Water water everywhere, but what will we drink?

Nice work. I'm all for it. I wish more people were less selfish. No more trophy children. ADOPT.

Excellent, JfG.
The point is clearly made.

So, take your dog with you everytime you take a shower. You'll not only conserve water, you'll have a friend to sing with you, and you won't have fleas when you get out if you use his shampoo.

(and he won't care if you sing off key)

The most important aspect of your excellent summary is the potability of water. So many communities in my area add tons of chemicals just to make it legally "safe" to drink, which makes it too disgusting to ingest unless you filter it. A simple solution to help most struggling communities balance their budgets & not have to keep raising the rates annually would be to supply each household with a rain barrel. Millions of gallons of otherwise unused water could then be saved & used for gardening or other purposes where tap water isn't essential. This growing problem is definitely not receiving enough attention, especially with climate change making adequate supplies unreliable. Even ancient civilizations built cisterns understanding how essential a steady supply of drinking water was to the survival of its growing population.

I agree with everything you said.

Again you have posted an extremely important article. Thank you and I am going to work towards ways to help my family/friends/associates become better informed.

darkhorsejim: Absolutely. If we even followed the engineering genius of the Romans we would have enough water for everyone. There is much to learn from ancient civilizations apart from only discussing their wars.
I already recommended that rainbarrels be given to all in my community, but as of yet, nothing. I'll keep trying though. We simply have to learn to conserve or be forced to as climate change is making water a scarcer resource.

karnathis: Thank you. Being informed is the first step to progress.

Here is some information for you then Jan. The most major cause of water pollution in the US is coal mining. I would guess that might be true for China also.

Stripmines expose chemicals that were buried safely in the earth for millions of years and exposes them to leaching into the watershed. Underground mining does the same, although that is usually in the groundwater supply, which either poisons wells, or comes up through springs to the surface. Coal is then washed and the waste water is polluted and dumped in to streams, rivers and lakes where the silty mud chokes oxygen out of the water and kills riparian and aquatic life. Plants die off because the silty mud blocks sunlight, the plants die and do not produce oxygen in the water, fish, frogs, turtles or anything else that depend on the water environment die either from lack of oxygen or lack of food. Toxins from burning the coal go into the air where they are carried hunreds of miles. They are then washed out in rains that run into lakes. This produces acids. Acid rain kills entire forests and water systems. google- Acid Rain, Stripmines THEN, after the coal is burned, there are mountains of soot, cinders and ash. These are dumped in enormous slag heaps the size of mountains. The rain washing all kinds of heavy metals, and other toxic substances out of the cinders and ash into other watersheds.

To see my plan to remove coal as an energy source, come to Breaking the Chains.
http://groups.msn.com/BreakingTheChains/general.msnw?action=get_message&mview=0&ID_Message=166&LastModified=4675685674394210322

its time to buy what we can...now. while we have the chance save as much as you can. Water, canned food, a can opener!!!stock up, the greed of the 'big boys' will kill millions of people when it comes down to it.
thats some scary sh*t.