Thursday afternoon, a Kroger employee passed out bottles of water to grateful shoppers. Police and firefighters routinely provide bottled water to the vulnerable citizens they encounter during their daily routines. Many convenience stores allow people to have water from their soda stations, free of charge. In fact, in Arizona a state law requires store owner to provide water at no charge.
Along with the air we breathe, water is essential to maintaining plant and animal life. We hardly ever think about water in January, but in these, the dog days of summer, our appreciation for water follows the thermometer.
Hot weather, as we know, leads to dehydration, which can lead to a wide range of health issues, even death.
Physiologically, we not only rely on water, we are, in fact, mostly water: It accounts for 75 percent of our body weight.
We not only rely on water to maintain our body temperature, we depend on it for the food we eat. Farmers, for all their ingenuity and advances in techniques and methods, have found no alternative to water. No water, no crops.
And it is at that point, we begin to see that water is not only essential to maintaining life, it was implications that touch almost every aspect of human existence.
The economic impact of water can be seen every time you visit the grocery store. Nothing affects prices as much as supply and nothing affects supply more than water. When there is a drought in California, we realize its not “their problem.” We are affected, too, since California produces more than half of the U.S. supply of fruits and vegetables.
Historically, access to a safe water supply has been a root cause of countless wars and a contributing factor to others. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman links droughts and the scarcity of water to much of the radicalization that has emerged in the Middle East over the past two decades.
Scarcity of a safe water supply led to severe economic hardships, he has reasoned, which led to high unemployment, followed by unrest and ultimately an increasingly radical population ready to wage war on the power structure that is perceived to have failed them.
While access to safe drinking water has improved over the last decades in almost every part of the world, approximately one billion people still lack access to safe water. Some studies have estimated that by 2025 more than half of the world population will be facing water-based vulnerability.
One report, released in 2009, suggests that by 2030, in some developing regions of the world, water demand will exceed supply by 50 percent.
If true, the implications are, indeed frightening.
There are any number of things we can live without, after all.
Water is not among them.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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