http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/opinion/sunday/17drought.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
Imagine a world without water. Imagine where we would be if we had no water left. We would be nowhere. It is a simple fact that any human cannot survive without drinking water. However, some areas are forced into such an unimaginable place when droughts come into place. A lot of southern states in the United States are experiencing droughts and from what scientists believe, they could be eternal.
This article not only talks about the problem at hand, but also tries to incorporate ways to fix it. The idea is not to fix the droughts because those are natural and cannot be stopped. Instead, it would be ways to get more water that we can send to these places that are experiencing said droughts.
One suggestion was to find a way to turn salt water into potable water. That would solve a lot of problems. Considering how much water is in the ocean and how much drinking water is on the earth, it is clear that the water from the ocean is a much larger quantity of water. With such a large source of water people wouldn’t have to worry so much about finding drinking water to keep them alive or to keep their plants and animals alive. Water is such a big necessity in a life. So big that we shouldn't have to risk going without it.
Unfortunately, no one has found a way to do such a thing and it would take a lot of money and time to work on this project. It would help us greatly if we did find a way to do this, but there are probably better experiments right now to use our money on such as curing illnesses. It will become a bigger issue down the road and for that we should work on it now, but in smaller increments. There are more dire things we should worry about now that cannot be saved for the future as this problem probably can.
1 comment:
This article brought to light some of the scary facts about the not-too-distant future, and although the solutions suggested, such as desalination and recycling sewage water, are expensive and have proven to be slow to catch on, they will be necessary if humans want to survive on the over-populated Earth.
Something that stuck out to me about the article was the reason recycled sewage water isn't widely used in America is because of the "'yuck factor'". This strikes me as a petty and spoiled view. In a few decades, no one is going to care if they're drinking former sewage water, so why not get a head start now and make more use of the resources available?
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