Water, Water, Everywhere

A beautiful animated video depicts the ugliness of the world’s water problems.

It’s Blog Action Day today, when bloggers and social media activists gather behind a single topic and write about its importance in order to gain large scale exposure and inspire collective action toward a solution. After being in the blogging world for just about a year, I’m excited to make myself a part of this community effort. This year, the issue is water, and in particular, the astonishing scarceness of drinking water for nearly a billion people. I admit that I knew very little about this topic before deciding to write a post on it for BAD - which is just one way this online campaign has already begun to work, by spreading awareness among us folk who just didn’t know about it. So I took a look at the facts, and they are staggering. But once you look past the numbers and percentage signs and comparison measures, your mind begins to comprehend the scale of the problem – and seek some idea for why it’s happening.

 As with so many social issues, it all comes down to access. Resources we consider basic in most parts of America are cut off from entire communities and villages in other countries. It requires hours of labor, mostly performed by women and girls, and countless other resources just to get a family’s daily supply. And this, in turn, stalls  the overall economic progress and productivity of populations, because there’s little time to focus on things like small business development or your town’s economic stability or education with a large portion of your population trekking long distances every day for the vital needs of their community. And then there’s the issue of sanitation. Unclean water and the bacteria it carries kill millions of people every year, and hospitalizes millions more. For something as basic as water – shouldn’t the solution be clear?

It can, when the adequate resources are allocated to the people that need them, and when they are allowed to come up with the solutions that fit within their own communities. Water.org shares ways that you can get involved in educating others about the issue, spreading the message, and raising funds to go toward self-sustaining projects. Visit the site, visit other blogs who are talking about the same issue, and get involved with the conversation. Very rarely does a cause invite so much room for real impact through such simple efforts.

Locally, there are ways for us to make our own drop in the bucket of impact. Minimizing our consumption of resources, water included, is something all of us can do. As I’ve learned once I give up something taken-for-granted and everyday, I begin to think of what else I might be able to do without – or do with less. Calculate your water footprint to get an idea of what your single impact is doing. And then do something about it.

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Posted in: Social Justice