forum on water and google alert

Response to “water”

The forum we had on water was interesting, to say the least. Water is something almost everybody takes for granted, and because we take it for granted, we abuse it and, in the end, waste it. It seems idiotic to me that everyone is so wasteful with water because without it, we could not survive. People can survive without internet, without TVs, without laptops, without iPods and event *gasp* without coffee. But nobody can survive for more than a week or two without water. We need it to survive, and we need to stop wasting it.

One of the suggestions in class was that we should stop using water even in cases where we would normally need it. But why? If I stop using water because people half way around the world don’t have water, the water I don’t use isn’t going to get to them. So in my opinion, we don’t need to stop using water period, we need to find ways to get water to the people that don’t have any.

One of my google alerts that I get daily is about the Costa Concordia cruise ship. The biggest issue (besides finding people, of course) was determining how to extract the oil from the ship before it starts leaking out into the pristine waters off the coast of the island of Giglio. It would be an enormous environmental disaster should 1) the oil leak out into the waters or 2) the ship sink to the bottom of the ocean before the extraction is complete. When the ship falls to the bottom of the ocean, the oil tank will most likely rupture on impact and the 500,000 plus gallons of oil will contaminate the idyllic waters of Italy.

Link to Costa Concordia oil extraction article