In the ancient past, maintaining a source of clean drinking water was an everyday priority. With the industrial age came new and more potent sources of potential toxins into the environment, including water, but many other natural hazards such as bacterial infection of water remained an issue. While today running water is the standard in cities and in the developed world, much of the developing and rural population depends on traditional water sources. Even for those who live in areas with treated, running water, pollution in the water supply can occur and cause great harm. The safety of treated drinking water is completely dependent on the competence of the people running the operations, and their leaders.
Pollution in drinking water continues to threaten human and environmental health in every country of the world (Ponting, 1991). A problem for all societies which is interrelated with clean drinking water is the disposal of waste water and sewage. This can be a major source of water contamination when sewage runoff contaminates the supply of drinking water with fecal matter, chemicals from pharmaceutical drugs and other things that have been washed down the drain (Ponting, 1991). Pollution in drinking water can be caused by industrial waste as well as air pollution, which contaminates the rain water (Ponting, 1991).
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While there are laws about pollution, there is a problem. That is the fact that law enforcement only reacts after a law is broken, and it is too late to prevent the actual damage to the ecosystem. The process of the law will punish the offender, but it cannot fix the problem that was created. This is a great challenge, because clean drinking water is becoming scarcer (Ponting, 1991). This is likely to get worse if climate change progresses, and the world deals with more droughts, floods and changing temperatures, all of which affect water supply (Ponting, 1991).
- Ponting, C. (1991). A green history of the world. London: Sinclair-Stevenson.
