Problems
“Where there is no water, there is no life. Fresh water is the blood of our land, the nourishment of our forest and crops, the blue and shining beauty at the heart of our landscape. Religious bathe their children and their saved with water. Greek philosophers describe water as one of the four elements that made up the earth. The Kogi Indians of Columbia say that the three things at the beginning of life are mother, night and water. The Koyukon Indians of Alaska define cardinal directions not as north and south but as upstream and down.”
Where's the water at?!
-Regions that have an abundant supply of fresh water are: Alaska, Canada, Norway, Brazil, Russia, Austria and Malaysia among others.
-All of Florida's aquifers yield to more than 4.5 billion gallons of fresh water each day.
-The daily average of water that is dumped out of the Yukon River into the Bering straights is 145 billion gallons.
-More than three trillion gallons of water flows out of the mouth of the Mississippi River. This water flows through turbines everyday providing roughly 10 % of the nation’s electricity.
-Brazil holds the largest amount of water estimating to 20% of all global water followed by Soviet Union at 10.6%.
-Major lakes that have stored fresh water include: Russia’s Lake Baikal, Africa’s Lake Tanganyika, and Lake Superior on the U.S -Canadian border.
-Together the Great Lakes equals up to 27% of our global lake water volume.- All together the twenty eight major lakes account for 85 % of all lake water on the planet.
Current predicament
Our planets 3 % of fresh water supply is not running out. This number has been the same since the dinosaurs roamed the earth. Four trillion gallons of water falls on us daily in the form of precipitation.
The problem is the amount of clean fresh water we have available out of that 3% caused by the abuse, exploitation, over and misuse of this precious limited resource. Water has extraordinary qualities- its movement, its power, its uneven distribution and most crucial its central necessity to life.
Water picks up everything- oil, manure, lead, nitrogen, phosphorus and mixes into all surrounding ecosystems. Underground pipes carry sewage, industrial waste, and storm water to treatment plants. These treatment plants are the central disaster points when it rains because they overflow into streams that lead into rivers and so on.
Water also has the ability to carry some of our most serious diseases such as typhoid, dysentery, hepatitis- yet still look crystal clear in a glass.
“When the well's dry, we know the worth of water."
Benjamin Franklin quoted these words nearly two and a half centuries ago when American wells overflowed with water.
Water pollution is divided into two types:
1) point-source pollution- waste dumped by factories or sewage plants
2) nonpoint-source pollution- also known as polluted run-off this one being the most devastating.
-Statistics from the EPA lists that out of 18,770 impaired water sites, 529 are polluted from toxic point sources and the rest are polluted from run-off sources.
-Pollutant runoff is caused by a wide range of incidents; from chemicals, solvents and oil from your homes driveway or lawn to agricultural fields that spray herbicides and pesticides to factories that flush out water that is intoxicated with heavy metals.
Statistics
Residential
-In a 24 hour period, 329 million gallons of sewage is discharged into the ocean along the coast of our nation.
-U.S. homes use 25 billion gallons of water a day magically provided through underground hidden pipes in every city and town. The grandest is New York.
-The United States alone withdraws 339 billion gallons of water a day. We use between 2 and 4 times more water per person than European countries daily; 1,300 gallons person (Earth Day 1990 fact sheet).
Agriculture
-The use of irrigation in the U.S. equals up to 137 billion gallons of water a day. As well as the one billion pounds of weed and bug killers each year which eventually flow with the water into our water ways.
-California and Idaho use the highest amount of ground and surface water in the United States, predominately for crop irrigation.
-In California 78% of the water is used towards agriculture and 22% for urban needs.
-The Southwest has only 6% of US water but uses 31% of US water for just commercial farming and urban centers alone.
Industrial
-Coal, natural gas, oil, and uranium power plants need water for steam and cooling systems. These systems use 131 billion gallons of water a day, five times more than what people use for their homes.
-In the United States alone 396 gallons of water are used each year by the computer industry alone.
-Other factories pump out 25 billion gallons of water from their systems used.
The wildlife and habitats
-The transportation of bulk water to dry regions is a huge ecological threat because of its massive drainage and displacement
-Acid rain which gets less of the public’s attention is a major factor. Odd pollutants that are found in pristine areas are being tracked to thousands of miles away where they have been blown in from storms.
-In the west thousands of birds were killed from the concentration of selenium: a chemical naturally present in tiny quantities, but as piousness as high concentrations of arsenic leached from soil throw mass unefficiant irrigation.
-Using too much water prevents fish from spawning, destroys animal habitats and increases the percentage of pesticides and fertilizers in rivers. As in the case of Mono Lake, it can also increase salt content and destroy the food supply for millions of migrating birds.
-In 1975, 60,000 pounds of carp caught in and near Lake Pepin on the upper Mississippi had to be destroyed because of the presence of PCB's found in their flesh.
-When too much water is taken from underground reserves, it can cause the land to sink and irreparable damage to the underground aquifers. In Florida this problem became so bad that entire houses and cars were swallowed.
Privatization
The demand for water is doubling every 20 years, more than twice the rate of the human population growth. This is causing what is being called the “21 century war on water”.
