Drinking Water

After breathable air, the next most urgent requirement for human life is drinkable water.

Unfortunately, though, clean water just isn’t currently available to a large proportion of the human population. Instead, huge numbers of people drink, cook and bathe in water containing such noxious components as Giardia, cholera, heavy metals, and even worse. It has been estimated that from about 2 million to 5 million people worldwide die each year from water-related diseases.

Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter has been active in the fight against infestation by Guinea worm, a parasite whose larvae are found in stagnant water in many African countries. After entering a human’s digestive system, the worms can grow up to three feet long, and then emerge painfully by boring out through one’s skin. Such horrors should no longer be part of human life, especially considering that large numbers of those affected are children.

To this end, the Carter Center and other organizations have distributed millions of nylon “pipe filters” to Africans. When water is sucked through such a filter, even from a puddle on the ground, the Guinea worm larvae are filtered out. Thanks to efforts such as these, according to cartercenter.org, the number of Guinea worm (dracunculiasis) cases had been reduced by 99 percent worldwide in 2003.

And in the not-too-distant future, clean fresh water itself is likely to become a rather expensive commodity. Indeed, fresh water represents less than half of one percent of the world’s total water stock according to "Water as Commodity – The Wrong Prescription" by Maud Barlow, in Backgrounder, Summer 2001, Vol. 7, No. 3. Being a rare commodity, drinkable water is in serious danger of being monopolized by big business interests, to the likely detriment of “average” people everywhere. In fact, the same article also stated that the 10th Stockholm Water Symposium determined “that by the year 2025, as much as two-thirds of the world's population will be living with water shortages or absolute water scarcity.”

Water, then, is too valuable a commodity to be hoarded by corporate interests.

And an immediate example of the commercial value of water can even be seen by merely glancing at the prices of bottled drinking water on the shelves of stores all over the U.S., a country where tap water is almost universally safe to drink. Some brands are more expensive volume-wise than gasoline, and yet people buy them without blinking an eye!

Moreover, in ancient Hawaii for example, the possession of fresh water was considered a form of wealth. On an island chain (essentially the most isolated in the world) surrounded by thousands of miles of nothing but undrinkable salt water, that’s not hard to understand. And especially with the current trend of population growth there and elsewhere, water is likely to once again become a form of wealth.

But the new, clean forms of electrical power generation may promise the possibility of desalination as a means of providing bountiful fresh water for areas near the sea. However, there must logically be a limit even to that – after all, even with the vastness of the oceans, there must eventually be a point at which no more water can be removed from them without causing some kind of ecological harm. So the waste of water, then, must soon be realized to be an insult against nature itself.

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