A Waterfall of Issues, Entry 1

What's up With Water?

You've probably consumed a lot of it in your lifetime, because if you haven't, I'm guessing you wouldn't be reading this post... or you're perhaps one of the rare species that only needs a drink every few years.

*In which case, hats off to you.

As my dad always says, there are two things that deserve respect in this world: Oil and industry.

The environment and 8 bit music. As it's hard to write about something that must make its way through the audiological senses of a person, I decided to instead write about the other intrinsic piece of our existence.

*It's also the prerequisite to the invention of 8 bit music, so it earns real reverence in my mind. (more on this later)

In 76.546% seriousness, humans live off the land. Literally everything we use in our day to day life is a natural resource extracted, manipulated and distributed in some way or another. Some resources are less vital and more recreational, such as electronics. Many basic ones however, are quite a lot less meretricious when it comes to survival. Necessities like unto food, water, and kazoos actually fuel day to day tasks, like playing Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, taking back the factories from the bourgeoisie, and petting kittens at a local animal shelter.

*Okay, so kazoos are not at all necessary for life, but they're certainly epic.

Unless you live under a rock, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise to you that there are quite a lot of humans on the planet.

Like

A lot.

I mean like

over 7 billion

A lot.

*Enough to feed about 39,000,000,000 weasels, according to some back of the napkin calculations and this website: http://theoatmeal.com/quiz/weasels/go

As such, there becomes a problem. Every nation, clan, tribe, organization, cult or whatnot has people all desperate to eat food. Not only is each group concerned with feeding themselves, but within each, there's a network of people all looking to obtain what they need to survive. The means are indeed, diverse, and I can't say they're all equally audacious, but the point is that every population we can sort on a government based institutional level is amidst a slew of individuals all interacting to obtain survival.

*Some steal, some work, some scavenge, some beg, some imperialize conveniently placed nations and appropriate their labor through a wage and an oppressive government...

ya know, the usual.

That's not to say that we don't have enough food to feed everyone. The real issue is rooted in the infrastructure and sustainability of the operation. Things like nutrition, location of grown food, and the resources needed to distribute food globally all play a considerable part in the stopping the plague of hunger. Simply accomplishing the goal is its own debate.

*There are those participating in the debate who argue it could be as simple as feeding everyone if we really wanted, but there's a lot that human societies put first... such as enforced ethics, economic systems, and international relations. These are all socially constructed tripwires that must be navigated in solving world hunger, as most are not open to the idea of handing out free food.

The issues multiply when we shift our gaze to another highly appraised resource: oil

*Oh come on, I gotta stop doing that...

Water!

*It takes a long day's work or run in the blazing sun to truly appreciate an ice cold glass of this stuff.

It is this curious chemical, this liquid oddity and aqueous anomaly that I intend to focus my blog into dissecting through the next while.

*That's both figurative and literal, I actually do want to log some electrolysis experiments.

...oh yes, that's right... you can, in fact, dissect water. Not the classic frog from biology, but still just as entertaining, and quite a lot less repulsive.

A Waterfall of Issues, as I am calling this series-

*I hope my subtle pun was caught, because yes, it was intended.

-will analyze everything about water and all of philosophy's, economic's, and science's interactions with it. Think of it as both literal and metaphorical chemistry... how water reacts to the various environments it contributes to, and vice versa.

*As mentioned, I recently took a trip to Nicaragua with my school organization. The excursion revolved around water, and its global/domestic distribution. I'll draw upon the experiences and problems witnessed there as anecdotal source material through all of this.

This being said, you can brace yourself for the next entry of this mini-series, where we'll break the ice and chip the surface through the foremost enigma of water from a philosophical perspective. I'll do my best to answer the following question:

Is water a human right?

*Cue epic 8-bit outro