The war is caused by a trillion-dollar industry to privatize water and is controlled by international trade and investments; mainly the WTO (World Trade Organization) and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). Following these agreements is a rule created by the WTO called GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services).The GATS is the decision maker for the privatization of basic services. The basic services are water, education, health care, Social Security, libraries and prisons. Within the water category alone there are hundreds of services- sewer services, fresh water services, treatment of waste water, nature and landscape protection, construction of water pipes, waterways, tankers, groundwater, irrigation, dams, bottled water and water transports and many more.
Water rights
Long-term agreements are made to secure water rights. For instance, Global H2O has a contract for 30 years and is exporting 18.2 million gallons of water per year from Sitka’s glacier water to China. When the water arrives in China it will be bottled in “free trade zones”, so that cheap labor can be used. Another example is a Canadian company called McCurdy that has applied for the right to export 13.7 billion gallons of water from Gisborne Lake, in Newfoundland pristine wilderness that will be shipped off to its new destination in the Middle East.
Transportation
The transportation of bulk water can be done a couple different ways. Studies have proven that draining bulk water from its natural habitat creates serious damage to its ecosystems, reduces biodiversity, dry up aquifers and natural underground water systems. Worst of all is the displacement of water to dessert regions. These regions were never meant to support large human populations; a perfect example being Tucson Arizona.
Below is a quick look at what methods are used for transporting water.
Pipeline Corridors
For century’s pipelines have been used for irrigation systems in agriculture, but with today’s technologies new pipelines are being used to transport bulk water across countries. Pipelines are transporting water from the Austrian Alps to Vienna, Scotland to England and from British Columbia across the U.S to the Mexican border. The King of pipelines is the Colonel Moammar Gadhafi’s, a multibillion-dollar underground mine from Lybia’s underground aquifers of the Kufra Basin in the Sahara Dessert. These pipelines transport as much as 24.7 billion cubic feet of water per year. This system can be an environmental disaster during its constructing stages depending on if the pipelines are under or above the ground. If it is underground it has similar steps like making a mine; digging and exploding the earth to make underground like tunnels for the pipelines to be placed in.
Supertankers
The supertankers that are used to transport water today are old oil tankers. The first supertanker shipment was in 1995; leased by Mitsubishi, the tanker carried millions of gallons of water from Alaska to Japan. Sitka Alaska has enough water to fill up a one million gallon tanker every day and that would only equal up to 10% of its current water usage. In Eklutna Alaska they have estimated its maximum export of water can be 30 million gallons per day! Canadian water specialist, Richard Bocking explains how these ships require bunker C fuel, which is the worst environmental grade oil used today. He also states “these huge tankers would wind their way through tortuous coastal waterways, maneuvering around islands and reefs in areas where no well-developed marine traffic management system exists”. He continues on how, “Pods of Killer whales move regularly through these waters”. He predicts along with other specialist that these tankers are setting themselves up for big horrible tragedy.
Grand Canals
All around the world there are canals being planned out, but the largest will eventually be found in North America. When these canals are built they change the natural flow of water to become more direct in order to move water from one place to the other. The most famous canal is being planned out called the GRAND Canal (The Great Recycling and Northern Development Canal) that will flow from east side of Canada south providing water throughout the U.S. Along with these grand canals come dikes, power plants, locks and smaller canals that flow into reservoir which then will get rerouted and delivered 167 miles southward to different regions in the mid-west through more canals; at a rate of 62,000 gallons a second. In China, the enormous Three Gorges Dam diverts water from the mighty Yangtze River to Beijing used mainly for industrial and commercial purposes. A network of tunnels 260 miles long are used to drain water along the way before it travels another 764 mile through a canal finally arriving in Beijing. A smaller scaled example of how this would cause an environmental disaster is if the Mississippi river flow was redirected and mutilated to provide water for Washington D.C.
Bottled water
The bottled water industry is the fastest growing and the least regulated system to transport water. *Bottle water companies pay no fee for the extraction of the water because of their private property right. They exploit farmers in rural communities and buy their water wells. Then, they flee the scene when there is no resource left. Since the 1970’s the annual volume of bottled water has exploded from 300 million gallons to 22.3 billion gallons in the year 2000.
Today, the world leader of the bottled water industry is Nestle. They own more then 68 brands of water such as: Perrier, Vittel and San Pellegrino, as well as most of the food found on shelves of supermarkets around the world. It is amazing how much profit the bottled water industry is making; as past chairman of Perrier states, “It struck me… that all you need to do is take the water out of the ground and then sell it for more than the price of wine, milk, or for that matter oil.” Following the bottled water trend is Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, and Danone whom are leading an accelerating future for bottled water. These companies use different names in different countries; mainly because of scandals they created and for their financial safety.
Most of the water that fills these bottles are no safer than tap water and in some cases has been detected to be worse selected countries. A study conducted in March, 1999 by the Natural Resources and Defense Council (NRDC) based out of the U.S, discovered that one third out of the 103 brands of bottled water contained high levels of contaminates, including traces of arsenic and E. coli.
posted by the guide @ 3:39 PM
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