Normally I try to keep Happy Herbivore neutral; leaving politics and activism for other, more appropriate places, than a humble food blog. However, today I'm breaking that rule to participate in Blog Action Day 2010 -- an iniative to help spread awareness about the worldwide water crisis.
Nearly 1 billion people lack access to clean water.
To put that number in perspective, there are only 307 million people living in the United States and only 6.7 billion people living on the entire planet!
Worse still, nearly 42,000 people die EACH WEEK from unsafe water. Many of these deaths are children under the age of 5 who die from drinking unsafe water or from unhygienic living conditions.
What can you do to help?
Leave animal products off your plate as much as possible. It takes 66 gallons of water to produce 2.2 pounds of wheat and 6,604 gallons of water to produce 2.2 pounds of meat.
Use your iPhone less. iPhone's require half a liter of water to charge. Considering there are over 80 million active iPhone users, that's a lot of water!
Say No to Plastic Bottles: The average American drinks 200 bottles of water each year. It takes over 17 million barrels of oil to manufacture those bottles -- 86% of which will never be recycled.
Shop less: That cotton T-shirt you're wearing took 1,514 liters of water to produce. Jean require an extra 6,813 liters.
Conserve. The average person uses 465 liters of water per day.
My individual water use was 463.94 gallons per day (compared to 1,190.5 gallons per day the average American uses)... figure out your water footprint & make small changes to use less water.