Be a Hero for a Better World ... Every Act of Kindness Makes a Difference!
   

WATER

Water is one of the most basic of all needs -- we cannot live for more than a few days without it. And yet, most people take water for granted. We waste water needlessly and don't realize that clean water is a very limited resource. More than 1 billion people around the world have no access to safe, clean drinking water, and over 2.5 billion do not have adequate sanitation service. Over 2 million people die each year because of unsafe water - and most of them are children!
-- Robert Alan Silverstein

We need a global approach to this from all sides. We need to educate people, we need the scientists to create new technologies, we need the engineers to create the networks, we need every human being to be aware of how precious water is and save it. Everybody has to be involved in a very firm and assertive way.
-- Isabel Allende

* Fierce national competition over water resources has prompted fears that water issues contain the seeds of violent conflict.
-- Kofi Annan

As I travel around the world, people think the only place where there is potential conflict [over] water is the Middle East, but they are completely wrong. We have the problem all over the world.
-- Kofi Annan

"Children of a culture born in a water-rich environment, we have never really learned how important water is to us. We understand it, but we do not respect it."
-- William Ashworth

"Thousands have lived without love, not one without water."
-- W.H. Auden

* The destruction of aquatic ecosystem health, and the increasing water scarcity, are in my opinion the most pressing environmental problems facing human kind.
-- Maude Barlow

Water is being depleted many, many times faster than nature can replenish it.
-- Maude Barlow

* "Kids can help the environment by riding a bike. Always wear a helmet of course and stay in the bike lane. Take public transportation with your parents and your friends and see if you like that. That’s a good way to get around. Start a home garden, be energy efficient, turn off the lights and the water. All of those things are very good for the environment and good for your pocketbook. "
~ Ed Begley, Jr.

* "Creating a world that is truly fit for children does not imply simply the absence of war. It means having the confidence that our children would not die of measles or malaria. It means having access to clean water and proper sanitation. It means having primary schools nearby that educate children, free of charge. It means changing the world with children, ensuring their right to participate, and that their views are heard and considered. It means building a world fit for children, where every child can grow to adulthood in health, peace and dignity."
-- Carol Bellamy

"I have little need to remind you that water has become one of our major national concerns."
-- Ezra Taft Benson, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, 1955

The quality of water and the quality of life in all its infinite forms are critical parts of the overall, ongoing health of this planet of ours, not just here in the Amazon, but everywhere... The hardest part of any big project is to begin. We have begun. We are underway. We have a passion. We want to make a difference.
-- Sir Peter Blake (1948-2001)

When we talk of flood control, we usually think of dams and deeper river channels, to impound the waters or hurry their run-off. Yet neither is the ultimate solution, simply because floods are caused by the flow of water downhill. If the hills are wooded, that flow is checked. If there is a swamp at the foot of the hills, the swamp sponges up most of the excess water, restores some of it to the underground water supply and feeds the remainder slowly into the streams. Strip the hills, drain the boglands, and you create flood conditions inevitably. Yet that is what we have been doing for years.
-- Hal Borland

"If we lived in a desert and our lives depended on a water supply that came out of a steel tube, we would inevitably watch that tube and talk about it understandingly. No citizen would need to be lectured about his duty toward its care and spurred to help if it were in danger. Teachers of civics in such a community might develop a sense of public responsibility, not only by describing the remote beginnings of the commonwealth, but also how that tube got built, how long it would last, how vital the intake might be if the rainfall on the forested mountains nearby ever changed in seasonal habit ot amount. It would be a most unimaginative person, or a stupid one, who could not see the vital relation between the mountains, the forests, that tube and himself."
-- Isaiah Bowman

* We must begin thinking like a river if we are to leave a legacy of beauty and life for future generations.
-- David Brower

 

 

* It takes 1,000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of grain. As water becomes scarce and countries are forced to divert irrigation water to cities and industry, they will import more grain. As they do so, water scarcity will be transmitted across national borders via the grain trade. Aquifer depletion is a largely invisible threat, but that does not make it any less real.
-- Lester A. Brown, Michael Renner, Brian Halweil

