After reading Mark Sagoff's article "At the Shrine of Our Lady Fatima, or Why Political Questions are Not All Economic," many topics were brought up in our group discussion. I found this discussion very interesting and wish to share some of the points that were made about water depletion in this blog.
The quality standards of water in the U.S. are fairly high. We all basically have access to clean water and most of us use quite a bit of it for household purposes. However, cleanliness and pollution are topics that are relevant to water all over the world. Even though the U.S. might have clean water for the majority of its citizens, there are many countries that only have access to polluted water. Not only are the terms "cleanliness" and "pollution" relevant to water and water depletion, but the idea of water regulations are as well.
Yes, there may be some water regulations in the United States such as how much water households are allowed to use on their lawns - these laws are usually set in place in towns with droughts or water shortages in general - or laws about the pollution of water. However, there are still only very few regulations on water in the U.S. Bolivia on the other hand has water regulations that were put into place after the water wars of 2000 and 2006. These regulations were put into place because the conditions and privatizations became very extreme in Bolivia and the people knew something needed to be done. Water regulations and shortages have not yet been deemed as an extreme issue in the United States unfortunately, so our water regulations still remain fairly nonexistent.
If water regulations were put into place, I believe everyone can agree, that we all would benefit from higher quality standards of water. Although the water available in the U.S. is already of good quality, third world countries would see a dramatic change in their quality of water if regulations were put into place. Now, this of course would be in a perfect world. Because as we also questioned in class, is such a high quality of water around the world worth the amount of financial and personal sacrifices that more developed nations would be sure to have to make to achieve this? This dilemma relates to many others that our world is experiencing, such as the issue of world hunger, shelter, education, healthcare, etc. And the problem is the same throughout, people do not want to give up their quality of living to improve that of others. This idea that our whole world should be equal by some of us lowering our standard of living has been discussed throughout many of the articles taught in class. However, one thing that has proven to help issues such as these, is donations. If we cannot force people to make sacrifices for others' quality of life, then we must rely on people to donate of their own free will for the cause.
Regulations on the use and quality of water should be put in place all around the world because it would help us preserve the water we have on this earth. Even though this seems like the solution, it will be very difficult to create these regulations and have people agree with them unless they see the severity of the issue. In the meantime, people have been trying to come up with ideas other than regulations that will help us avoid water depletion. One of these ideas is converting saltwater to freshwater by a process known as desalinization. Although this could be an additional solution, the cost to do this is also expensive, and in the end everything boils down to how much we are willing to spend to avoid a crisis that we may not even see coming.
