It would appear that my point of view is fairly controversial. My FaceBook (FB) page of late has been full of people dumping buckets of water and ice over their heads raising money and awareness for ALSA. I have no problem with the cause, and champion people who want to raise money and awareness for charities. The issue that arises for me is that I do not think we should be wasting resources like clean water in order to do this.
There have been some notable examples of people doing alternative things, like in Gaza where people have been using buckets of sand and in China where people have used empty buckets. Even Matt Damon used water from his toilets (he did help create water.org, so it kind of makes sense).
Water is precious we are lucky in this country we have clean water, and although we do suffer water shortages from time to time, we rarely have to suffer from a complete lack of it, unlike the estimated 780 million people who lack access to clean water around the world.
I believe that we should try where possible conserve the world resources and this very much includes water, it is not unlimited however much we treat it as that. On the whole people on my FB account are agreeing and disagreeing with my views on the use of water for this ALSA challenge. We in the ‘West’ are lucky clean water is something we quite often get to take for granted, we don’t have to walk to get it, we do not have thousands of children dying from water related diseases in our countries and yet for some reason we seem to forget the hardships other suffer from water related issues.
I by no means am perfect in conserving water either, I try which is all I can really do.
Other random facts about water gathered from the web: 85% of the worlds population live in the driest half of the planet. 6 to 8 million people die annually from the consequences of disasters and water-related diseases. In many developing countries, women and girls walk on average over 3.5 miles each day to fetch water. Women often spend more than 15 hours per week gathering water. By 2025, the proportion of the world’s population living in water-stressed countries is set to increase by 2/3.
So yes I still have strong views about us wasting water… it is a limited resource, people need to understand that.
Useful links:
Matt Damon’s Charity Water.org
ALSA – I am impressed this challenge has raised $94.3 million in donations since the 29th July.