Water Scarcity and the Importance of Water

The class H20 is part of our STEAM curriculum this year, and it's teaching us about water, and how little fresh water is left on the planet. The first Field Experience of H20 was to help us experience what it was like if we had to carry our own water usage every day, like hundreds of thousands of less fortunate people have to. It really opened my eyes to the rest of the world. Carrying only one gallon was easy enough, but the I imagined having to fetch 50 gallons throughout the day, and that that's exactly what some people have to do. The purpose of our first Action Project for H20 was to show the class how much water we used in a day, and how that compared to the rest of the world.

I started this AP by calculating my own daily water usage in gallons, which was a lot more than I was expecting, but almost half as much as the average American’s use, which was surprising. I was shocked when I found out how little water people get every day, and how far they have to go to get that minuscule amount. I only carried one gallon, weighing about 8 pounds, and it took me 7 minutes and 45 seconds to carry the water from the Chicago River back to GCE. At that rate, it would have taken me a little more than 8 and a half hours to carry back my entire water usage for the day. If I had to carry that much water, I would become very conservative with the water I had when washing dishes, clothes, and myself. Using less electricity could also help, because power plants use thousands of gallons of water to cool off. So, even if it’s not much of a difference, it’s something to help conserve water. To make this information easy to understand, I made a poster that easily showed the difference between my daily usage, the average daily usage in the UK, and the average daily usage in the US. That advertisement poster is the image below.
WH (2017) Water Scarcity and the Importance of Water

Key for the pie chart:
Cleaning (Blue) = 44.2%
Other (Red) = 37%
Hygiene (Green) = 20%
Food/Cooking (Brown) = 12.8%

Clean, drinkable water is getting more and more scarce. 663 million people are living without drinkable water, and are forcing themselves to drink dirty, possibly contaminated or diseased water. We need to start saving water now, because if we don't, we could run out of clean water before we are able to find a solution to this problem. By doing little things, like taking faster showers, not using as much electricity, and waiting to wash clothes and dishes until there is a full load, we can save, little by little, some fresh water. This would give us more time before we completely ran out. Privatizing water is not a solution to this, because one or two very powerful companies will end up holding the world's life in their hands. We need to stop this and let every human have a right to clean, drinkable water.

Citations

WH (2017) Water Scarcity and the Importance of Water

T. E. Whalen (1939) Flag of Chicago

US Department of Interior (2004) US Map - states and capitals

Wereon (2006) UK-map

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