As amazing as it is, we Americans are able to go about our day to day activities, turning on the faucet whenever we please, knowing we are getting safe, clean water. We don’t even think twice. We live in our bubble, rarely looking past our own zip code, while millions of others live a completely different life, with different struggles, different priorities, different goals and dreams, and are constantly faced with obstacles we will never know. Carrying buckets of polluted well water, sometimes for miles, to their families, knowing they need water but not knowing if they will become sick from it. All while we live in a land where we believe that clean water is a right that we should be given without question.
Polluted water kills more people than all forms of violence. Really think about that. Then think about how the violence is recorded and distributed in media, you almost can’t avoid hearing about it, but when was the last time you read a families’ personal struggle and loss of a family member over water? It is sad, but true. Thinking about it again, is our intentional ignorance a form of violence? This instills a feeling of guilt in me, but I will do what I can to help.
Sustainability is a catch phrase used by laymen and experts in several fields. The word sustainability by original definition meant the ability to sustain, or the potential to keep things the same way. Now, people in all areas have made their own definition of sustainability to the point where the true definition has been lost. Perhaps this isn’t on accident; as the thermodynamic principle of entropy states, entropy is forever increasing, which states that things cannot stay the same. Therefore true “sustainability” is not possible, in any field, for any area. It is impossible.
That being said, the term “sustainability” for my purposes in environmental engineering represents the ideas and efforts made to preserve a natural system, or even better, to minimally disrupt a system despite inevitable changes to the respective environment; including increasing population, urbanization, temperature and energy changes. Though “sustainability” has become the buzz-word of environmental discussions world-wide, I respectfully recommend the use of “Low Impact Design” as an alternative. I know, three words to replace one isn’t ideal, however, those three words do have one less syllable, so to me, it’s justified.