As the Natural Resource Defense Council stated,
“Our rivers, lakes, aquifers, and coastal waters aren’t unlimited resources that can handle whatever we take out or dump in. These waters need protection.”
Over the past few years, the issue with water pollution has been increasing, even with the “Clean Water Act” that was passed to help protect our water. The main causes for the increase in water pollution is the growth in our usage of technology in factories, the chemicals that we use for agriculture that ends up polluting the air, and oil spills by oil industries. Clean water is an essential element needed not only for our own survival but also to keep other lives in the environment around us as well. If the human race plans on surviving, then we need to take necessary measures to protect the water bodies around us, because our actions have consequences and sooner or later, they will catch up to us.
There are many causes of water pollutions and the biggest ones are human caused. Technology has been developing rapidly and is now used in our everyday life including factories. During the industrial revolution, factories began using machineries that produced and released toxins back into the atmosphere, thus causing pollution. Since then, more factories came up to exist except now, lot of them have gotten a lot bigger than they were, and they tend to overproduce which is causing an increase in pollution. Chemicals like fertilisers, insecticides and pesticides that are used everyday in agriculture are also a major cause of water pollution. These chemicals runs and mixes with the groundwater supplies, and not only does the chemicals kills animals in the water, the same chemicals makes the water toxic and impossible to use. Another major cause of water pollution is oil spills.
“About 12 percent of the oil that enters the ocean everyday is being dumped by oil companies, and it can be extremely harmful to local marine wildlife such as fish, birds and sea otters and other aquatic life (Earthworksaction.org).”
If we want protect our water and saves the wildlife that surrounds it, we need to make drastic amendments to the way we live in our societies.
More and more bodies of water are being polluted everyday. My proposal to stop this issue is through a non-profit organisation called “Sauvons Notre Eau.” “Sauvons Notre Eau” will enforce all the acts that were made targeting pollutions that the government does not necessarily enforce. We will fight for pollution control and better management for clean water in our nation and others as well. We will protect groundwater supplies by fighting for the placements of policies that requires farmers to use tested environmental friendly fertilisers and pesticides. We will participate in the cleaning up of our beaches and help make sure that oil companies get stopped from spilling oil into our ocean and killing aquatic animals.
For so long now, many countries from Asia for example have been fighting for clean water, and we never really helped because the problem did not directly relate to us, but now a few residence halls in our own campus New Paltz has been affected and we need to start taking deep precautions or else, this issue will spread through the nation. As we all know, dirty water can cause extreme waterborne diseases, and may actually cause cancer. According to the Environmental Pollution center, every year, a few millions American are made ill by polluted water; we do not want this in our community. As the residents of New Paltz, stopping this problem is up to us and that is why “ Sauvons Notre Eau” needs funding, so we can start our fight against water pollution.
In general, living things need two things for survival more than anything else; air and water. With air pollution already being a major problem in our world, saving our water is the best option we have so far. We still have time to reduce water pollutions and limit the negative effects like the deadly diseases that it carries. lf we do not receive the necessary funding that is needed to stop the problem before the issue becomes major, then we would not be able to stop the issue later, and we would allowing our water to be wasted, our animals to be killed and innocent people to die because of polluted water related illnesses.
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