g about 9,000 cubic kilometers readily available for human use and exploitation (4:80). It is estimated that in principle this is enough water to support 20 billion people (4:80).
However, because the water supply and the human population are unevenly distributed, water availability becomes a problem. Areas such as Iceland have an overabundance while countries such as Bahrain have no access to fresh water and are dependent on desalinization of seawater. Further complicating the situation is the amount used by different groups. The average American consumes more than seventy times as much water each year as the average resident of Ghana in Africa (4:80).
Fresh water is used for public drinking purposes, in agriculture and for industrial uses. Though each country varies in its water uses, agriculture is the main user around the world. "Average globally, seventy-three percent of water withdrawn from the earth goes for this purpose" (4:80). An area of the earth's surface equaling the size of India is currently under irrigation with an eight percent increase annually.
There are two main ways to increase a local water supply when shortages occur: trapping more water by damming rivers and "mining" groundwater, and by implementing conservation methods related particularly to irrigation. In reality, however, fresh water is becoming increasingly scarce as population, agriculture and industrial uses grow. Safe drinking water is now an expensive commodity.
In 1987, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) claims that American corporations dumped 550 million pounds of toxic waste into the country's lakes, streams and rivers (5:33). Further, these same companies buried another 3.9 billion pounds of pollutants in the ground, over or around the aquifers that supply half the nation's drinking water. The disturbing news is that some of these pollutants or poisons are not even regulated under the EPA.
As a result, betw...