Thirsty?

In this article by Bary Katz over at The Future is Green we are reminded once again of the pitiful job mainstream media is doing at keeping us apprised of the challenges we face. We are still flushing our toilets with fresh, treated, drinking water while;

"... 12 million people die each year due to lack of access to clean water. A child dies every six seconds for lack of access to clean water."

You might say "but what can we do about water in the developing world, we are not going to ship vast quantities over seas are we?"

"... this is not just a Third World problem. Huge swaths of the United States are currently facing severe water shortages. Maude Barlow writes in Blue Covenant that in 2007, " Lake Superior, the world's largest freshwater lake, dropped to its lowest level in eighty years. . . . California has a twenty-year supply of freshwater left. New Mexico has only a ten-year supply. Arizona is out: it now import all of its drinking water."

Barlow also notes that the U.S. Geological Survey found that "the parched Interior West is probably the driest it has been in five hundred years." This is more than a drought. We are running out of water."

We rely on huge quantities of water, not just to flush away our waste but also to grow the food we eat. This is clearly not some passing perturbation;

"The WorldWatch Institute has called water scarcity 'the most underappreciated global environmental challenge of our time.'"