Earth is a piece of space that is a living and breathing entity just as the people who live on its surface. Her main job is to provide us, with shelter, food, and water to ensure the survival of the species. However, our planet does not have unlimited resources and as the population of mankind continues to increase, the availability of the planet to provide us with these basic needs also dwindles.
The planet must continue to survive and provide us with all the necessities while we try to save our planet from running out of natural resources before it is too late. The problem is that we cannot seem to come up with a way to preserve that which sustains life. We manage to destroy our forests daily and proven that because of the continued pollution of the planet, we have managed to poison the most precious life-sustaining mineral on the planet, our water supply.
It’s funny how it seems that even though our planet is 71 percent covered by water, not all of it is available for drinking. a mere 2.5 % is freshwater while the rest is in the solid form of glaciers and snow covers. Therefore sourcing clean and safe drinking water for approximately 1.2 billion of the world population is a tremendous challenge for us. Most especially since this problem affects 1.3 billion of the world’s children. When we have 6,000 children dying every second from water-borne illnesses, as per the statistics of the World Health organization, we can safely say that the real pandemic is the shortage of safe drinking water.
The problem of safe and pure drinking water is not limited to the 3rd world countries alone. In the U.S.A. the Environmental Protection Agency has been tasked to provide the population with safe drinking water and yet there are still around 700 contaminants, such as lead and other various toxins, manage to survive the filtration process at the treatment plants. We still ingest filthy water, we just don’t see it as sludge the way those living in more dire conditions do.
This is why I consider the problem of safe drinking water to be the biggest challenge for the planet and the human race. Although nature can probably provide us with clean drinking water from the fresh supply readily available, the problem is that everything we do contaminates the supply. Our recent attempt to save the planet from the destruction which we are causing to happen in the first place includes recycling our water supply.
Although admirable on the part of the conservationists, the reality is that our recycling process does us more harm than good because we add chemicals to the water supply during the recycling process that seep out and contaminate its immediate surroundings. It has a long-term adverse effect on our health and causes a false sense of safety for everyone who drinks from the water supply. So what solution can I propose to solve or lessen the impact of the problem?
After doing much research on the topic, I have concluded that I must advocate the solution proposed by the organization called Pure Water For The World. The slow sand filtration process which Europe and America have been using for centuries can easily be adapted and used even by the 3rd world countries thanks to its low cost and low maintenance abilities. According to various technical reports, this bio-sand filter can remove up to 99% of the disease-causing water-born contaminants at half the cost of a full-service filtration plant.
Our planet is already at the 11th Hour, so is our water supply, now is the time to take action and try everything possible to preserve our water supply, before it dries up or worse, becomes impossible to clean. Remember, we can last a week without food, but only 3 days without water. We should act now so that neither scenarios become a reality for the current or future generations.
Work Cited
“Do You Know Your H20?”. NationalWaterCouncil. 2009. Web.
Pure Water For The World. 2009. Pure Water For The World. Web.