For Love of Water

I just watched the documentary “Flow: For Love Of Water,” which struck me very deeply. I have the luxury of not having to think much about water. It’s always there, at the turn of a handle. It’s so pervasive that I admit I often hardly notice it. I have so much clean drinking water, in fact, that I actually flush my toilets with it. We all do, in this part of the world. It seems endless, all of this clean water that flows through our homes. But it’s not like this throughout the world. In fact, according to Wikipedia’s article on drinking water, approximately 1.1 billion people lack access to potable water. And this issue seems to be intensifying.

What can we do?

I wish I had the answer, but of course I don’t. However, a few things occur to me that I feel can help this situation, which clearly needs a lot of help.

1) Let’s acknowledge water’s true value. All life relies upon water. To deprive a person (or any organism) of clean water for too long is to deprive them of life. If anything in this world can be called truly sacred, I feel that the life-giving, life-sustaining property of water deserves earns this description for it. Given this fact, is access to clean water something that should be entrusted to corporations whose primary objective is to create profit? This leads to the next point…

2) Let’s acknowledge that privatization of municipal water supplies is truly corporate theft from the needy. It’s important to call things by their true names. The multinational corporations that control municipal drinking water supplies are not charities that operate for the common good; they exist to make quarterly profits for their shareholders. Should rich, powerful companies be allowed to control and own water supplies, and sell it back to people who can barely afford – and in many cases cannot afford (and therefore suffer dire consequences) – to pay for it? I believe that they should not, and that this is a violation of the basic human right of all people to clean, safe drinking water.

3) Let’s advocate for clean water as a basic, inalienable human right. Article 31 is a petition to the United Nations that states: “Everyone has the right to clean and accessible water, adequate for the health and well-being of the individual and family, and no one shall be deprived of such access or quality of water due to individual economic circumstance.” Here’s a link to the petition, which I urge you to sign.

4) Let’s pull the plug on bottled water: There is no governmental regulation of the huge bottled water industry (which is currently a roughly $60 billion per-year business). In many cases, it is just packaged tap water, and sometimes it’s worse for us than tap water, containing more contaminants than its (virtually) free counterpart. At the root of it, bottled water is all about corporate profit and corporate control of our water. Bottled water also creates a tremendous amount of plastic waste. [Plastic water bottles aren't truly recyclable; they're "downcyclable." This means that old water bottles aren't used to create new ones, rather, they're used to create other products of reduced functionality. And many water bottles aren't recycled (or downcycled) at all, and end up in landfills.]

For more reasons to end the bottled water habit, check out the article “Five Reasons Not to Drink Bottled Water.” In case the article goes offline, I’ll summarize: 1) Bottled water isn’t a good value, 2) It’s no healthier than tap water, 3) Bottled water means garbage, 4) Bottled water means less attention to public systems, 5) It contributes to the corporatization of water. Additionally, bottled water collection often has a negative impact on the environment surrounding the water bottling plants.

5) Let’s learn about and support the clean water innovators. “Flow” features several innovators who are helping the poor gain increased access to safe drinking water. One such person is Dr. Ashok Gadgil, who created a UV water purification system doesn’t require pressurized water delivery or even electrical outlets. Here’s more information about the success story of his UV Waterworks System. I hope that there will soon be breakthroughs in desalinization technologies, which will make this process much more energy-efficient and which can help provide pure water to people and crops in coastal areas. We know about energy-creation using wind and tidal forces… why not harness these renewable energy resources to desalinize water? I believe that this kind of thinking needs to be supported both in the private sector and in our governments as well.

6) Let’s be mindful of our own water use, on a daily basis. Taking shorter showers in California won’t end water shortages in Bolivia, but it will help us to remain aware of and connected to the issue that’s happening on a global level. Are there ways that we can be more efficient with our water use? Are all of our toilets efficient low-flow? Could we use cisterns for water catchment in our homes? Could a gray water reclamation system be added to our homes for our landscape irrigation? I feel that questions like these are important for all of us to consider, wherever we happen to live.

I have no intention to make myself or anyone else feel guilty about having access to an abundant supply of clean water. To the contrary, I feel that all beings (human and otherwise) should have access to clean, pure, life-sustaining water. I simply write to share my thoughts about what I feel is one of the most important issues of our day. Although most Americans have had the luxury of not having to think about this issue (with increasing numbers of notable exceptions, such as this family whose tap water was actually flammable because of contamination from a nearby gas wells), the fluid, boundary-eroding, universal solvent quality of water ensures that what happens to water happens to all living creatures on this planet.

Water is life. Water is sacred. I feel the time has come for us – individually and collectively – to start treating it as such.

PS – If you’re working on a new water desalinization invention powered by renewable energy or something similar, or if you’ve just heard about innovations like this, or any other related success stories, please let me know. And if you have any thoughts, comments, or suggestions, I’d love to hear them in the comment suggestion. Let’s use the power of group-think to discover new ways to overcome the challenges that are facing us and our precious and only planet.