Running Out of Water; Running Out of Time

{Learning Reflection 1}

This summer I spent a lot of time near the ocean.

I left my landlocked home in Fort Worth, Texas and travelled with my family to visit our relatives in Singapore, Malaysia, and Australia.  Coming from a place where the closest body of water is the Trinity River and a number of manmade lakes, it was easy to recognize the constant presence of nearby rivers and the immensity of the nearby ocean.

But while I felt especially surrounded by a seemingly endless supply of water with the ocean and seas make up most of the water on the planet at 96.5%, it is shocking to realize that 99% of all water on Earth is unusable by humans.  Realizing that we have a small supply of usable water leads to a realization of how much water is wasted.  The impending, invisible water crisis is what Fishman refers to as water’s “revenge” on us in his book The Big Thirst.  With one of every six gallons of water pumped into American water pipes leaking away before reaching its destination, it’s easy to see that water is often being depleted for no reason.

For some American cities, the water crisis has already made a huge impact on the lives of citizens.  Las Vegas, anticipating the depletion of water supply, made changes necessary to conserve water by treating and recycling water, working with businesses, and implementing government programs.  Because of their efforts to decrease water usage, Las Vegas is able to sustain its population and economy.  It remains an oasis in a desert.

Another shocking number on display in the Rees-Jones hallway is 768,000,000 people who don’t have access to clean drinking water.  The fact that water depletion is a local crisis makes it harder for me to comprehend the reality that so many lack access to clean water.  To me, water has always been easily accessible, cheap if not free, and clean.  But for 768,000,000 people across the world, this is not the case, and it makes me feel helpless in my little bubble of Fort Worth.

While so many people go without water, Americans use an average of 1,400 gallons of water per capita in the United States.  It’s so easy to take things for granted that we receive without question in the U.S.  One thing that I learned from my trip overseas this summer is that many people wish that they lived in the U.S. because of the job opportunities we have.  This nation is still the Land of Opportunity. 

We also take something so simple as water for granted.  Maybe this is most evident in Fishman’s point about how we are experts on water without really knowing anything about it.  We can’t go a day without water, we know the exact temperature of water we want our showers to be and we know exactly how a cold refreshing sip of water will taste, we are even mostly made of water, but what do we know about the origin of water outside of the water cycle we learned about in 5^th grade?  The Earth’s oceans are evaporating 13 trillion gallons of water each hour and the United States use 410 billion gallons of water each 24 hours. 

With the world’s exponentially increasing population, water will become an even more limited resource.  The projection displayed in Rees-Jones predicts that by the year 2045, the global population will reach over 9 billion people.  That is 2 billion more people than we have today in just over 30 years.  If we are going to save our water for not only the future population, but also for the 768,000,000 currently without clean water, we need to start anticipating the inevitable water crisis before it is too late