October 30, 2011
How Do You Treat Your Water?
As privileged students at USC, we often fail to notice how much water is used in our daily activities and around us, and we take for granted our access to it. For example, for our drinking needs, we have water fountains in every building, and water bottles are sold in vending machines and food stations on campus, allowing us to have access to water within every hundred feet. In addition, water is used in many of the aspects of USC that we could not imagine our campus without. Our lawns, trees, and plants would not be green without being watered regularly, not to mention the various fountains found on campus for aesthetic pleasure.
As Americans, we use a substantial amount of water a month, 3.9 trillion gallons to be exact (AWWA Journal, June 2006). The average American uses 176 gallons of water in one day alone. We could not imagine our lives without water being available with the simple twist of a tap. However, the rest of the world is not as fortunate as we are. In contrast to us, the average family living in Africa only uses 5 gallons of water a day, and about 1 billion people around the world do not even have access to clean drinking water. Many people in third world countries, mostly women and children, walk miles to sources of water that are unclean and will eventually make them sick. However, the problem of water scarcity seems so far away to us because water is so readily available; we expect it to be provided by the government without any thought to where it comes from or how much we are using.
It is easy to think of clean and safe sources of water as a right, because most Americans have almost always had access to it. As shown by the statistics above, we are among the lucky few who have been lucky enough to have access to clean water sources. But it is also easy to fall into the trap of expecting these resources, and treating them as a right. Access to clean and safe water sources is not a right; if it was, we would not have such a large problem of people suffering from the lack thereof even in the United States. Rather, it should be treated as a privilege, and we should instead be humbled by the continuous availability of flowing water. This is imperative to our ability to sustain our water. If everyone assumes that water is ‘there for the taking’, before long we will find ourselves without our most valued resource.
We need to realize that there could easily be a day where water does not automatically flow from the tap, and that we may begin to become an area such as African countries, where water scarcity is a serious and imminent problem. We need to respect the access we currently have to clean and safe water as a privilege and appreciate more what we are currently taking for granted.
Sources:
http://www.waterinfo.org/resources/water-facts
http://eyeswideopen.me/water/ (hyperlink ‘average family living in Africa’)
www.water.org (hyperlink ‘176 gallons of water’)
About the authors: Stephnie John and Neelam Savla are working towards their bachelor degrees in the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
I understand your ideology in thinking how treating water as a privilege will get people to respond more respectively to it. However, I feel that it is a natural human right to receive access to clean and safe drinking water, being that it is a necessary component of our bodies and survival.
By delegating water as a natural right, it should give the government the incentive to appropriate adequate funding and resources in making sure the technology and ability is there to monitor and assess fresh water. This ensures water security throughout the states.
Now, while this may be a local solution in terms of the world, this in turn could start a precedent that other nations will be forced to follow in order to meet rising water demands from booming populations and increasing agricultural pressure for higher crop yields.
While this may seem like an expensive idea to impose on the government, it can be implemented through a re-allocation of funding. By improving water-use efficiency technology, water subsidies towards farms can be drastically reduced in terms of the water costs they use to irrigate their crops.
All of this banter leads to this point: if the government, on local, regional, and federal scales, can efficiently allocate its water sources, then the people will be able to enjoy the water that was previously wasted on inefficient practices.
Although, despite these comments, I absolutely agree that the general public has to take responsibility, on a personal level, for the water that it wastes- not take advantage of their natural rights.
Traditionally, water has been seen as a public good. When looking back to even the most ancient societies, water has been regulated at local levels through the public sector in order to fairly and evenly distribute it among the local people. But more recently, and exponentially in the past 15 years, water has been turned more and more into a private commodity. In this modern international age, public governments are no longer the only actors, and usually not the most powerful actors, who affect and control how people obtain their water. If water was equally accessible in all parts of the world, and each government was developed enough to control and fairly distribute water, a system where water resources were regulated on a local level by governments would be ideal. But many nations and areas do not have the development, or the water, for this to happen. So, with the advent of technology and the increasing level of control of the international system, water has become a resource that is controlled by developmental organizations, seeking to aid countries where they cannot provide. One of the UN millennium goals was to cut the number of people without access to clean water by half by the year 2015. Since developing nations clearly need help to achieve this goal, actors such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and private, multinational corporations used by these funding agencies to aid in development, become the key actors of water distribution in developing nations. But with the necessity and power that is water, these corporations can become very powerful, and the balance of providing fairly to poor people and making a profit often does not coincide. But with the power that corporations obtain in controlling water in developing nations, they create a means of controlling water in developed nations as well, and are changing the entire system of water policy out of the hands of government and into the hands of corporations throughout the world.