Water Pollution Essay: Water Is The Fountain Of Life

Water is the fountain of life. All living things need it to stay alive. Water is the difference between life and death; humans can only go 4 days without water before dying of thirst. Most people think that the Earth has plenty of water to spare, however they are wrong. T. Boone Pickens has studied water scarcity and says, "Water is the new oil". As it becomes harder to obtain, the prices of water will rise. This can be related to peak oil and how oil is only going to become scarcer and harder to find, therefore we are experiencing peak water. Water supplies are rapidly drying up and becoming polluted. Humans take water for advantage and waste it beyond belief. The world’s water consumption doubles every twenty years; this is more than twice as fast as the population growth. If this continues there will be little-to-no usable water within the next 15 years. Water scarcity can be seen as either the lack of enough water or lack of access to safe water. It is hard for most Americans to imagine that clean, safe water is not something that

As small of a percentage as 3% already is, only a smaller percentage is available for human use. Of that 3% of fresh water 2% of it is stuck in glaciers, leaving 7.125 billion people to divide up 1% of Earth’s water. This 1% is Earth’s only usable water. About 70% of Earth’s usable water is used for agricultural irrigation; which leaking hoses and incorrect watering methods waste 60% of that water. To add to it, the pesticides and fertilizer used in agriculture often runs-off in to the local fresh water supply polluting it. As a result, about 1.1 billion people do not have access to water, and for at least one month out of the year, another 2.7 billion find water hard to come across. Not only is water hard to find for many, the water found is often polluted. For another 2.4 billion people, bad sanitation is an issue that exposes them to