Water huggers

So it was world water day on Thursday. Topic broke some media, and our newspaper devoted quite some space to it. There again and again, I saw the same idea, often implied and even said explicitly. It goes like this:

Drinking water supply is low in the developing world, in East Asia and Africa. Many people there live without proper sanitation and soon will be left without drinking water. It is therefore non-conscientious to abuse and run down water supply in America.

This same idea was also being sold to me by some decently educated people, one in fact from India. Now you'd think how retarded does one have to be in order to fly to America and not notice you are flying over the Pacific. Even lamest of the water-protection punks is supposed to carry at least a remote understanding that there's such thing as the world ocean. In K12, it's on all the Liberty pictures, and one story everyone has to learn is that Columbus had to sale across this thing.

The thing with oceans, is that you see, you cannot drink them. They are saline. Yet they are huge. In fact most of the planet is covered by oceans. Only tiny bit of water is fresh, and of that most is stored in polar ice caps. Oceans separate the continents, and that's why Chinese are not jumping the borders along with Mexicans. So we cannot really share. Water on the continents is the water evaporated from the oceans. Their surface is much bigger, and they are much closer to say the coast of Africa then some tiny lake in the Midwest. There is no such thing as global fresh water supply.

While we should take care of our waterways and water supplies, we'll have to do it of completely egoistic motifs. We like it that way. That obviously goes against the grain of quite some people. They just need a "higher" cause to justify them going hysterical.

Keeping the oceans clean and abundant with life is of course a global cause, but somehow it doesn't stick with the public. Maybe that's because they aren't really conscious these things even exist.