Water, Water Everywhere...

Today is "Blog Action Day 2010". On this day, bloggers everywhere have committed to dedicating their posts to a designated topic we all voted on to discuss. This years topic is "Clean Water", as in billions of people in our world do not have access to water which is safe to drink. Unsafe drinking water and lack of sanitation kills more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. Unclean drinking water can incubate some pretty scary diseases, like E. coli, salmonella, cholera and hepatitis A, way worse stuff than what really bad cooking can do. Given that bouquet of bacteria, it's no surprise that water, or rather lack thereof, causes 42,000 deaths each week. So, this a pretty serious issue. The average American uses 159 gallons of water every day – more than 15 times the average person in the developing world. From showering and washing our hands to watering our lawns and washing our cars, Americans use a lot of water. To put things into perspective, the average five-minute shower will use about 10 gallons of water. I personally have NEVER taken a five minute shower, I am somewhat ashamed to admit - mine are generally 25+ minutes. But imagine stretching a measley 10 gallons of water to do all that we 'need' to do!

When you consider more than 40% of our country's rivers are too polluted to SWIM in, or support aquatic life, and 45% of our lakes are in the same condition, and that even now, wetlands are still being destroyed at an alarming rate, it's pretty amazing that we have ANY clean drinking water. But there is enormous cost to render water safe enough to drink. It is estimated that worldwide, pollution of the worlds waters costs the global economy over 12.8 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR! That's a lot of coin, no matter where you're from. Imagine what good could come from using that 12.8 billion for health and human welfare programs. If you want to know how you can help, visit water.org or follow their links for more in depth stuff. Or, for a really cool bit of technology for the environmentally conscious, you can download an iphone application which will allow you to calculate the 'water footprint' of your favorite foods at http://virtualwater.eu/ . I know this is a big departure from what I usually have to say here and I really appreciate you taking the time to read this. So now, I am going to get a big tall glass of water and reflect on how lucky I am that I can just open a tap to get some!