Water, Water, Everywhere

I like water: swimming, water sports, baths, showers, clean hands. There is no replacement for the feel of water on my skin, and I don't care if I go wrinkly. I like water to use on my vegetable garden in the summer (but don't bother with watering the grass---too much work, and it ends up dying anyways--besides then you have to mow more often. Not that I'm allowed to...my family expects me to mow myself over....) Drinking water isn't something I do as often as I should, I'm pretty much perpetually dehydrated, yet I love water. 

I can't imagine life without water. Life wouldn't exist without water, water is essential. It's also a somewhat limited resource. We can make more water---through chemical reactions that also release harmful gases into the atmosphere. We'd release too much CO2, O3, and CO, as well as other chemicals into the air, in order to make water out of other substances. Furthermore is there not a limited amount of Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms? Sure, you could use atomic energy to split atoms down into hydrogen and oxygen, perhaps, but you would still create pollutions. Simply put we have limited resources of water, in a realistic sense. 

And we're wasting water: pollution, fertilizer in the water. Have humans ever done anything GOOD to water? The likely answer is yes, we learned how to clean it. And then we abuse that knowledge, as it gives us an escape from the arguments of pollution. We can pollute the water if we clean it: it all comes out the same in the end, right? 

That doesn't excuse polluting the water in the first place, and does the water really end up completely clean? Probably not. And Americans probably use more than our fair share of water---just like we do all the other resources on the planet. 

What can we do? Low-flow fixtures for the toilet, the shower, the sinks. Is handwashing clothing any better, or do we just need to stop sorting clothing by color ranges and just stick to 'lights'  and 'darks'? 

Ethically should any given human only use their fair portion of the planet? Utilitarianism might lead us to say yes: that by only using a small portion of the resources currently used by a single American, we would enable greater happiness for a vast amount of other people. The point is moot: American society has already passed the point where that is possible, each of us can only minimize how much we consume. 

Sometimes living ethically isn't completely possible---even if we avoid every store and do our best to have nothing to do with society, there are still government institutions designed to protect us that account for a huge portion of resources. At this time we are only capable of minimizing our footprint to protect others in our world, and the future.

~Jessica