By: Ben Walters

Why Care About Water? 97% of the world’s water is too salty to drink, and another 2% is locked inside of ice; leaving only 1% of the world’s water available for human use. The American Lifestyle requires on average twice the amount of water that the average global lifestyle requires. 70% of the freshwater the human race uses is used for agriculture.

The Colorado River The Colorado River and its tributaries have been around for a long time, but they have never run dry; until humans decided to take more than 90% of the rivers water. Now, many of the Colorado’s tributaries are drying up, and the Colorado itself no longer runs all the way to the sea due to the building of dams. Luckily, many projects are attempting to help the Colorado river. More water is being allowed to pass through the river, fish species native to the river are being protected, people are using less water on average, irrigation canals are becoming more scarce, and plants that require less water to grow are being planted. These strategies are not enough, but they will help the Colorado river according to many researchers.

Is American Water Safe? America’s water has been historically safe, but that may soon change. America’s piping is getting old, and many pipes are breaking or leaking, leading to temporary lacks of water or contaminated water. Also, storage ponds of dangerous chemicals like coal ash are getting more numerous and older, and they have started to leak into the rivers and American drinking water; at best shutting down a regions tap water, and at worst killing people who drink the tap water. The recent climate changes are accentuating this problem, droughts are making people desperate enough to use risky water, and floods can break the storage ponds of the dangerous chemicals. The best solutions researchers have are to repair the pipe system, to closely watch the storage ponds, and to fight climate change.

Communicate Every ecosystem and environment in the world depends on water. Without water, nothing could live on earth, and therefore no ecosystems could either. Sadly, the Colorado river is drying up, and with it the many ecosystems it sustains and gives life to. The Colorado river and its tributaries give water to ecosystems all over the Colorado river basin, but as the Colorado and its tributaries dry up, some of the ecosystems lose all of their water. This causes the inhabitants of the ecosystem to either die or move, which also impacts other nearby ecosystems because of how the ecosystems are interconnected.

Communicate It will be difficult to save the Colorado rivers water supply and the ecosystems that depend on it, but there are some ways that could work. The first thing we need to do is stop building more infrastructure that sucks up the Colorado’s water, like pipelines and dams Second, we need to reduce our dependence on the Colorado’s water by changing peoples lifestyles in the Colorado basin. In the basin people try and live like other (high water using) Americans around the country, but our culture is not sustainable in the Colorado basin so we take more water from the river than we need and cause it to run dry. People need to stop waiting for the river to adapt to them, and start adapting to the river.

Communicate Third, we need to discourage immigration to the Colorado basin, because no matter how efficient we are with water usage, the Colorado has a carrying capacity for humans and we have reached it. Fourth, as the Colorado river sustains more water each year, we need to set aside water that is not for human usage and allow it to stay in the river.