Clean Water Crisis

"For many of us, clean water is so plentiful and readily available that we rarely, if ever, pause to consider what life would be like without it." - Marcus Samuelsson

What can we say about water than haven't been said before? "It's important to our lives" would be the most cliche answer there is. But it would be a correct one. Water is a crucial factor in almost every aspect of our lives, or rather, of the lives of every living things on Earth. From the largest of biome, to the smallest of living cell, water is always there, sustaining life as it always do. Therefore, it's only logical that something as useful as water should be conserve for long-time usage.

However, that's not the case with us humans. If you can stop just for a moment and have a look at the video above, you would see how have people wasted water on a daily basis and the consequences behind. Also, corporations releases thousands of gallons of industrial wastes in streams and river every day, turning perfectly good water source into toxic streams of death. Wasting water, polluting water, we are literally destroying the thing that's keeping us alive everyday. Why do people do it? What's the result of this course of action? Who does it affect? And how can we stop it? That's what I'm going to talk about today.

Why do people waste water? In my opinion, it has to do with how human reacts to abundance. Whenever we have a lot of something to use, we don't usually worry about how much is left or how effectively we use it until we run low on it. If someone have a lot of time to do HW, he might wasted his time surfing the Internet until the last minute. Likewise, we don't usually think about how much water we are wasting because we have so much of it, or at least that's what we thought. If you want some water, you can just turn the tap and there it is. So because water is so easy to get in our daily lives, we are caught in this illusion of abundance, thinking that since water is so accessible, there must be a lot of it, so it's ok if we wasted a little bit. It's this illogical thinking that puts California in the position it's in today. (click here to read about the California drought)

What's the result of wasting and polluting water? There are 769 million people in the world who don't have access to clean water right now. That's one tenth of the entire human population. And then there's people who use water as if they have access to an infinite amount of it. But soon, as Californians have experienced, their water resource runs out, and they suffered from it. Water is such an important factor in our life, but because it's so easy to access, we sometimes forgot just how precious they truly are. Only 21% of Earth's water is drinkable, and that amount of water have are used by almost every living things on Earth. What if one day, we wasted our last drop and pollute our last river, what would happen then? I'll tell you what happen: every living thing will die.

How can we stop it? One might think the answer is simple and straightforward: Stop wasting and polluting water. But just saying that means nothing. People aren't going to stop wasting water, factories aren't going to stop polluting rivers, and companies aren't going to pay for water cleaning systems just because we said so. We have to do something to convince people that shortage in clean water is a serious problem, that wasting water is a luxury we can't afford and polluting water is a sin we can't recover from. So, if you truly think that shortage in clean water is a serious world problem, go out there and do what you can to stop people from wasting and polluting it.