Let's get serious: Last Call at the Oasis

[DDuckworth]

This is the first in a series of topics that I plan to start posting in periodically, "Let's get serious" will address issues I feel are vital to society and need more attention and discussion. This week: Water, next week Cissa (Cispa's bastard brother)

Last call at the oasis is a documentary which can be found on the Netflix instant watch queue.

It has an INCREDIBLY important important message and some wonderfully done visual special effects to really show just how bad of a situation we are currently in. Another closely related (but admittedly not as good) documentary is Bottled Life which I would recommend watching first if you watch both as the importance of Oasis is made all the more clear after watching Bottled Life.

This all boils down to two key issues: The privatization of the public commodity of water, and the necessity for the use and consumption of "Recycled Water" which has a large opposition in people's minds because it seems contaminated when in truth, it is cleaner than any other water.


I would love to hear your opinions on the subject, and I beg of you to watch at LEAST Oasis before commenting because it is quite a polarizing film.

Some of my own personal thoughts:
I was surprised to hear we aren't ALREADY using "recycled water." I thought all water we drank came from revitalized runoff/sewage water and I thought that's what water treatment plants were all about...I had no idea we were still pulling water out of the ground and lakes endlessly.

I was surprised to hear that bottled water companies are the ones that are tasked with testing themselves for safety, there are no FDA agents going in and testing their water, they are just asked to provide proof their water is clean with little to no checks and balances. The safety of our own drinking water is out of our hands when it comes to bottled water.

If any of you have thoughts on this matter please leave them here, I want to get this issue out to as wide an audience as possible because the human race is in serious jeopardy and we can't even see it coming, nobody even realizes we are in a water shortage!

 

[Fay_Galore]

I have not watched the documentary nor do I know anything about water management in the USA, so my question could be a dumb one, doesn't anyone just drink tap water in the US?

what happens to sewage water in the US if it isn't being filtered and reused?
where do you guys get drinking water from? is it all mineralwater?! that can't be right?

 

[DDuckworth]

I have not watched the documentary nor do I know anything about water management in the USA, so my question could be a dumb one, doesn't anyone just drink tap water in the US?

what happens to sewage water in the US if it isn't being filtered and reused?
where do you guys get drinking water from? is it all mineralwater?! that can't be right?

Never a dumb question when it comes to education! I am more than happy to answer that's part of why I posted.

Sewage water is lightly filtered, or not at all, then put out directly into the ocean. I have no idea whose idea this was, but fuck that guy.

Our drinking water comes from a variety of sources, the great lakes, various lakes and damns (surface waters), and in places where the water has become toxic from companies thanks to mr dick fucking cheney, they use underground aquifers. These aquifers take thousands of years to fill up, and we have drained most of them within decades, so they obviously won't replenish at the speed we use them.

The worst part of it all, is that our water filtration systems were never designed to filter out chemicals, it was built as a state of the art SOLID waste removal and that's pretty much it. At the moment there are traceable levels of hormones from birth control and many other antibiotics from the the stuff our bodies don't absorb then excrete being put back into our lakes, streams, and the oceans.

 

[DDuckworth]

Bump because I'm sad this didn't get a larger response!