At the beginning of this new millennium we have a water crisis which threatens human’s existence in many parts of the world. One might ask, how sustainable is it to live in a world where approximately 1.1 billion people lack safe drinking water, approximately 2.6 billion people lack adequate sanitation, and between 2 and 5 million people die annually from water-related diseases (Gleick, 2005)?
UNICEF’s Report, The State of the World’s Children 2005: Children Under Threat, provides an analysis of seven basic "deprivations" that children feel and that powerfully influence their futures. UNICEF concludes that more than half the children in the developing world are severely deprived of one or more of the necessities essential to childhood: adequate shelter, sanitation, access to safe water, access to information, health care services, school, and food. Of these three are directly related to water:
• 500 million children have no access to sanitation
• 400 million children do not have access to safe water
• 90 million children are severely food-deprived
There are approximately 2.2 billion children (with 1.9 billion living in the developing world and about 1 billion living in poverty) in the world so approximately one in five in the world does not have access to safe water.
The looming present day water crisis must be faced using traditional knowledge and techniques inherited from the past in addition to our present day technological capabilities for more sustainable ways of dealing with water scarcity, particularly in developing parts of the world. Many present day water problems could be solved using the traditional methods developed and used for hundreds of years by the ancients. In parts of the western world, the philosophy of “having it all and all at
L. W. Mays (B)
School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-5306, USA e-mail: Mays@asu. edu
L. W. Mays (ed.), Ancient Water Technologies, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-8632-7_11, © Springer Science+Business Media B. V. 2010
Once” unfortunately has spread around the world. This has blinded many people of the forgotten sustainable ways of the ancients. So that in reality highly advanced methods are not required to solve many water problems, particularly in many of the poor and developing parts of the world. A large part of the future will be to live in concert with nature, not trying to defy nature.
World History
