Water, water everywhere...but...

21st Century challenge: Access to clean, affordable water

It's true that Earth is the water planet, with the majority of the planet's surface covered by this wonderful liquid. A challenge for the human family is that only 3 percent of this widespread water is fresh water (the rest is in the oceans), and 69 percent of that is locked up as ice in the polar regions or in glaciers. Of the 31 percent of fresh water remaining, the vast majority of this is stored underground in the soil or aquifers, with only .3% of all freshwater found in lakes, swamps, or streams. Wherever it is, earth's wet wonder is facing problems.

• Global warming is melting mountain glaciers all around the world. About half of the world's people depend on snow melt from these glaciers for dry-season water supply.
• Climate change is also affecting rainfall patterns, drenching some areas with more rain than ever, while creating some 50,000 square miles of new desert every year, threatening the livelihood of 135 million people in 100 countries—and likely to create 200 million environmental refugees by 2060.
• 1.1 billion people in the world already don't have ready access to clean water; 3000 children die every day from causes related to impure water. Meanwhile, the richer nations will spend $100 billion this year on bottled water they don't really need. (When Coke-owned Dasani put in a water bottling plant in India, 50 nearby villages soon found their wells going dry.)
• In the US, we're over-pumping our aquifers (underground reservoirs of water) by 3.2 billion gallons a day.
• Meat consumption is a leading cause of aquifer depletion, as it can take 3000 gallons of irrigated grain to produce 1 pound of beef.
• primarily due to agricultural run-off (farm waste and fertilizers) and burning fossil fuels, there are over 200 "dead zones" in the world's seas and oceans--places so oxygen-depleted that sea life cannot live there

AND THEN THERE'S BOTTLED WATER!

In the United States :

• We'll spend $16 billion this year on bottled water (the UN Millennium Goals ask for $15 billion a year to cut in half the number of people in the world who don't have clean water by 2015)
• We'll purchase 29 billion water bottles, requiring 17 million barrels of petroleum to produce—and throw away 85% of them (that's some 40 million a day—if laid end-to-end, that would stretch the 6000 miles from Chicago to Anchorage , Alaska …and back)
• The total fossil fuel footprint of our bottled water drinking problem, including importing the oil, making the bottles (takes half a bottle full of petroleum to make one bottle), shipping them (some come from Fiji—5000 miles away), sending them to the land fill (where it takes over 1000 years for them to decompose), or recycling them (40 percent of our recyclable plastic is shipped to Asia) comes to 50 million barrels of oil a year! That's enough to fuel 3 million cars!
• Meanwhile cities and towns spend $45 billion a year giving us some of the cleanest water in the world to drink!

  The NCP director computed the annual cost of drinking tap water from his spigot—at a quart a day (mostly for iced tea!), the total yearly cost was 90 cents…less than the cost of a single serving of bottled water—and the average US'er drinks 30 gallons of the stuff a year. And don't tell anybody, but almost half of bottled water is fancied-up tap water!

Want to keep the water flowing? Here are some ideas:

• Think outside the Bottle! Take the pledge to drink from the faucet and get others around you to do the same http://www.thinkoutsidethebottle.org/
• Stuff – consuming stuff less saves water (making a car=100,000 gallons; producing 1 gallon gas=18 gallons; 12 ounces soda=60 ounces of water; one pound paper=10 pounds water)
• Stuff II – recycling paper, aluminum, plastic and glass saves up to 80% of the energy, water and pollution
• Diet – if US'ers cut meat consumption by half, we'd save 14 Colorado Rivers' worth of water and stop a lot of water pollution! (the average US meat-based diet requires 1350 gallons of water per day!)
• Diet II – eating organic foods keeps fertilizers out of waterways and uses 30-50% less energy
• Diet III – the most heavily irrigated crop in US? lawn grass, with 25 million acres under irrigation (golf courses use 4 billion gallons per day in US)
• Energy – conserving energy reduces acid rain and water usage (generating 1 kilowatt requires 2 gallons of water); global wrming is the greatest threat to the world's water supply—turn down the heat and get outta that car
• Conserve - preserving forests safeguards water cycles and water supplies l

Sources: The World's Water, Peter Gleick; Earth Under Fire , Gary Braasch; The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan; UNDP; State of the World 2004, World Watch Institute; Earth Policy Institute; United Nations Environment Programme