This afternoon I had the extreme pleasure of attending a presentation of solving the global water crisis. The presentation was run by Maude Barlow, who lives in Ottawa, Canada and has a decorated resume in environmental rights, specifically clean water acts. She has even helped construct laws at the United Nations level, so I was very fortunate to be able to hear her perspective and ideas on the environment and water scarcity. She also wrote the novel Blue Gold which was one of the first books discussing water and the scarcity of it in the near future. Barlow wants to prove to people that the problem of water scarcity and pollution is just as important and prevalent as climate change, if not more prevalent and terrifying. She discussed how many people in the past believed this good such as water and fossil fuels were endlessly abundant and led to people overusing the resources to an extreme degree. Now a large majority of the world is stuck with water shortage or stuck with extremely polluted water. Even the United States has extremely polluted water in areas such as Flint, Michigan and Toledo, Ohio, but most every place has at least harmful microplastics in the water. Barlow stated the fact that 2.5 billion people in the word do not have access to proper sanitation, which shocked me. It is unbelievable how sheltered and how lucky people like myself are to grow up in a place where we are never forced to worry if drinking water will be clean or if I will even have running water at home. I quite honestly cannot imagine going through some of the hardships third world countries are forced to go through just to receive a small amount of sanitary water, but that could be the very legitimate future if we proceed to waste water in the manner we have been. She had many points that truly opened my eyes regarding the danger of our future and water supply. She discussed how just recently the United States discovered that we only have half as much ground water as we originally believed. That other half is contaminated by chemicals or has absorbed too much salt water and has become undrinkable to humans. I also thought it was very interesting that she touched on the large algae blooms and bacterial growth in Lake Erie considering I discussed that problem and the voting of the Lake Erie bill just an hour before the talk. It was very disheartening when she said that the United States are moving in the complete opposite way of protecting natural environment and water. Barlow discussed how Trump just recently announced the largest cut back on the Clean Water Act since it was established in 1962. She opened my eyes showing that the fight for clean water is a fight that we must keep fighting and be extremely persistent with. Corporations will proceed to ignore the idea that we do not have enough sanitary water for the future, but we must keep fighting until everyone realizes and accepts the truth regarding the world water crisis.