Water is of course the most precious and vital resource on our entire planet. It is the basis of not only human and animal life but all other forms of life found on Earth as well. Nevertheless, this most crucial of resources is being overused, polluted, mistreated, and mismanaged by nearly every country on Earth.
Though water is a renewable resource, it has obviously not renewed/refreshed itself quickly enough to keep pace with the population growth which has occurred in the past few centuries (but most especially in more recent decades). There is increasing freshwater depletion and pollution occurring all over the world; pristine ancient aquifers are being almost totally pumped dry for agricultural use as well as for industrial purposes, while at the same time we are ignorantly dumping much of our wastewater right back in to the fragile water cycle and causing enormous environmental damage as a result.
Many major rivers and lakes are not only being massively and perhaps even irreversibly polluted, but we are also over-damming many of them and thus horrifically interrupting the crucially important water cycle. There is also massive waste of much-needed freshwater happening all over the world.
Additionally, as we continue to pave over more and more of the Earth’s surface in the name of ‘progress’ we are clearly preventing the natural replenishment of many important underground aquifers (due to the fact that water is unable to seep through concrete and recharge groundwater), which will certainly have extremely dire long-term implications.
Similarly, our oceans are becoming more and more polluted and overfished than they already have been in the last century. Pollution and overfishing (in the oceans, rivers, lakes, streams, etc) has already led to the total extinction of a large number of aquatic species. Raw sewage is wantonly and routinely dumped in to the oceans all around the world. Industrial and agricultural chemicals/poisons run-off of factory sites as well as farm fields, and then funnel into many rivers which often have their terminus in the world’s oceans.
For example, many sailors as well as scientists have noted that a disgusting man-made ‘island’ is floating far out in the Pacific Ocean – this ‘island’ is composed entirely of human garbage and is approximately the size of the U.S. state of Texas.
Appalling and inexcusable damage has already been done to the world’s vital water resources, and it will likely take centuries if not millennia for the Earth’s water to return to a healthier and more sustainable/natural state. Unfortunately, the situation in regard to water resources is likely to get worse as the human population continues to grow and increasingly overstrain the already fragile, interrupted, and badly damaged water cycle of our planet.
The Human Sustainability Plan 