by Marc Phillippe Babineau

Created on: January 24, 2009

Crisis, what crisis? The freshwater that people rely upon, take for granted and exploit, is either running out or too polluted to use for personal purposes. We, as a race, not a country or government, must take matters into our own hands, if we ever want to significantly ease the world water crisis. We must not rely upon government agencies, corporations (with bottom lines to follow and shareholders to earn money for), or non-profit agencies to fix the problem, because they always say, problem, what problem? Just turn on your taps and water comes out. In order to fix the problem, the problem has to first be recognised as a major ecological disaster before any serious, major work is done to reverse, or at the very least, halt the over consumption and pollution of our freshwater systems.

From the comfortable confines of the International Space Station, looking down on our lovely blue planet, third from the Sun, it must seem awfully ironic that planet Earth is going through a major water crisis. The planet, ironically enough, is covered by almost 72 percent water, more than two-thirds of the Earth's surface. However, and unfortunately, more than 97 percent of the water that is on our lovely blue planet is saltwater, and 2 percent of our water is Glacial, Ice Caps and other forms of frozen water. This leaves us, the human and animal population of Earth, with 1 percent of the water on the planet being suitable to sustain life.

Now, that view from space not only seems ironic, it seems down right nasty. The inhabitants of this planet are given one percent of the water which covers 2/3rds of the surface of our rather large planet for drinking purposes, and we are made up of over 60 percent water ourselves (muscle is 75 percent water, fat is 50 percent water). Yet, even as we know that water is our elixir of life, we dump our raw sewage, dead and decaying bodies, chemicals and other man-made refuse, oil and radioactive materials into our one chance for salvation. We may be at, or at least near the top of the food chain, but nobody ever accused humans of being intelligent as a race, when it comes to abusing their only home, that little blue planet, third from the Sun. That planet that we explode nuclear bombs in the deepest trenches of the Oceans, even though we are not aware of the function of that deep, covered part of the Oceans on the planet's ecosystem. Bad people! Bad!

Now, the time has come to pay the piper, to man-up and try to fix what we have broken. Is it too

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