The Pollution and Misuse of Water

The Pollution and Misuse of Water

I have chosen to write my paper on the effects that we have on our most important resource, water. The article I chose to go along with my paper was out of The Detroit News 5-24-00. The article discussed the problems that Metro Detroit has had with their outbreaks of e. coli in many of the area beaches. After reading the article I thought that it would be a great idea to look further into the problems our country faces with water and the way we use it.

In the past fifty years nations have gone to war over oil. In the next fifty years we are going to go to war over water (Simon 18).

The current world population of approximately 5.9 Billion will double in the next forty -ninety years. To further compound the water shortages, human consumption of water is rising twice as fast as the population. The exponential population growth has a severe effect on the amount of water being used and the amount of pollutants that go back into it. Take for example the problems that people in California are having with water and trying to get it. California's current water use is unsustainable. In many areas, ground water is being used at a rate that exceeds the rate of natural replenishment. Fish and wildlife species are being destroyed by withdrawal of water, as well as by development. Official projections are that water demand will exceed available supplies in the year 2020 (Simon 18).

California is the nations most populated state with over 1,400 reservoirs and the most sophisticated water supply system in the world (Rosenbaum 167). However it appears from studies that they will be experiencing some severe water shortages in the years to come. Many things have led to the shortages in California especially over population and desiccation. Towards the beginning of the century, Los Angeles understood that they would have problems, so they purchased Owens Lake the third largest body of water in the state. Today it is called Owens Dry Lake because it was sucked dry by Los Angeles. Today The U.S. Environment Protection Agency considers it the most polluted area in the nation (Simon 22). On dry days the wind blows particulate matter from the dry lake as far as fifty miles making the air twenty times as high as the maximum safety standards for air pollution.