So What?
We all need water. A human being can’t go three days without drinking any water. Animals need water. Plants need water. Most things that are living need water. But the thing is, water is not a resource that we can just always have. We have to work hard to keep enough water for everybody. Water may seem like a never-ending resource, something that would always be there, but think of it like this. 70% of the earth is made up of water. Of that, about 3% of that is fresh water, and 1% of that fresh water is accessible.
So, yeah, water isn’t something that’s going to last forever, so we have to conserve it. But we also have to do more than conserving it. Conserving water is only the first step. Taking shorter showers, turning the water off when you’re brushing your teeth and flushing the toilet only as much as you have to are all good things. But in the world we live in, the water we conserve may not actually stay drinkable for long. The chemicals we have in our shampoo, nail polish, gasoline and more are seeping into our water through a very simple and possibly easy to prevent process.
How Does Our Water Get Polluted?
First, you don’t clean up after yourself. All around us is waste on the ground: you’ve seen it. The gasoline in puddles. The soda cans on the ground. The dropped things we don’t bother to pick up. The dog poop that we must have missed. Even the pesticides that are on crops and gardens and lawns. At the time, these things seem trivial — you can put them off until tomorrow, say it won’t do any damage overnight, you’ll do it later. But what if it rains? Where will all that stuff go? What if it’s not there in the morning?
I’ll tell you. It washed away. It slipped over the fields, ran into the sewers, got into the water.
Some of those things have very dangerous chemicals. They get pushed into our water, and they poison it. Some of these things are exposed to us at the tap, and some of these things are removed. But none of these things are safe. They harm us, and try as we might to conserve water, all those efforts will go to waste if we poison it, if we pollute it.
How Can We Keep Our Water From Being Polluted?
It’s actually very simple, though you may not believe it. All you have to do is pick up after yourself. Don’t use pesticides. Don’t procrastinate and tell yourself you’ll do it tomorrow. (And this is coming from one of the biggest procrastinators to roam the earth, so you have to know it’s important.) Don’t be like Annie and say, “Tomorrow, tomorrow, I’ll do it, tomorrow, that’s only a day away!” There are other steps you can take, too. You can make sure you’re buying things that don’t really have chemicals. Don’t litter. Pick up other people’s litter. Protest coating things in harmful chemicals.
And, so we can have that water to potentially poison, you should conserve water. Conserve conserve conserve. We don’t want to waste water, and we don’t want to waste the water we refrained from wasting. It’s like stopping an algebraic equation after you’ve narrowed it down to 6 = 2x. You still need to divide by two to make it 3 = x. We don’t want to stop trying to have enough to drink just by conserving. We also have to do that little extra step of dividing so that we can solve it, get an A+, and be happy. Oh, yeah, and drink enough, too.
section, as everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I repeat, this is not the view of the entire blog, but only one member of the staff.
