The Inevitable Water Shortage in America’s Future :: Drinking Water Shortage

The same dream again.   It had been haunting him for weeks now.   Always the same.   Water.   Fresh water.   Drinkable water.   He got out of bed slowly, his stillsuit itching in that one certain spot again, and went to his refrigeration unit.   What flavor do I want this morning?, he thought to himself.   Eggs Benedict.   He opened the top of the squeeze tube and gulped the yeast solution down. All the troubles had begun in the year 2010 when Aldo was in his first year of college.   The first of many droughts had hit the Southwestern United States of America due to excessive use of the Colorado River.   Few had died in that one, but it was just a child compared to the trials to come. Aldo Goldwater was now thirty-five years old.   He had grown up in Phoenix, Arizona in a time when water conservation was a thing of inconvenience.   People back then would flood their lawns, wash their vehicles, even bathe with water.   Times were different now. The Water Conservation Act of 2011 was one of the U.S. Government’s first feeble attempts to ensure water quality and availability into the future.   His father, too, had been a visionary, and was important in the drafting of that first weak attempt at revamping the water usage laws in the United States. The droughts of 2016 and 2017 proved it ineffective, however, and deaths around the country totaled in the thousands, but that was just the beginning.   As global warming and ozone layer depletion gained the forefront in the news, temperatures around the world continued to rise.   Rainfall decreased annually at a steady rate, and polar ice caps were melting, making sea levels rise.   Ironically, the US’s major source of water, the Ogallala Aquifer, the largest non-renewable reserve of water in the world (Reisner 11) ran out in 2017, just when our water situation was at its peak. Water shortages were not the only problem.   When river water is used in irrigation, much of it evaporates, the rest usually finds its way back to the river it came from.   Due to the evaporation and repeated use, it increases in salinity, salt.   Each time it is used and reintroduced into the rivers, the water gets saltier.   Each year crops got smaller, until many areas previously used for farming could no longer sustain plant life.   In some areas you could even see a white dusting of salt (Reisner 6) that looked like a frost in ninety-five degrees of heat.