Around the world, millions of people don’t have access to clean water. And those millions of people don’t stop short in America.

Around the world, approximately 783 million people don’t have access to clean water. Approximately 1% of non-native American people don’t have access to clean water and 13% of Native American populations go without clean water. Sometimes people live in dry areas where water is not accessible, sometimes dirt and bacteria leach into water (something that isn’t safe by any means), but sometimes, humans cause the pollution of water through oil.

There’s multiple documentaries made about the condition of people who have oil in their water due to fracking around homes. These people are able to light their faucet water on fire, something that is definitely not safe for human consumption. Humans have the right of accessible, affordable, safe water but that is, by no means, safe. Fracking isn’t safe for the Earth and isn’t safe for people.

Water can also be tainted by deteriorated water pipes as seen in Flint, Michigan. Flint has been subject to contaminated water for nearly 3 years.

Water quality certainly isn’t always something that is about hurting the Earth but in cases where that does happen, poor water quality is harming the Earth.

When I went over CAFOs, the manure of such large animal organizations can leach into water sources and contaminate that source with low hopes of restoring it. With this in perspective, I want to express that poor water quality can be a human caused a portion of the time.

Contamination can also occur in the oceans as millions of gallons of oil are spilled in American waters each year. This easily hurts fish populations as oil is not safe in any means on humans or fish. The fish that are contaminated are then caught and sold to people in supermarkets. According to consumerlab.com, a serving of fish meat is likely to contain far more contamination than a fish oil supplement which can contain oil and mercury.

Water contamination is always directly related to earth’s deterioration, but it harbors many different ways it harms us humans. It is important to keep our water safe for everyone around us and ourselves.