Rebecca Scibek '01

As an undergraduate majoring in Environmental Studies, Scibek spent time at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies in Israel. After graduation, she worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in the West African nation of Ghana. She is now coordinator for volunteers at the Charles River Watershed Association, which promotes water conservation in Boston and its suburbs. Here she talks about the emerging worldwide shortage of clean water—and the implications of not having enough.

Having enough clean water is an issue everywhere. In northern Ghana, for instance, the cattle drink and cool off in the same impoundments that the people use for bathing and drinking. And the water makes people sick even though they have some immunity to the pathogens in it. I worked with farmers there for whom water was a big issue. It determined whether they would have enough food to feed their families.

There are big storms two or three times a week during the rainy season, and then it doesn't rain for another six months. There are villages where the residents have to walk up to five miles in the dry season to get to a river. This is done by the women. They do it twice a day, carrying water in big jugs balanced on their heads. It's not anything out of the ordinary. That's just everyday life for them.

But water is a problem in the U.S. as well. Think about the southwestern U.S.: Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada. Those states have growing cities in the desert. Trying to build cities where there is no water is not going to work in the long term. And this is happening all over the world.

In Boston, where I live now, we get about 48 inches of water annually, and people don't think about water. But because the city and its suburbs are paved over, the water doesn't go into the ground to recharge the water tables. And because it doesn't recharge, there are water issues. What we're doing here is not sustainable.