Environmental Awareness

 

This image depicts a mother providing her baby water out of a small bottle cap. This image speaks to me especially with respect to the ALS ice buck challenge. The message in this picture sends is that there are millions of people everyday struggling to get one of life’s basic necessities in order to survive, and that is water.

It is heartbreaking to think that a girl in Africa has to walk three miles before school to fetch water from a distant well or dam to provide for the family, and half the time ends up missing school because the walk there and back takes too long. One in every six human beings has no access to clean water within a kilometer of their homes (Occupy For Animals, n.d).

 

Limited access to water is mainly a crisis for the poor and for countries such as South Africa. However, it is sad to see how the developed countries such as America (who were the first to start the ALS ice bucket challenge initiative) have more resources and are able to access water more accessibly and easily but decide to use it for wastage.

It is a waste in my opinion to dump buckets of water over yourself to raise awareness for a disease when there are millions of people living in poverty struggling to just get a drop, let alone a bucket of water.

There could surely be other ways in attempting to raise awareness that does not need to be done by drenching oneself with buckets of water. Society has the responsibility to be environmentally conscious and be aware of the issues surrounding them. They should be just as aware that water wastage is just as important as raining funds for charities and diseases. People are dying all over the world due to poverty, and if there is a way we could prevent it and be environmentally conscious then we should be. Water is a precious resource because life cannot exist without it.

 

I think that society needs to realise the environmental impact that water wastage has on people and the environment especially for people in poverty who struggle everyday and walk miles to get a bucket of unsanitary water. The ALS is a good cause but I think that society needs to realise the ignorance in wasting buckets of water for a trend; whereby they could just donate to the cause instead. As I mentioned previously, we have a responsibility to our environment and the people that live in it; therefore there is no harm in doing good, as long as that good is doing no harm.