 

The number of people displaced by dams is estimated at between 40 million and 80 million, most of them in China and India. The costs of dams were on average 50% above their original estimate. Some designed to reduce flooding made it worse, and there were many unexpected environmental disadvantages, including the extinction of fish and bird species. Half the world's wetlands had been lost because of dams.
-- Paul Brown

* "We can use our scientific knowledge to improve and beautify the earth, or we can use it to ...poison the air, corrupt the waters, blacken the face of the country, and harass our souls with loud and discordant noises, [or]...we can use it to mitigate or abolish all these things."
~ John Burroughs

* "In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water along with other resources has become the victim of his indifference."
-- Rachel Carson

* Acknowledging the physical realities of our planet does not mean a dismal future of endless sacrifice. In fact, acknowledging these realities is the first step in dealing with them. We can meet the resource problems of the world -- water, food, minerals, farmlands, forests, overpopulation, pollution -- if we tackle them with courage and foresight.
~ Jimmy Carter

* "I have never believed we had to choose between either a clean and safe environment or a growing economy. Protecting the health and safety of all Americans doesn’t have to come at the expense of our economy’s bottom line. And creating thriving companies and new jobs doesn’t have to come at the expense of the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, or the natural landscape in which we live. We can, and indeed must, have both."
~ Bill Clinton

"The air, the water and the ground are free gifts to man and no one has the power to portion them out in parcels. Man must drink and breathe and walk and therefore each man has a right to his share of each."
~ James Fennimore Cooper

* Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.
-- Jacques Cousteau

 

* "We have the ability to provide clean water for every man, woman and child on the Earth. What has been lacking is the collective will to accomplish this. What are we waiting for? This is the commitment we need to make to the world, now."
~ Jean-Michel Cousteau

* "UNICEF is helping mothers realize their dreams for the future — a future in which the basic needs for a child’s survival: food, clean water and simple health care — are guaranteed."
-- Jane Curtin

* Every human should have the idea of taking care of the environment, of nature, of water. So using too much or wasting water should have some kind of feeling or sense of concern. Some sort of responsibility and with that, a sense of discipline.
--The 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso

Every 15 seconds, a child dies because of a lack of clean water and sanitation. I should probably repeat that: Every 15 seconds, a child dies because of a lack of clean water and sanitation. A billion people on our planet will never have a clean drink of water. There are 2.5 billion people in the world without toilet facilities. That kind of deprivation isn’t even on our radar in the U.S., but in Africa it’s the central preoccupation of many people’s lives. And the most devastating thing about it is that it takes so little to change it. Just $25 will give someone clean water for life—yes, just $25 will change someone’s future forever.
-- Matt Damon

* To the naked eye, our oceans are beautiful. But scientists tell us that all of the world's fisheries will collapse by 2048, unless we change how we manage them. Help protect our oceans so the next generation can also enjoy their bounty.
-- Ted Danson

* Inanimate objects are sometimes parties to litigation. A ship has legal personality…The corporation…is an acceptable adversary and large fortunes ride on its cases…So it should be as respects valleys, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes – fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it.
-- Justice William O. Douglas

* "Clean water and health care and school and food and tin roofs and cement floor, all of these things should constitute a set of basics that people must have as birthrights."
-- Paul Farmer

* "When the well is dry, we learn the worth of water"
-- Benjamin Franklin

We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.
~Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732

* We must treat water as if it were the most precious thing in the world, the most valuable natural resource. Be economical with water! Don't waste it! We still have time to do something about this problem before it is too late.
-- Mikhail Gorbachev

The shortage of fresh water is the major ecological problem of this moment.
-- Mikhail Gorbachev

Water, like religion and ideology, has the power to move millions of people. Since the very birth of human civilization, people have moved to settle close to it. People move when there is too little of it. People move when there is too much of it. People journey down it. People write, sing and dance about it. People fight over it. And all people, everywhere and every day, need it.
-- Mikhail Gorbachev

