In Your Opinion Are Water Resources Over Or Undervalued In The United States? Essay - 1,138 words

In your opinion are water resources over or undervalued in the United States? Water is the most important life element to humans after oxygen. Without water human can live only up to 3 days after which they would die. Today water represents a great and profitable industry for the fact that the producers of the main US soft drinks need water, as well as the ordinary citizen who use water for their household needs, let alone for the lawn use. In the following essay I am going to speak about the water industry as being overvalued with respect to the green (social) economy based on various examples, literary findings as well as my personal opinion on the given matter. Water in the USA in my personal opinion is undervalued for numerous reasons, most of which are unrealized. Any typical American family, and it is a par to the US mentality and identity in my persona opinion is dreaming of having a suburban personal house with a wonderful back yard and with the picturesque front yard lush green lawns. It should be noted that Americans in the past year have spent more on their lawns than they have at the movies, an astonishing 17.4 billion dollars (Thompson, 2001).


The preservation of the suburban lawn oftentimes means the use of various organic and inorganic fertilizers like nitrates that greatly benefit the growth of the greenery on the lawn as well as increasing the fertility of the regular turf. As a rule, the fertilizers are almost always mixed with various pesticides and herbicides to assure the quality and beauty of the personal front yard lawns. At the same time, these pesticides, and fertilizers when applied almost always penetrate the ground and threaten to contaminate the ground waters below, thus making the whole area possess water not-suitable for household use. The largest cities unlike smaller towns indeed have to rely on the groundwater as their primary source of household water. The fertilizers can contaminate the water via runoffs soil storage, and dust, thus posing serious threat to the health of people. The fact that nitrogen negatively affects human fact, yet it is not usually accounted as a cost or expense by the water companies that operate in the given region, while in fact the cost/expense of human health affects the whole territory, thus factually reducing the income and therefore the overall value of the water in the USA.


Even though, it is people who pay for their health, it is still the society that losses from peoples sick leaves and the like. Maintaining high quality surface and groundwater supplies is a concern at the national and local level (Mattingly, 2000). It should be noted that in the USA groundwater accounts for 86% of the total water resources and provides from 25% to 95% of the drinking water supply for urban and rural areas. (Breen, 2002). In New York, The groundwater is only source of drinking water for both Nassau and Suffolk (Breen, 2002). The development of these counties with their growing populations has had an effect on groundwater quality over the past century.


During this time, much of the landscape has changed from rural agriculture to suburban development. These development patterns are particularly noticeable in Nassau and Western Suffolk Counties where the largest single crop cultivated is ornamental turf namely because of the growth of populations wealth. (Raul, ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

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Essay Tags: bottled water, water resources, drinking water, united states, united state

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