It's Only Water....

I have been attending university now since 2010, and have been made increasingly aware how fortunate my family has been in where they have lived over the centuries I can trace. Regardless of peasant or noble status, the lands they have inhabited had renewable resources and fresh water available.

Where I was brought up, we had 40 artesian springs on one hillside alone, and I never once gave thought to the availability of fresh water. I knew that running water from the kitchen and bathroom tap were relatively new technology since my grandmother had to fetch water until the plumbing was brought in the house in the 1940s. However, the clean and fresh water was never an issue.

Now, in the new century, we are painfully aware of the worldwide water shortage, the waste of water, and growing concern regarding our ancient water reserves that will simply disappear, if not replenished. When you see the dried and compacted soil in other areas of the world, you wonder how you ever thought "it's only water".

Conservation has to begin somewhere, and right now, it is beginning with me. Liquid gold is what water has become, yet the waste and excessive use of the precious resource by so many, when so few have it, boggles the mind.