"Globalization was supposed to break down barriers between continents and bring all peoples together. But what kind of globalization do we have with over one billion people on the planet not having safe water to drink?"
-- Mikhail Gorbachev

“A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure.”
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

* "So many people that I've seen can't get clean water. It's a crime."
~ Jay-Z

"Well I'm not just gon' go and do rap songs. I wanna touch, and maybe help, and see what I can do in these areas.' As I start looking around me, looking at things in ways that I can become helpful, starting at the first thing, water. Something as simple as water."
~ Jay-Z

 

By 2015, according to estimates from the United Nations and the United States government, at least 40 percent of the world's population, or about three billion people, will live in countries where it is difficult or impossible to get enough water to satisfy basic needs. "The signs of unsustainability are widespread and spreading," said Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project in Amherst, Mass. "If we're to have any hope of satisfying the food and water needs of the world's people in the years ahead, we will need a fundamental shift in how we use and manage water."
-- Douglas Jehl

Clean water is a necessity that we can no longer take for granted. Each year more people die of water related diseases than any other cause of death on this planet. With a higher rate of suffering and mortality than diabetes, cancer, high cholesterol, or war; or any two combined for that matter! An entire economy is growing around water. Those without money are suffering the most and risk severe illness from contaminated sources
-- Jewel

* Solutions and technologies exist to provide clean, affordable drinking water anywhere in the world. These solutions will save lives, reduce financial burdens, foster peace, and relieve millions of people from worrying about their next drink of water.
-- Jewel

 

"No one has the right to use America's rivers and America's Waterways, that belong to all the people. as a sewer. The banks of a river may belong to one man or one industry or one State, but the waters which flow between the banks should belong to all the people."
~ Lyndon B. Johnson

But we have not used our waters well. Our major rivers are defiled by noxious debris. Pollutants from cities and industries kill the fish in our streams. Many waterways are covered with oil slicks and contain growths of algae that destroy productive life and make the water unfit for recreation. "Polluted Water—No Swimming" has become a familiar sign on too many beaches and rivers. A lake that has served many generations of men now can be destroyed by man in less than one generation.
-- Lyndon B. Johnson

A nation that fails to plan intelligently for the development and protection of its precious waters will be condemned to wither because of its shortsightedness. The hard lessons of history are clear, written on the deserted sands and ruins of once proud civilizations.
-- Lyndon B. Johnson

* "If we could ever competitively, at a cheap rate, get fresh water from saltwater, ..(this) would be in the long-range interests of humanity which could really dwarf any other scientific accomplishments."
-- John F. Kennedy

* "We in Government have begun to recognize the critical work which must be done at all levels—local, State and Federal—in ending the pollution of our waters."
~ Robert F. Kennedy

* "...if we want to meet the obligations of our civilization and our culture which are to create communities for our children that provide them with the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment as the communities that our parents gave us, we've got to start by protecting that infrastructure; the air that we breathe, the water that we drink, the landscapes that enrich us."
~ Robert Kennedy, Jr.

"What we are fighting for is not just the fishes and the birds. We protect nature not for nature's sake but for our own sake because it's the infrastructure of our communities, and if we want to meet the obligations of our civilization and our culture which are to create communities for our children that provide them with the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment as the communities that our parents gave us, we've got to start by protecting that infrastructure; the air that we breathe, the water that we drink, the landscapes that enrich us. We're not protecting nature for nature's sake. We're protecting it because it enriches us, yes, it enriches our economy and we ignore that at our peril. But it is also enriching us aesthetically, recreationally, culturally, historically and spiritually. Human beings have other appetites besides money. And if we don't feed them, we're not going to grow up…we're not going to become the kind of beings that our creator intended us to become."
~ Robert Kennedy, Jr.

Industrial agriculture now accounts for over half of America's water pollution.
~ Robert Kennedy, Jr.

