What we need is to be environmentally friendly, and our water will keep its availability and purity itself. We need water for almost every single thing we do every day, starting from the time we wake up to the time we fall asleep. That makes water the most valuable natural resource ever, and it is logical if we want to protect it.
But what does it mean by protecting our water? For most of us, getting fresh water every single day is not a problem. However, in some parts of this planet, there are people who would like to kill for just a sip of fresh and clean water.
The problem is, we are living in an already polluted world, with billions of people in need of fresh water every day. The protection we are talking about is how to maintain its availability and purity. It might seem hard to do that, but expert said that it is actually not that hard.
Here are environmentally friendly acts that will help us protect our fresh water, according to experts.
First Thing First
Yes, first thing first we should know real life condition of our fresh water. The latest condition during this global pandemic of coronavirus COVID-19, makes us realize the importance of clean water to wash our hands. For long, it has been considered a voluntary act, but not it transforms as necessity to prevent further spread of disease.
However, not all people have the luxury access to clean water. Some are even unable to fulfill their daily intake of fresh water, like people in Karachi. Many factors, including climate change, are affecting the availability of fresh water all around the world, which means limiting some people to make some effort to stay healthy.
In addition to that, don’t you realize that we cannot create water out of nothing? Eleanor Allen, CEO of Water for People, said, “Some people don’t know that the water supply of the world has never changed as long as since the dinosaurs”.
“So, we’re just continuing to reuse and recycle the same amount of fresh water that’s been here on earth forever. What’s changing is the amount of people, the amount of pollution, and the amount of demand for that water,” she explained in an interview with World Economic Forum.
This is the reason why we should save our water. It is not a difficult task to do, but it needs global support. We just need to go environmentally friendly and our fresh water sources will recover itself, providing access to more people and as a bonus we will get more peaceful life.
Eat Environmentally Friendly Foods
Don’t you know that most of our freshwater consumption goes to farmlands? Look at United States, whose 80% of its freshwater consumption is used to agricultural practice. The problem is, it doesn’t mean that all water used is to water the plants that will be eaten as it is.
A lot of it is used to water livestock feeder and process meat and produce to make it more favorable for consumers. It means that most water we consume for food production is only used to ‘fashion’ our foods, solely to make it more marketable.
One of the examples of such practice is consuming water for soya plants. The plants will then be used to feed industrially farmed livestock. The meat of livestock is then processed to make fast foods. We are practically wasting a lot of water this way.
Thus, consuming environmentally friendly food means we can save more water. In this case, environmentally friendly food is any kind of food which doesn’t need to be fashioned in such way that consumes so much water not for nutritional nor edibility purpose.
The example of environmentally friendly food is fresh produce we can get from local markets. Even though local farmers use gallons of water to nourish their plants, but the water spent in this case is directly functioned as support system for the plants that they absorb and process by themselves.
Environmentally Friendly: Plant More Trees
After you get the energy from eating those delicious foods, you might want to do another thing to conserve our fresh water. Planting trees might be the activity you want to do, because not only it burns calory, but also because it is a general act to save our planet.
Planting trees is indeed associated to almost every single effort to save this planet, starting from reversing climate change to this very topic we are talking about. Well, basically trees are indeed natural carbon processer and water conserver.
Trees work quite directly in water conservation process. It can absorb rainwater and store it in the ground, which will then can be dug up to make well. This process has actually saved the lives of billions of people since earliest times history ever recorded.
The presence of trees is also very important to maintain underground water reservoir water quantity since they can absorb water on the surface. We can see that in areas where illegal logging happens, huge flood is more likely to follow after rainy season start.
The reason is because rain water is not absorbed into the ground with the help of trees’ roots. On the other hand, flooding is actually another waste of fresh water, because floodwater is contaminated with many things that it is less likely to be safe and consumable.
Limit Our Waste Production
And since flooding is another waste of freshwater, we should also tackle it from another side which is also environmentally friendly: waste production. Waste is a problem for almost every country, but especially developing country it is also the source of a bigger problem.
Many people in developing country, such as Indonesia and India, are throwing away their waste in water ways. Not only it means they are littering the natural environment, but it can also result in clogging of waterways and cause local flood.
Not only municipal waste, some evil companies are also contaminating rivers, lake, even underground water with their harmful industrial waste. Greenpeace Indonesia conducted a research to examine total economic valuation of Cikijing river in Bandung after exposed to continuous waste contamination.
The result showed that waste contamination has caused a total of more than 3.3 trillion rupiah of loss from 2004 to 2015 alone. With more people and industry is growing around the area, the number is foreseen to increase a lot more.
Limiting our waste production, and preventing it from entering our fresh water sources is a necessity we tend to ignore. As Allen explained above, we will have more people and demand for fresh water in the future, while the amount of water to be consumed, reused, and recycled, stay the same.
Practicing environmentally friendly acts mentioned above is surely not that hard, isn’t it? We truly need to conserve our fresh water, and one simple act can mean a lot to our planet.
Sources:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/
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