Water Everywhere and Not a Drop for Free

Only when you look carefully at the enormity of the environmental pollution problem do you realize that the present efforts and funds being expended will not turn the turbid tide which has created pollution of our urban environment. Water resources serve as a case in point. Reference is made particularly to the degraded water quality in the metropolitan complexes of America. In the past, water either for domestic, industrial or recreational use was not always available but when it was people usually considered it a ^free commodity/5 Today, the technology of water transmission and treatment makes quantities of water available at incredibly low costs. However, water for tomorrows5 users will and should have an increasingly higher price tag. Considerable evidence exists that the attitudes of metropolitan Americans about water resources change very slowly in the absence of a crisis condition. Ineffective planning for floods and droughts are traditional examples. One approach to reduce an increasing spread of water pollution is to be honest with the present student generation. Teachers and other workers with youth must begin to prepare students for the difficulties they face in terms of environmental pollution which will be inherited from us. Three major points need to be emphasized: 1) Water pollution is the most complex to understand and to combat of all the forms of urban environmental pollution, 2) The cost of water pollution control is the basic reason for the frequency and severity of pollution and 3) If anti-water pollution campaigns are to be waged successfully they must be done on a personal, localized level. The suggestion is made that the youth of America need to become involved with all three of the above considerations if long term water quality improvement can be made. The urban dweller feels he is more at the mercy of a fouled atmosphere than a fouled river or lake. At the same time sources of air pollution and remedies for its control are relatively simple to identify. For these reasons this author feels that measures to abate air pollution effectively will be taken much sooner than the necessary steps required to reduce water pollution. The complexity of effluents in addition to the complexity of political jurisdictions whose duty it is to monitor and control water pollution make water pollution reduction efforts gigantic tasks in large metropolitan areas (where 72% of Americans live).