Résumé Fantine

Water is essential for life. All living things rely on it and are made up of it. 60% of the human body is composed of water, and it is crucial that we replenish our supply several times a day. With water covering 71% of the Earth's surface, one would think everyone should have easy access to water, but it is unevenly distributed.

But some biomes, like deserts, make this most basic need a struggle. Some countries, like Canada, have plenty of water for a small population. Canada has .5% of the world's people and 20% of liquid freshwater on Earth, while China, with one fifth of the world's population, has only 7% of the world's liquid freshwater.

In addition, what water we do have, we treat poorly. Only approximately .024% of water is available liquid freshwater. And humans waste it and pollute it, and we charge too little for it, which encourages waste and pollution. Roughly two-thirds of water is wasted, and the United States is the world's biggest water consumer. And when we excessively extract water, we lower water tables, reduce river flows, shrink lakes, and damage wetlands. If executed irresponsibly, there are problems with all forms of obtaining freshwater: converting salty seawater to freshwater can be expensive, transferring water from one place to another is an immense undertaking with a big potential for pollution, building dams disrupts ecosystems, and extracting groundwater can cause aquifer depletion.

Some countries in the dry Middle East cope with water shortages and increased conflict over sharing water sources. Countries that control the headwater of a river can cut off water to countries that rely on it. In addition to all the political upheaval in the region, add the stress of the potential war over water between Iraq and Syria.

Raising water prices would prevent people from wasting and polluting it, but making it more expensive for those who can't afford it now will only cause more problems. For now, citizens can do little things to conserve water, like using waterless composting toilets and fixing leaky faucets. To help people worldwide get water, donate to The Thirst Project or other charities that distribute clean water to those who need it.

People used to think about water as an infinite resource. They could use it, abuse it, pollute it and sink their garbage into it with impunity, it would never run dry and would somehow clean itself of sewage and chemicals and industrial waste. This short-sighted view of life’s most precious and necessary resource justified the great post-war “turf boom” expansion of the population into designed suburbs of cookie-cutter houses with neat green lawns and homeowners’ associations that decided they could dictate what residents were allowed to plant, whether there could be a few weeds in the mix, and how often those green expanses of useless grass had to be watered and dosed with chemicals in order to maintain the cookie-cutter expanses of identical expanses of useless grass.

Now that we know water is a lot more precious than we thought, that climate change is imposing long-term droughts on entire swaths of the earth, that unwise allocations have drained ancient aquifers, and that a lot of the water people have to drink is polluted by things nobody really wants to know about, it’s a good time to re-think our entire approach to water. This is yet another necessary change in humanity’s

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