You might be thinking that water is abundant and there is no need to be worried. Why be worried about something that is obviously all around us and even falls from the sky?
Well that assumption is not true and being mindful of our very limited freshwater supply is necessary if people wish to continue having clean freshwater. On the path that the human race is heading down, we are using and polluting way more than what is being replenished. The current trend leads to a significantly lower amount of clean water that will be available. This is a huge problem because the amount that we have is already very low.
Clean water is an essential resource that is used in just about all production and daily life. It is simply a resource that we cannot live without and as a result it should be treated as such. Focusing on clean water, there is a lot that can be done all around the world. Within the USA and personally my state, CA, there are water pipes and systems that need to be replaced and set up to be more optimal as well as the runoff of chemicals, with known carcinogens being some of them, coming from industrial production and agricultural production. Water should be treated like liquid gold however it shouldn’t have the same rarity or price tag as gold.
The Earth is nearly 70% covered by water, only about 2.5% of that water is freshwater and less than 1% of that freshwater is easily accessible. Almost all of the Earth’s water is not safe for use and yet people continue to dump and pollute the limited freshwater resources that are safe and usable. Clean water is essential and yet we treat it like it is here for all taking and using it in any manner that we so wish. The world needs to be more mindful of their actions of making sure that they are not polluting the freshwater.
This is a major problem all over the world. It is prevalent in all countries, first and third world. I think it is safe to say that everyone agrees that water is critically important and that everyone needs this resource in order to live. Yet many people do not seem to care enough about others nor do they think about them and as a result clean water is becoming a resource that not everyone can have access to and it is very much so becoming a special privilege and something only the rich can afford and have access to.
The USA as a whole has problems with clean water. A huge majority of the water systems that are in place and being used today are outdated and not optimal, with many pipes being leaky and not clean. California, the state that I grew up in and still live in, have these issues. Clean water seems like it should be a much bigger priority than it is currently given. This might be due to many reasons such as poor regulations and enforcement of any regulations that have been put into place. On top of this, this issue does not appear to be as widely talked about being an issue when it very much so is.
There are many things that can be done to help this issue with big actions all the way down to super small and simple actions that if everyone would do then it would have a huge effect.
Image below is showing data from 2010 when EWG, a nonprofit organization, tested 35 major cities in the US and found nearly all of them to contain just one chemical that is a known carcinogen. This had raised concerned when looking at the nations regulated amount that is allowed to be in water is much higher than what is being proven to be healthy amounts. In following years, apparent watches of chemical and tests were done and somehow in the end the way that it is regulated seems to have not changed in anyway with still allowing insanely high levels of this single chemical in the tap water. Within this list, San Jose, my city that I currently live in and grew up in, was near the top of the list containing quite high numbers of particles in the water.
