rainfall and river runoff.
But what about Texas?
The red areas of this map indicate polluted waters in Texas. It comes out to about 30% of surface water which is contaminated by some sort of pollutant. This could be bacterial blooms, toxins, heavy metals, or plastic based by-products. We need to stand up and protect our waterways before we are in a situation like Georgia.
A report by US Pirg, Troubled Waters, found that 318, or about 53 percent, of the state's major industrial and wastewater plants failed Clean Water Act standards in at least one of 12 reporting periods in 2005.
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