Water is a life giving substance! Everyone knows that life cannot exit apart from the presence of clean, liquid water. People are able to live weeks without food but merely days without water. Recently NASA bombed the surface of the moon in hopes of detecting the presence of water, for future colonization will be virtually impossible without finding a source of it.
The earth contains plenty of water for us all. If we divide the total 326 million trillion gallons of water on earth by the current population, 5.8 billion, we see we have 56 billion gallons apiece. For sanitation, bathing, and cooking needs, the average person in the world has a daily requirement of about 13.2 gallons of water. Thus we have enough water down here to last each of us over 11 million years (not counting population growth)! And that doesn’t take into consideration its wonderful ability to be recycled.
Of course, the problem is that not all (or even most) of this water is useable in its present form. Ninety-eight percent of the water on the planet is ocean salt water. About 2% of the planet’s water is fresh, but 1.6% is locked up in the polar ice caps and glaciers. Another 0.36% is locked underground in aquifers and wells. A mere trifle, just .036% of the planet’s total water supply, is found in fresh water lakes and rivers. That still provides 392 million gallons for each of us. The sobering fact is that only about 0.007% of all water on earth (and less than 1% of the world’s fresh water) is accessible for direct human use.
Another problem is that the available useable water is not distributed evenly to the population. The average person living in a slum in a developing country uses in a whole day about the same amount of water that an American uses taking a five-minute shower. Nearly one billion people lack access to safe water. More precisely 884 million people lack access to safe water supplies, approximately one in eight people. That amounts to about one in eight people. Further, two and a half billion do not have access to improved sanitation, which means they are unable or don’t bother to separate drinking water from wastewater.
The lack of sanitary drinking water results in major health issues throughout the world. Perhaps half of the people in hospital beds at any one time in the world are sick because of a water related disease. As a result, a child dies from a water-related disease every 15-20 seconds in the world, usually from diarrhea. That totals a staggering 1.4 million children each year. The children in these environments often carry 1,000 parasitic worms in their bodies because of stagnant water supplies. In all, unsafe drinking water, inadequate sanitation, or insufficient hygiene account for 88% of diarrhea cases worldwide.
Poor water results not only in deaths, but also in more crime, more disease, increase in birth defects, and decreased ability to do well in school, among other things. In short, general economic decline is the result. An investment in pure water for a people, or in desalination of the sea, is an investment with big returns. It is estimated that on average, every US dollar invested in water and sanitation provides an economic return of eight US dollars.
Some want the western civilization to feel guilty for taking a shower or watering their lawns. This reasoning is flawed. Lowering our living standard in use of water only borrows their problems. The main reason America has sufficient good, clean water is that we have learned where to get it and how to preserve it. We shouldn’t feel guilty; we should be more aware of our need to be good stewards of it, and we should be more willing to share our technology with others. When our water systems are conserved and maintained, America will continue to set a high standard for others to follow.
But what if you are in an area where suitable water is difficult to obtain. You would do well to have an activated charcoal portable water filter. The best line of activated charcoal filter we are aware of is the Berkey Filters. Whether you choose their Imperial Berkey or another model, each set of filters they ship with can be re-cleaned to purify up to 6,000 gallons of water.
Tags: global water crisis, water crisis, water shortage, world water crisis