3.25.08
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I recently heard on NPR, “Science Friday” about water shortages. Okay, I am a huge NPR junkie. This is where I get most of my news. My thought was, I really don’t have anything to worry about since I live by a huge body of water, called Lake Erie. Well, it seems like our populations are getting bigger and bigger, because of such nations as China and India, and the cost of moving water is getting very costly.
The three largest nations that use water for irrigation are China, India and the US. In fact, eighty percent of water consumption is for agriculture; therefore, costs have to increase for food. Thus, there will probably be a food shortage if we don’t find substantial ways to conserve water. Another huge culprit of water consumption is in our electric power plants for cooling. I don’t know about you, but this is down right frightening. Their needs to be a global effort to reuse water from run offs, and sewage to name a few. I am sure there are hundreds of other creative ways that we as a nation can conserve that natural resource, called water.
Who drinks water from those annoying plastic bottles where I see littered everywhere? I see them on the side of the road while I am biking or overflowing at the Bally’s Gym trashcan. I can’t help it, I am a huge environmentalist and those clear plastic bottles absolutely drive me crazy. I end up picking them up from the road when I can.
NPR’s panelists basically described that the “bottled water” was developed out of people’s fear in drinking water from the “tap.” I hate to be the barrier of bad news, but a lot of that water is from your basic “tap” and it is “remarketed” into huge profits. The main reason I decided not to partake in the “bottled water” consumption is the exorbitant amount of energy and gas that is need to truck this water into our grocery shelves. And, I am sure this is probably one good reason why our gas prices are on the increase. I also heard that New York City has one of the best tasting “tap” waters but people will not even attempt to try it. Why, out of fear.
I am feeling fear right now because our “water” will become a natural resource that will soon be hard to come by.
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From your post: “I can’t help it, I am a huge environmentalist and those clear plastic bottles absolutely drive me crazy. I end up picking them up from the road when I can.” Toni, I do the same thing! And I also stop to pick up plastic bags. If you see me at the gym, I may have a plastic bottle of water in my hand, but you won’t necessarily know that I have filled it from the tap many times.
One piece of good news about the Great Lakes: water levels had fallen for the last few years, but this year, because of all the snow, the water level is expected to rise considerably.
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+1 | March 25, 2008 @ 6:56 pm
Carla,
I just took a walk around my block, which adjoins your block. I picked up 15 plastic drink containers and 5 plastic bags. This has become a daily dogwalk ritual for me. I don’t have to go far to find the plastic litter. Some days I see the plastic bottles and bags in the storm drains. I stop, dig out the bottle or bag, pull aside the other detritus and allow the water to flow in. Sometimes people driving by point and laugh.
What blew me away though (and I could find no recourse) was that while I watched a podcast of Congressional Hearings on the Tri-State water wars (between Georgia, Alabama and Florida) each of the congressional representatives had a plastic bottle of water next to their microphone. As I listened to the issues of water scarcity killing one of the Western Hemisphere’s most productive estuaries so that golf courses in Atlanta can be watered, I search for a way to convey my disappointment to the representatives who did show up for the hearing (Steven LaTourette didn’t show). But I couldn’t send email to someone else’s rep. My emails would not be accepted by the folks who were listening to these tales of loss of jobs, loss of resources, loss of ways of life in communities all along the Flint, Chattahoochee and Apalachicola Rivers, in the Apalachicola Bay and the Gulf of Mexico because I did not vote for them – don’t live in their districts.
I sat back and thought about how we don’t get it. The world is one big ecosystem - push it in here and it pops out over there.
It is easier to think in sound bites about plastics floating in the Pacific or coal fired power plants in China and India being “a problem” that someone will have to deal with someday. But it is more gut wrenching to visit New Orleans and see the devastation there and realize that Cleveland neighborhoods look strikingly similar and not because of flooding, but because of a different breed of disdain and indifference.
It is encouraging to know that George is plowing through the podcasts at the Long Now Foundation’s website. I encourage others to visit, watch and listen to talks about the Clock of the Long Now. It is encouraging to visit Wiserearth.org and see that some environmental and social justice orgs in NEO have signed on and signed up. It is encouraging to read Paul Hawken’s book, Blessed Unrest and know that millions of environmental and social justice organizations are working round the clock to stem the tide of indifference. But it does astonish me to realize how we just can’t seem to grasp that we have to address these issues on a personal level. We have to change the way we live. As Hawken says, the game we have been playing is viewed as a finite game; someone wins and someone loses. We have to begin to recognize that the game we want to be playing is an infinite game - one where we can adjust and change the rules so that we continue to play. He addresses this here on the Paula Gordon show: Suicide Interventions - http://www.paulagordon.com/shows/phawken/index.html
Here’s the deal; we’re all in this together. The plastic in the belly of the albatross is our problem, not the problem of “some bird that flies along over the Pacific”. The fall out of air pollutants or the sequestration of coal sludge in Meigs County is our problem, not just the problem of some yahoos who live in rural Appalachian Ohio. Plastic bags that take hundreds of years to degrade and were part of the cause of death for thousands in Mumbai because they blocked the flow of storm drains is our problem not just theirs. Mountain top mining in Virginia and West Virginia that pollutes the water in surrounding communities to provide coal for our electricity is our problem, not just theirs. Etc. ad infinitum, ad nauseum…
If we see the earth as a spaceship and go further to invoke the comparison of a lifeboat, it is of course of vital concern to everybody on the boat if the crew or the passengers start polluting their supply of food and water, distributing supplies on a grossly inequitable basis, knocking holes in the bottom of the boat, or worst of all trying to blow the boat out from under us. - William Burroughs This quote is from the NOVA Convention 1978
Vital concern…it is of course of vital concern to everybody on the boat.
Let’s have a plastax for one. That’s one way we could raise money to help solve some of these environmental problems. No need to wait for the river to burn again to get moving on these things, eh?
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+1 | March 26, 2008 @ 11:21 am