Water Is Our Most Valuable Natural Resource

Pollution of a Diminishing Required Resource

It is not news that we are polluting our global water supply, we have been doing it for millennia. However, we are approaching 8 billion people on the planet, and the comment Mark Twain made about the value of land applies perhaps even more so to water: “they’re not making any more of it.” We are in an exponential phase of population growth on this planet. There are many more of us using a resource of fixed amount, so the relative amount available to each of us is shrinking daily.

Consider this population curve over the past 12,000 years. The data are uploaded from Wikipedia and are from the estimates at census.gov (archive.orgmirror) and are in the public domain.

The global population in 2021 is 7.8 billion and estimates for the year 2100 are between 10-13 billion. The rate of growth is shrinking slightly but remains a positive number and does not change the inevitable conclusion.

The problem illustrated in the graph applies not only to water but every natural resource on the planet. In some cases, we are managing the issue, as in food production. We now are feeding many more people using less land and fewer materials than a few decades ago. The same for housing in the developed world. We are learning that single-family dwelling, which is the norm in about 75% of the United States, is no longer sustainable and we are shifting to multiple family units and mixed housing plans. In each of these examples, we are making more use of our fixed amount of land but continue to deforest it and progressively make the planet uninhabitable as far as CO 2 balance is concerned.

Mark Twain’s comment still applies to water. It will require 28% more water in the year 2100, per individual, if we continue to consume at the present rate. If you turn that number around, it says that we must decrease our individual use by 28% by the end of the century to maintain our current usage per individual. If we continue to both use and pollute, then the amount per individual will decline even more rapidly as a function of the pollution which will increase as the population increases. We are dooming ourselves by our own actions.  

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates our drinking water quality and does It well.  But our lakes, oceans, and rivers still suffer enormous pollution. The Natural Resources Defense Council tells us that 80% of the world’s wastewater is dumped, largely untreated, back into the environment, polluting rivers, lakes, and oceans. This amounts to two million tons per day or over 600 million tons/year. In addition, 3 billion tons of garbage, most of it plastics, end up in the oceans every year. Plastics now visibly contaminate every ocean on the planet and actually have entered in our food chain through contamination of marine life. [See my earlier blogs on plastic contamination of our water.] Pesticides, fertilizer, and other chemicals on land enter into water and drainage runoff, thereby putting chemicals in our oceans and drinking sources. Additionally, abandoned U.S. mines continue to release pollutants into waterways. In Colorado alone, mines have polluted 2,300 kilometers of streams.

It is easy to salve our consciences by reminding ourselves that the oceans are enormous and cover 70% of the surface of the earth. There seems to be plenty of water. However, only 2.5% of the total water is freshwater and that is the important number for us. When we dump sewage and waste into our freshwater streams, rivers, and lakes, we are dumping it directly into our drinking water supply.

Here are a few relevant facts:

·      About 70% of industrial waste is dumped into our surface water.

·      About 80% of water pollution is caused by domestic sewage.

·      More than 3 billion tons of garbage, mostly plastic, enter the oceans every year.

·      Contaminated water is the main cause of many transmissible diseases, particularly cholera – remember the cholera epidemic in Haiti carried by troops sent to aid in the earthquake crisis. 

·      About 15 million children under the age of five years die every year from diseases caused by contaminated drinking water.

·      On average, 250 million people die each year from diseases caused by contaminated water.

·      The tsunami of 2011 in Japan, released 11million liters of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean.

·      Asia has the highest number of contaminated rivers than any other continent. The Ganges River in India is considered the most polluted river in the world and contains dirt, garbage, dead animals, and humans.

·      Underground water in Bangladesh is contaminated with arsenic. In China, 20% of ground (used as drinking water) is contaminated with carcinogens.

·      In the United States, 40% of rivers and 46% of the lakes are polluted and unsuitable for swimming, fishing, or any other activity.

·      Industry dumps an estimated 300-400 million tons of polluted waste into water every year. This includes heavy metals, solvents, toxic sludge, and other waste.

The situation is so overwhelming that one feels insignificant and impotent. The impulse is to walk away and ignore what one cannot change. But we can change it. It is not simple; it is not done at cocktail parties about the environment; it is not a matter of donating money to someone or some organization. It can be accomplished by individuals or like-minded people willing to act in the political realm to elect serious legislators; by writing to inform others and compel them to action; to change our personal habits. The latter is the most important. If you cannot change yourself, you never will change others. 

More on how to change this in the next blog. Stay with me.