* "All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land."
~ Aldo Leopold

Multinational companies now run water systems for 7 per cent of the world's population, and analysts say that figure could grow to 17 per cent by 2015. Private water management is estimated to be a $200 billion business, and the World Bank, which has encouraged governments to sell off their utilities to reduce public debt, projects it could be worth $1 trillion by 2021. The potential for profits is staggering: in May 2000 Fortune magazine predicted that water is about to become 'one of the world's great business opportunities', and that 'it promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th'.
-- John Louma

"Civilization has been a permanent dialogue between human beings and water."
-- Paolo Lugari (founder of the Gaviotas Community in Colombia

"Water helped ancient man learn those first lessons about the rights of others and responsibility to a larger society.... It became part of the moral and mental legacy parents passed on to their children."
-- M. Meyer

"...Good luck and Good work for the happy mountain raindrops, each one of them a high waterfall in itself, descending from the cliffs and hollows of the clouds to the cliffs and hollows of the rocks, out of the sky-thunder into the thunder of the falling rivers."
-- John Muir

 

* Water is the most precious, limited natural resource we have in this country...But because water belongs to no one - except the people - special interests, including government polluters, use it as their private sewers.
-- Ralph Nader, 1971

* War over water would be an ultimate obscenity. And yet, unfortunately it is conceivable... Water has been a source over so many years of erosion of confidence, of tension, of human rights abuses, really, of so many in areas whose traditional water supplies have been controlled and depleted by occupational authorities. That must stop if we're going to be able to develop a climate for peace.
-- Queen Noor of Jordan

"What may be possible for a minority of humankind, albeit at great cost, simply cannot work for the humankind. Our kind of progress depends on lacerating the Earth, on gouging out its riches, on stripping is life-sustaining skin of soil and forest, on poisoning its pure air, on defecating copiously in its pure water... the single most important indicator of environmental decline is the extent to which the damage done is reversible. The most heinous ecological crime of all is for any one generation so seriously to assault the web of life that the damage done is literally irreversible for every generation that follows."
~ Jonathon Porritt

* "For many of us, water simply flows from a faucet, and we think little about it beyond this point of contact. We have lost a sense of respect for the wild river, for the complex workings of a wetland, for the intricate web of life that water supports."
~ Sandra Postel

* "Water is finite and we have not done a great job of managing it in the past."
~ Sandra Postel

 

* "We’ve poisoned the air, the water, and the land. In our passion to control nature, things have gone out of control. Progress from now on has to mean something different. We’re running out of resources and we are running out of time."
~ Robert Redford

The wars of the twenty-first century will be fought over water.
-- Ismail Serageldin, World Bank Vice President for Environmental Affairs

Clean water is not an expenditure of Federal funds; clean water is an investment in the future of our country.
-- Bud Shuster, U.S. Representative

"I have left almost to the last the magic of water, an element which owing to its changefulness of form and mood and colour and to the vast range of its effects is ever the principal source of landscape beauty, and has like music a mysterious influence over the mind."
-- Sir George Sitwell

"Water is the most basic of all resources. Civilizations grew or withered depending on its availability."
-- Dr. Nathan W. Snyder

* "The cleanup costs of polluting a river, injecting pesticides into the ground water, or putting noxious gases into the air have not been figured into the cost of the manufacturing or agribusiness that put them there in the first place. Historically, the economic incentive has been to pollute."
-- Gloria Steinem

I have always been a big advocate of tap water—not because I think it harmless but because the idea of purchasing water extracted from some remote watershed and then hauled halfway round the world bothers me. Drinking bottled water relieves people of their concern about ecological threats to the river they live by or to the basins of groundwater they live over. It's the same kind of thinking that leads some to the complacent conclusion that if things on earth get bad enough, well, we'll just blast off to a space station somewhere else.
-- Sandra Steingraber

More than 5,500 large dams impede America's running waters, leaving less than 2 percent of the country's 3.1 million miles of rivers and streams flowing free. In the wake of these river alterations trails a record list of endangered aquatic species. Two of every three freshwater mussel species are heading for extinction, or are already there; half of all crayfish species are imperiled; more than a third of the country's freshwater fish are in trouble -- 17 of them missing outright.
-- William Stolzenburg

"Water is life's mater and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water."
-- Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Hungarian biochemist and Nobel Prize Winner for Medicine.

