We turn on our faucets and there it is – water. There are 14 billion cubic kilometers of water on earth, a volume roughly equivalent to the moon, constantly cycling through oceans, rivers and lakes and the atmosphere – this is called the hydrologic cycle, and we have been abusing it for many years.

Only 2.5 percent of earth’s water is freshwater, only 30% of the freshwater is accessible and less than one percent of this is accessible freshwater for human consumption. (Here in our small city, we live atop one of the Great Lakes, the biggest source of freshwater in the country and the second biggest in the world.) Pollution, development and mismanagement of our limited water resources are rapidly diminishing the health of vital ecosystems and jeopardizing the safety of water for human use. One of every six people does not have a decent supply of water; more than 1.1 billion people (three times the population of the U.S.) live without safe, clean drinking water, a public health disaster!

The current global water crisis is one of both environmental and human health and the two are intimately connected. The more we pollute and alter water ecosystems, the less water is available to support human, plant and animal life. Overuse of water resources leads to loss of biodiversity and vital ecosystem services. For example, a third of the world’s ocean fisheries have collapsed; in the U.S. a 2001 survey detected pesticides in 97 percent of urban and farmland streams, and in Europe, 60 percent of cities with over 100,000 residents are using their groundwater faster than it can be replenished. This crisis, of course, falls mostly on the backs of the poor – the average child in a developed country uses up to 50 times more water than a child in a developing country! Three quarters of the poorest 20% of the global population do not have access to piped water.
And every day, two million tons of human waste are disposed of in waterways, enough to fill 725 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

March 22 is World Water Day. Here are some things you can do to help:

• Reduce your own water use drastically, and insist that your family members do likewise
• Discontinue using bottled water – this is not shown to be better than tap water, and about 80 percent of the plastic bottles end up in landfills or floating in the ocean, where there is a “garbage patch” of such plastic and other trash as big
as the continental US!
• Contact Congress and the President and ask them to be active in preserving wetlands, conserving water and preserving the Great Lakes as a tremendous freshwater resource (The Great Lakes Compact has been signed, but more needs to be done about protecting the Lakes from invasive species and pollution.)
• Read BLUE COVENANT, a book about the world water crisis by Maude Barlow –- a truly honest and startling revelation of the status of water in the world
• Insist on community control of water; privatization of water is rampant throughout the world, with mostly disastrous results.
• Go to www.foodandwaterwatch.org for more information.