It is important that families around the would have access to clean, healthy water. This should be a fundamental right of anyone and governments have the responsibility to protect the water supply from contamination and pollutants and to ensure that everyone has access to water from where they live.
This is an issue in third world countries and it is one of grave concern. In my state of Pennsylvania, hydraulic fracking is a new technique being employed to extract natural gas from the underlying rock. I have hear testimony from many people who have allowed fracking by energy companies on their land and how subsequently how their drinking water has become polluted. Their water has become polluted to the extent that cattle and other livestock are dying or being born with severe birth defects. This is a current concern in my state and lawmakers are scrambling to decide if they stand on the behalf of clean water and increased regulation or if they stand on the behalf of job creation-it is one or the other from their perspective.
I believe that it is important to protect our natural resources and to make sure that the environment is not degraded by our actions. I believe it is a simple problem of physics: that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. It can also be looked upon as a simple law of thermodynamics: that in a closed system everything tends to move toward equilibrium. It can also be seen in Buddhism, Christianity, and on and on…They are all the same principle, that what one does has consequences heaped back upon oneself in some way or another. It is a simple idea really, and it doesn’t take great minds to see that we need to take care of the living earth around us to have a sustainable future for our children and ourselves. It is a part of being a responsible person with a conscience.
According to water.org clean water statistics from around the world are staggering. 3.5 million people around the world each year die from a water related disease. 884 million people around the world do not have access to clean water. Women around the world spend about 200 million hours a day searching for clean water. The water and sanitation crisis claims more lives through disease than any war claims through guns. People living in the slums often pay 5-10 times more per liter of water than wealthy people living in the same city. And an American taking a five-minute shower uses more water than a typical person in a developing country slum uses in a whole day.
"In wealthy parts of the world, people turn on a faucet and out pours abundant, clean water. Yet nearly 900 million people in the world have no access to clean water, and 2.5 billion people have no safe way to dispose of human waste—many defecate in open fields or near the same rivers they drink from. Dirty water and lack of a toilet and proper hygiene kill 3.3 million people around the world annually, most of them children under age five. Here in southern Ethiopia, and in northern Kenya, a lack of rain over the past few years has made even dirty water elusive."
-Tina Rosenberg
From an article entitled The Burden of Thirst from National Geographic written by Tina Rosenberg, photos by Lynn Johnson
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