Source Of Life Running Out: Water Scientists

Source OF Life Running Out: Water Scientists

"The majority of people on Earth people will face severe water shortages within a generation or two if pollution and waste continues unabated, scientists warned at a conference in Bonn Friday.

"This handicap will be self-inflicted and is, we believe entirely avoidable," read a document entitled The Bonn Declaration issued at the close of the four-day international huddle.

The conference sought to assess the evidence of Man's impact on freshwater resources, which constitute only 2.5 percent of the total volume of water on Earth.

Currently, an estimated third of the world's seven million people has limited access to adequate fresh water, according to conference delegates.

"In the short span of one or two generations, the majority of the nine billion people on Earth will be living under the handicap of severe pressure on fresh water," said the declaration.

The nine billion mark is widely projected to be reached from about 2040.

"We are flying the red flag out of our conference here," Charles Vorosmarty, co-chairman of the Global Water System Project research body that hosted the meeting, said in a teleconference from Bonn.

"These self-inflicted wounds have long-term legacy effects that are not easy to turn around."

The declaration points out that humanity uses an area the size of South America to grow crops and another the size of Africa to raise livestock.

Two-thirds of major river deltas are sinking due to groundwater extraction, and tens of thousands of large dams are distorting natural river flows on which ecosystems have depended for millennia.

Much damage is being done by river pollution from sewer drainage or agricultural fertiliser and pesticide use.

Already, about a billion people around the world are dependent on finite water supplies being depleted at a fast rate, said Vorosmarty, who made a plea for more financial and technical resources for research.

"We're not making the requisite commitments to creating observational networks and satellite systems that can measure the state of water," he said.

"Increasingly, we are flying blind and finding it very difficult to figure where we are and where we're going and whether the things we are doing are making a difference."

end of excerpt.

~~~~~~

Are we going to just let it happen?

We do have some choices:

We can continue to allow corporations with the direct help of governments to continue polluting our waterways until they are all toxic and unfit for human or any other species' consumption...



Or we could continue to allow corporations with the direct help of governments to privatize all of our water systems thus taking control of a human right and public trust to jack up prices while decreasing quality and safety beyond what the poor can afford to limit access even more...Afterall, look at all the pretty Coke cans we can make...





Or we can continue to be gluttonous not thinking of anything but the here and now nor caring where our water comes from until we turn on our faucets and nothing comes out...



Or we could dig deep inside us and find the moral courage and respect for this life liquid that will enable us to fight back and protect and preserve our water for us and generations to come...







What do you think we should choose?