* As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog across the poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on another planet to say about us: "With all their genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight and air and food and water and ideas," or, "They went on playing politics until their world collapsed around them."
~ U Thant

A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.
~ Henry David Thoreau

We used to think that energy and water would be the critical issues for the next century. Now we think water will be the critical issue.
-- Mostafa Tolba, former head of the United Nations Environment Program

* "Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man."
~ Stewart Udall

Water is fundamental for life and health. The human right to water is indispensable for leading a healthy life in human dignity. It is a pre-requisite to the realization of all other human rights.
-- The United Nations Committee on Economic, Cultural and Social Rights

I understood when I was just a child that without water, everything dies. I didn't understand until much later that no one "owns" water. It might rise on your property, but it just passes through. You can use it, and abuse it, but it is not yours to own. It is part of the global commons, not "property" but part of our life support system.
-- Marq de Villiers

Over 1 billion people have no access to clean drinking water, and more than 2.9 billion have no access to sanitation services. The reality is that a child dies every eight seconds from drinking contaminated water, and the sanitation trend is getting sharply worse, mostly because of the worldwide drift of the rural peasantry to urban slums.
-- Marq de Villiers

The trouble with water—and there is trouble with water—is that they're not making any more of it. They're not making any less, mind, but no more either. There is the same amount of water in the planet now as there was in prehistoric times. People, however, they're making more of—many more, far more than is ecologically sensible—and all those people are utterly dependent on water for their lives (humans consist mostly of water), for their livelihoods, their food, and increasingly, their industry. Humans can live for a month without food but will die in less than a week without water. Humans consume water, discard it, poison it, waste it, and restlessly change the hydrological cycles, indifferent to the consequences: too many people, too little water, water in the wrong places and in the wrong amounts.
-- Marq de Villiers

Wisdom understands that in a world of ecological interconnectedness there is no such things as “away.” We don’t throw things “away,” we simply put them someplace where they defile the land, foul the water, pollute the air or change the earth’s atmosphere.
-- Brian Walsh & Sylvia Keesmaat

 


* "You cannot have peace without human rights, democracy, gender equality, and clean water. Look to the root causes of war and you will find, in their reverse, the root foundations of peace."
-- Cora Weiss

 

"Rain is a blessing when it falls gently on parched fields, turning the earth green, causing the birds to sing."
-- Donald Worster


World Water Day - March 22

Earth Day - April 22

Read
The Better World
Shopping Guide

Every Dollar Makes
a Difference

Purchase at Amazon.com


Read

The BETTER
WORLD BOOK

... join the betterworld
movement...

