What Earth/Environmental Issues Concern you the most?

1. What Earth/Environmental Issues Concern you the most?

4. Ultimately we seek to help inform issues like… • India’s groundwater shortage • Contamination of Water • Bacteria • Chemical

5. How confident are you that you will always have access to clean water? • Very confident • Somewhat confident • Not confident

8. How much water do you consume every day? • 0-1 gallons • 1-10 gallons • 10-100 gallons • 100-1000 gallons

9. Water Usage in the US is about 166 gallons per day. Other countries: U.K. 71 gpd Japan (Tokyo) 77 W. Germany 46 Switzerland 107 Egypt 26 Pakistan 19 India 14 Spain 44

10. On average you should drink about 2.4 liters / day to be healthy? • 0.54 gallons / day

11. In the U.S., residential use breaks down like this: toilets 41% washing 37% kitchen 11% laundry 4% cleaning 3% lawns 3% car washing 1%

12. How confident are you that the water you drink is safe? • Very confident • Somewhat confident • Not confident

13. Which water do you think is safest to drink? • Tap water • Bottled water • Filtered tap water

14. Do you think that bottled water is a economically reasonable? • Yes • No • I don’t care

15. Diet Snapple - 16 oz for $1.29 = $10.32 a gallon • Lipton Iced Tea - 16 oz for $1.19 = $9.52 a gallon • Gatorade - 20 oz for $1.59 = $10.17 a gallon • Ocean Spray - 16 oz for $1.25 = $10.00 a gallon • STP brake fluid - 12 oz for $3.15 = $33.60 a gallon • Vick's Nyquil - 6 oz for $8.35 = $178.13 a gallon • White Out - .7 oz for $1.39 = $254.17 a gallon • Scope - 1.5 oz for $0.99 = $84.84 a gallon • ... and this is the real kicker........ • Evian water - 9 oz for $1.49 = $21.19 a gallon........ • $21.19 FOR WATER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! • Harrisonburg water cost: • $0.00305 per gallon

16. Bottled Water???? • Bottled water can cost up to 10,000 times more per gallon than tap water • Approximately 1.5 million barrels of oil—enough to run 100,000 cars for a whole year—are used to make plastic water bottles, while transporting these bottles burns even more oil.

17. Bottled Water??? • The growth in bottled water production has increased water extraction in areas near bottling plants, leading to water shortages that affect nearby consumers and farmers. • In addition to the millions of gallons of water used in the plastic-making process, two gallons of water are wasted in the purification process for every gallon that goes into the bottles. • Nearly 90 percent of water bottles are not recycled and wind up in landfills where it takes thousands of years for the plastic to decompose.

23. Water scarcity already affects every continent and more than 40 percent of the people on our planet. The situation is being made more acute by population growth, urbanization and the increases in domestic and industrial water use by people who live in more developed areas.

25. 52 percent of the world's population will face water shortages by the year 2050, according to the United Nations Environment Program. The water crisis is so bad that, according to UNEP: Every eight seconds, a child dies from a water-related disease 50 percent of people in developing countries suffer from one or more water related diseases 80 percent of the diseases in the developing world are caused by contaminated water 50 percent of people on Earth lack adequate sanitation 20 percent of freshwater fish species have been pushed to the edge of extinction by contaminated water

26. Speaking at the World Water Day celebration at FAO Headquarters in Rome, FAO Director-General Dr Jacques Diouf called coping with water scarcity the “challenge of the 21st century”. The bulk of that challenge lies in finding more effective ways to conserve, use and protect the world’s water resources. Global population is expected to reach 8.1 billion by 2030. To keep pace with the growing demand for food, 14 percent more freshwater will need to be withdrawn for agricultural purposes in the next 30 years. “As population grows and development needs call for increased allocations of water for cities, agriculture and industries, the pressure on water resources intensifies, leading to tensions, conflicts among users, and excessive strain on the environment,” said Dr Diouf. Climate change has raised the stakes. Global warming has been blamed for more frequent droughts. Climate change has also intensified storms and flooding, which destroy crops, contaminate freshwater and damage the facilities used to store and carry that water. http://www.unwater.org/wwd07/flashindex.html

27. Why aren’t there more facilities to desalinate sea water? • Some countries convert sea water into freshwater, but desalinization is expensive, uses huge amounts ofenergy and releases significant quantities of brine, which can damage marine environments and kill fish.

28. Why do poor people pay more for water than the rich?

29. Why do poor people pay more for water than the rich? • People in the slums of developing countries who must buy containers of water from vendors typically pay five to ten times more per unit of water than those who have access to piped water. The reasons tend to fall into three categories: a lack of facilities to conserve and deliver water to poorer communities, inadequate management of water services, and a lack of political power to demand fair water pricing

32. How can a shortage of water lead to or worsen poverty?

33. How can a shortage of water lead to or worsen poverty? • Without enough water to produce food and without access to sufficient water for drinking and proper sanitation, people are unable to eat, earn sufficient income or resist disease. Entire generations of children, especially girls, skip classroom education to spend time walking long distances to retrieve freshwater.

35. Ultimately we seek to help inform issues like… • India’s groundwater shortage • Contamination of Water • Bacteria • Chemical

36. What does global warming have to do with water scarcity? • Experts are divided on the extent to which human activity, deforestation and pollution affect the climate, but many point to the rising level of the earth’s seas, the rapid melting of glaciers, the frequency and ferocity of recent hurricanes, floods and drought as consequences of climate change or global warming. All of these can threaten the amount or safety of a community’s water supply.

37. "Conflicts over water, both international and civil wars, threaten to become a key part of the 21st century landscape,“ • Nearly 47 percent of the land area of the world, excluding Antarctica, falls within international water basins shared by two or more countries, the United Nations reports.

38. EXAMPLE: JORDON (JULY 1998) • Why a water shortage in Jordan? The country lacks the rivers of nearby Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt and it cannot afford to desalinate sea water like their Persian Gulf neighbors, who have oil revenues to spend. • rationing in Jordan, which occurs on a year-round basis, means that each household gets just 22 gallons a day. Since the average Jordanian household has nine people, that's not much water, especially when compared to Saudi Arabia -- which gets 65 gallons per household -- and Israel -- which gets 78 gallons

40. 10,000,000 people per year die of a water borne disease (dysentary, cholera) • 100 people / year die due to SARS • 6 people / year die of bird flu • 200? people / year die of Mad Cow • Worldwide, the chief cause of death in children is due to drinking unsafe water

41. 60-70% of water humans consume goes to irrigation • 6 billion humans on Earth share the same amount of water that less than 1/6 of the population shared in 1900. • Rainwater is the ONLY “renewable” (???) source of water (40-50 cubic km / year) • Ogalla Aquifer is being used 8x faster than it replenishes • Mexico pumping exceeds recharge by 80% • In Africa aquifers barely (if at all) recharge • Beijing has lowered water table 37 meters in 40 years • Bangkok is sinking

48. Pharmaceuticals In Our Water Supplies • Antibiotics • anti-depressants • birth control pills • seizure medication • cancer treatments • pain killers • Tranquilizers • cholesterol-lowering compounds

50. What do we do? • Lifeboat Ethics Garrett Hardin (April 21, 1915 – September 14, 2003)