Our Drinkable Water Supply Is Vanishing

[babylonsister]

Our Drinkable Water Supply Is Vanishing

By Tara Lohan, AlterNet. Posted October 11, 2007.

Thanks to global warming, pollution, population growth, and privatization, we are teetering on the edge of a global crisis.


Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, the Hungarian biochemist and Nobel Prize winner for medicine once said, "Water is life's matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water."

We depend on water for survival. It circulates through our bodies and the land, replenishing nutrients and carrying away waste. It is passed down like stories over generations -- from ice-capped mountains to rivers to oceans.

Historically water has been a facet of ritual, a place of gathering and the backbone of community.

But times have changed. "In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water has become the victim of his indifference," Rachel Carson wrote.

As a result, today, 35 years since the passage of the Clean Water Act, we find ourselves are teetering on the edge of a global crisis that is being exacerbated by climate change, which is shrinking glaciers and raising sea levels.

We are faced with thoughtless development that paves flood plains and destroys wetlands; dams that displace native people and scar watersheds; unchecked industrial growth that pollutes water sources; and rising rates of consumption that nature can't match. Increasingly, we are also threatened by the wave of privatization that is sweeping across the world, turning water from a precious public resource into a commodity for economic gain.

more...

http://alternet.org/environment/64948/

[glowing]

1. Privatization is a huge pull on that resource.... Personally, I think anyone

taking natural resources from American land ought to be paying a usage fee back to us.

[Rydz777]

2. Good post. This is a subject that should remain front and

center. I happen to live in an area that gets over 40 inches of rainfall a year, but we have recklessly built a lot of large population centers in our deserts. We have considered water to be an inexhaustible resource, and it is not.

China faces a major water crisis, and that of course is another subject - except that since China is the source of every product we buy, that may affect us adversely as well.

[raccoon]

3. You got that right, "but we have recklessly built a lot of large population centers in our deserts."

Except I'd change that to, "DEVELOPERS have recklessly built..."

I live in an area which usually gets lots of rainfall (SC). I thought lack of water was the Western states' problem, not ours. However, the Southeast has been experiencing a drought. Who knows how that will play out...

[Highway61]

4. Randi Rhodes often brings this up

Down the road there will be wars not over oil...but water.

[RestoreGore]

5. This is the environmental challenge of our time

http://water-is-life.blogspot.com
my blog.


And we are simply not paying enough attention to it.