FREE online

IN SEARCH OF UTOPIA:
100+ Milestones
To Our Utopian Future

paperback
99 cent Kindle edition
Youtube Video

1 Percent | Abundance | Acceptance | Accomplishments| Accountability| Achievement| Acknowledge | Action| Activism| Activists| Adversity | Advertising | Age | Alienation | AIDS | Anger | Animals | Answers | Approval | Art | Aspiration | Attitude | Attraction | Awe | Bankruptcy | Banks | Be Yourself | Begin Now | Beliefs | Belonging | Bernie Sanders | Better World | Biodiversity | Black History | Breathe| Brotherhood | Campaign Finance Reform | Cure Cancer | Causes | Celebrate | Challenge | Change | Chaos | Character | Charity | Children | Child Soldiers | Choices | Citizens United | Citizenship | Civil Disobedience | Civil Rights | Climate Change | College Tuition | Civilization | Collaboration |Comfort | Comfortable | Community | Compassion| Competition| Compromise| Confidence| Conflict Resolution| Connection | Conscious Evolution | Consciousness | Conscience | Conservation | Consumerism | Cooperation | CoOps | Corporate Personhood | Corporations | Corruption | Couples | Courage| Creativity | Criticism | Culture of Peace | Curiosity | Debt | Democracy| Department of Peace | Depression | Deregulation | Desire| Destiny| Dialogue | Dignity | Disabilities | Disarmament | Disasters| Diversity | Do The Right Thing | Dreams | Ecology | Economy | Ecosystem | Education | Effort | Ego | Elders | Election Reform | Emotions | Empathy| Empower| Encourage | End Citizens United | Enemies | Energy | Enthusiasm | Envision | Envy | Equality | Evil | Example| Excellence| Exercise| Expectations| Experience | Fair Trade | Failure | Fame | Family | Fast Track | Fathers | Fear | Feelings | Focus | Forests | Forgiveness | Fracking | Freedom | Friendship | Future | Global Awakening | Global Warming | Globalization | GMO Labeling | Goals | Goodwill | Government | Grassroots | Gratitude | Greed | Habitat | Habits | Happiness | Healing | Health | Heart | Heroes | History | Home | Homeless | Honor | Hope | Hugs | Human Rights | Humanitarian | Humanity | Humor | Hunger  | Ideals | Idealist | Imagination | Imagine | Improvement | Inclusion | Income Inequality | Indigenous | Individuality | Infrastructure | Inner Peace | Inspire | Integrity | Intention| Interconnection | Interdependence | Institutions | Interfaith | Intuition | Invention | Jealousy | Joy | Justice | Keystone XL Pipeline | Kind Word | Kindness | Kinship | Know Thyself | Knowledge | Labor | Landmines | Language | Laughter | Law | Leadership | Liberals | Listening | Literacy | Living | Living Wage | Love | Loneliness| Luck| Make a Difference| Mankind| Marriage| Meaning of Life | Media | Meditation | Memories| Mentoring| Microcredit | Military Budget | Millennium Development Goals | Minimum Wage | Miracles | Mission | Mistakes | Money | Morality| Mothers| Motivation| Movements| Music| Mystery| Mystical | Natural Resources | Nature | Networking| Nonconformity | No Fast Track | No Nukes | Nonviolence | Now | NSA Surveillance | Nurture | Obstacles | Opportunity | Oppression | Options | Organize | Parents | Pain | Parks | Participation | Partnership | Patience | Patriot Act | Patriotic | Peace | Peace On Earth | Peacekeeping | Peacetopia | Perseverance | Personal Growth | Personhood | Philanthropy | Philosophy | Plan | Police Militarization | Politics | Population | Positivity | Possibilities | Potential | Poverty | Power | Praise | Present | Pride | Principles | Priorities | Prison Reform | Problem Solving | Protest | Progress | Progressive | Prosperity | Public Opinion | Purpose | Question | Racism | Recycling | Redemption | Regulations | Reinvent | Remembered | Refugees| Resist | Resources | Respect | Responsibility | Revenge | Role Model | Root Causes | Sadness| Satisfaction| Science | Searching| Security| Self-Discovery| Self-Esteem| Self-Improvement| Senior Citizens | Shadow | Silence| Simplicity | Sisters | Skeptic | Slavery | Smile | Smoking | Social Entrepreneurs | Social Security | Society | Solace | Solitude | Solutions | Soulmates | Species Exctinction | Spirituality | Status Quo | Strength | Success | Sustainability | Sympathy | Talent | Tax Reform | Teachers | Teamwork | Technology | Thanksgiving | Thoughts | Time | Time Out to Refocus| Tolerance | Torture | TPP | Trees | Trust| Truth| Understanding | United Nations | Utopia | Values | Vegetarian | Veterans | Victory | Violence| Volunteer | Waiting | War | Water | Wealth Inequality |Wealth | Whistleblowers | Wilderness | Wildlife | Will | Willing | Willpower | WIN-WIN | Winning | Wisdom | Wishes | Witness | Women | Wonder | Woods | Work | World Federation | Worrying | Youth

Explore YOUR family tree
and Find YOUR Roots & Connections


Better World Handbook
by Ellis Jones, et al

Buy This Book


BetterWorld Heroes are included for illustration purposes. No endorsement implied.

We Can Build A Better World


BetterWorld Shopping Guide
by Ellis Jones

Buy This Book