La Vida Idealist

Last Thursday, Earth Day celebrated all methods to conserve our natural resources and how we as citizens of the world can help do so.

One of the surprising facts I’ve learned while volunteering with blueEnergy is how desperate developing nations have become for clean, filtered and pure sources of water. Water is the most basic element key to all human’s survival. Advocates during Earth Day raised awareness, often to the unknown observer, that clean water is not as plentiful that we may think.

From kindergarten through college I learned that conserving water is important to save energy and use less of the Earth’s resources. I did learn, or so I thought, that the Earth has plenty of water for its inhabitants. What I didn’t pick up is that clean sources of water are in a state of depletion.

While living in the jungle, I never thought that communities would have a shortage of water. During the rainy season I was blasting the torrential hourly downpours during my walks to the blueEnergy office. Might I add that the “rainy season” never quite ceases in the jungle. It just depends if it downpours hourly, or simply daily.

One of the main functions of blueEnergy is to build biosand water filtration systems and install them in various communities. We teach each community member how to properly use and maintain his or her system. You can imagine their skepticism when we attempt to explain these Easter Island statue lookalikes actually shoot out clean water, especially through the use of bacteria. Wait… what?? Bacteria! Gross.

“Not to worry,” we say, “these are good bacteria that eat bad bacteria.”

I won’t go into the complexity of these systems, because, lets be honest, I’m the business guy for blueEnergy, not the water technician. But, what I do understand and value is the use of these systems because I’ve used our household biosand water filter for the past six months. I often tell our little system how much I appreciate it helping fight against parasites, bad bacteria and other bad juju. A trip to the Bluefields hospital is not on the top of my list.

I hope that if this post caught your attention, consider learning and supporting blueEnergy and other organizations that provide resources for clean, drinkable water.

If you would like more information, you can follow blueEnergy’s Facebook and Twitter pages. There, you can read about our various water projects and how important this resource is within developing nations.

For more on the environment and other sustainability related issues, check out these other posts from La Vida Idealist bloggers.

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