WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE?

Besides the air we breathe, water is probably the most taken for granted aspect of our lives on the Planet. I grew up on a property with two ponds. We also had a well. I can remember that my mother was the first person I saw drinking water from a bottle. She was doing that because we were traveling in the car. In those days, everybody drank water from the tap—unless you were European. In fact, the Evian source in France is one of the few unpolluted wells in the French Alps that doesn’t contain heavy metals, so Europeans have been drinking bottled water for a long time.

Today, bottled water is a multi-billion dollar global business. Quite often, bottled water is just produced from municipal sources using filter, osmosis, and reverse osmosis. Nothing fancy about it. Then, of course, there are many of the designer waters from exotic ports of call like Polynesian island aquifers and Nordic glaciers, and usually available for your convenience in the average hotel room for just $14.00 a bottle.

It’s against the law throughout much of the United States to recycle grey water, which comes from showers, sinks, and roofs at home and to turn it into potable, drinkable water. Maybe we should learn something from NASA, which has been converting grey and black water for years and to reclaim it for the drinking purposes of astronauts. Many islands in the Caribbean and countries in the Middle East use desalinization for drinking water, but usually using expensive, polluted petroleum power to make it. There are now promising solar powered techniques for doing the same thing. Recycling products for rainwater and bringing grey water back into the home are also promising as are changes in laws in such metropolitan areas as Los Angeles.

Fresh water is a limited resource that we continue to take for granted. A number of futurists predict that wars in the future will be fought over rights to fresh water. The melting of glaciers in the Himalayas has created such a flash point for the enormous populations of India and China. The shared river water of the Middle East is a similar area for growing concern.

Water conservation and effective use of water should start with each individual striving to treat it like gold. That’s why we chose to offer water conservation products as the premiere category at the Evergreen Marketplace for Earth Day 2010. The amount of rain in North America this past year has given many people a false sense of security. If we don’t begin now to conserve, we may be living in a future world where like the Ancient Mariner in Coleridge's famous poem, we will be saying, “Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.”