Time to demand water protection

(March 18) - It’s funny how some of the things we learned in school don’t make sense anymore. They may have been true at the time, but not now. Admittedly, it has been a long time since I graduated. More than half of all Canadians living today were not born when I finished university. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. There was so much of it that we didn’t need a World Water Day. We do now. We’re going to have one next Monday.

It was in either elementary or high school science that we learned all about the water cycle. Water was a natural resource unlike any other. It wasn’t non-renewable, like petroleum. Oil is a “use it then lose it” commodity. Here today, gone tomorrow. It wasn’t a renewable resource like bamboo. Cut that down and turn it into furniture or flooring or cutting boards. By the time you’re done, another crop has grown.

Water was like neither of those. It was just there. As constant and dependable as my grandmother’s rhubarb jam. Whenever we wanted some, there it was. We couldn’t run out of it because of the water cycle. Evaporation, condensation and precipitation. Put simply, steam rises, cools off and falls down as rain. In one form or another, the same amount of water was always in the system. Solid on the ice caps. Liquid in the oceans. Vapour in the clouds.

What could go wrong? What did go wrong? To put it bluntly, we did. For one thing, there are a lot more of us using the water. Back in the less complicated days when I first heard about the water cycle, there were three billion people in the world. Today there are close to seven billion. The amount of water to share around hasn’t increased to keep pace. Quite the opposite. The volume of water might be approximately the same, but the amount that is usable has gone way down.

The United Nations says each person needs between 20 and 50 litres of safe, fresh water every day for drinking, cooking and cleaning. One in six people don’t have access to this. Two and a half billion people, including close to a billion children, live without basic sanitation. One and a half million children die every year as a result.

The statistics on the UN water website are frightening. In developing countries, for example, 70 per cent of industrial wastes are dumped untreated into the water supply. We can thank ourselves for this. Manufacturing plants that used to provide jobs here got tired of the rules and regulations they had to live with. They could make greater profits by relocating to parts of the world where anything goes. It’s another way in which globalization and deregulation are putting the boots to mother nature.

We can’t live without a secure supply of clean, usable water. It’s not a problem restricted to faraway places like China or Russia, although that is where it is at its worst. There were 679 boil-water advisories in Ontario in 2008. Serious enough, no doubt, but it pales in comparison with this statistic from the United Nations: “In a world of unprecedented wealth, almost two million children die each year for want of a glass of clean water and adequate sanitation.”

Wellington Water Watchers is celebrating World Water Day at John F. Ross Collegiate on Monday evening. Google them and get a ticket. It’s only five dollars. We can’t wait another day before we stand up and demand action to protect our rivers, lakes and oceans.