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I / The necessity of an education about the respect of water : does water need to be respected ?

A / A source of life which must be respected. 

When is has been formed, this between 4 thousand and 5 five thousand millions of years ago, the Earth was fenced by a very high-temperature-gazes belt, among which featured oxygen and hydrogen. Time going on, these two elements got cooler and combined till to form huge cloudy strata, and it rained… during thousand millions of years !

Then water had all the time to fill the folds and the holes of the earth's crust and to recover its ¾. Since then, its quantity has remained the same.

Nowadays, scientists think that life has appeared 3 thousand millions of years ago in the few deep waters of lakes and lagoons warmed by the sunbeams. Bacteria and unique-cell-shape beings, getting more and more numerous and evolved, formed more and more complex beings : fishes, 300 millions of years ago, then batrachians and reptiles, and finally mammals 75 millions of years ago. Mankind has only appeared 2 millions of years ago. So it's really a young species then[1].

By its origins, life is quite dependant on water. This one is the first human, animal or vegetal body's component[2].

Water ensures the irrigation and the flexibility of our tissues, makes the digestion possible by dissolving the food and facilitating its assimilation, ensures the thermal regulation and permits the waste evacuation.

If a human being can endure the loss of the half quantity of his proteins or the quasi totality of his greases, if he can survive 5 weeks without eating, he suffers from the thirst if he just loses 2 % of his water. If he loses 15 % of it, he dies.

But water is not only essential for life, it's also an ecosystem. In a permanent or in a seasonal way, rivers run to the sea, generating various and diversely populated habitats. Lakes, ponds, "motionless" areas the weak renewal of which makes more sensible to pollutions, inspire the soul of poets and painters. The wetlands welcome the migrating birds and give happiness to naturalists and ornithologists.

Composed in one hand by these different habitats and in the other hand by their animal and vegetal inhabitants, the aquatic ecosystem generates through the mediation of the sunlight and the warm of which a real food chain.

By photosynthesis, some producers, the plants and the seaweeds, supply material and food to primary consumers – who exclusively eat plants – or to secondary consumers – who also eat animals. Whatever they will be micro organism or fish, all these species will transfer one more time this energy when they are eaten by the tertiary consumers. The decomposers, bacteria and mushrooms, will rot the death cells and will give the system back some elements the flora will assimilate, closing then the ring of life.

Water is also at the bottom of  mankind's history and culture. The great rivers have been the bower of the most ancient civilisations, for reasons concerning either nutrition or military strategy, and water often plays an important role in the religions, myths, or symbolisms[3].

So mankind has tried to dominate water, to domesticate its use. From the roman aqueducts to the "water trades" of the Middle Age, from its fountains to the pipes of the Second French Empire, human being develops substructures to make the resource to be on his own service. As a nature's Lord, he fits the water up.

Today, water still plays a prevalent role in our societies. In the home, it is used to drink, to boil the aliments, to do the washing up, to wash oneself up, to keep gardens and balconies up. It permits the farmer to water his breeding and to irrigate his cultures. For the industrial, water is above all a primary matter which enters the composition of a large list of products[4]. It permits him to produce electricity and to cool his power stations. Water has also a relaxing function, often in the same time.

Then, it's an economical good, having a cost and a price and some important stakes follow from it, stakes which can concern either money or power.

But the human activity has its own price too : it affects water and ecosystem, by aggressions or pollutions.

The aggressions undermine the integrity of the waterways : high fittings on their banks, constructions of canals, granulats extractions which causes erosion and disappearing of numerous species, construction of dams and embankments which disrupt the cycles of the high and low waters.

The pollutions undermine the self-depuration capacity of water. When these pollutions are caused by organic and biodegradable matters, the consummation of oxygen can grow up in a first time (for the bacteria to eliminate those polluting matters) till an asphyxiation of the river in a second time, causing the death of its fauna and its flora.

On the contrary, the enriching in nutritive elements like nitrogen and phosphorus coming from fertilizers and rejections can cause the eutrophication of the system and a proliferation of seaweeds and aquatic plants which will consume the part of the oxygen the other species need to survive. If in the same time the biomass rises up and the quantity of the oxygen diminishes, the phenomenon can go on till the dystrophy, the waste being more and more numerous and the self-recycling capacity of the river being then saturated.

Some toxic substances can also enter the food chain, and concentrate for a part of themselves in the organs of the herbivorous fishes, fishes who'll contaminate later their fellows or the carnivorous birds. The concentrated level of toxicity being more and more higher as the food scale is climbed up, the species being positioned at the end of the chain are the most threatened. This phenomenon is called the bio-amplification.

All these kind of pollutions can be domestic, caused by the rejections of wastewater effluents, industrial products (like electric piles), collective wash waters, or simply the streaming rainy waters which scrub the roads and the parking and get saturated with organic or heavy metals particles. 

They can be industrial taking the appearance of organic or chemical effluents, and causing an increasing of the temperature, or the appearance of suspended matters.

They can be related to agriculture, when weed killers, pesticides and other chemical products  accumulate themselves in the underground water tables and disrupt the food chain as we have seen[5].

But the ecosystem isn’t the sole victim of the human activity. Needing to drink and food himself, the human being is directly concerned by the quality of water. Being close to this latter in his quotidian, positioned on the apex of the food chain, he's got a real interest in ensuring its quality.

This interest is all the more higher that the water resource is unequally shared out among continents and countries – even among the different regions of a same country. If the global volume of water is nearly constant, 97,2 % of it is salted, the 2,15 % remaining being essentially concentrated as ice. The really exploitable quantity represents only 0,65 %.

(estimations taken from "Vive l'Eau", pedagogical program of the Agence de l'Eau Rhin-Meuse).

In the Mediterranean basin, it goes from less than 100 m³ by inhabitant and by year in the Palestinian territories, in Gaza and in Malta ; to 10000 m³ in Albania and in ex-Yugoslavia.

It also presents a great irregularity in accordance with the various years and a big variability between the seasons.

Moreover, the practise of sea-water desalination has become indispensable in certain areas, but its energetic and so financial, cost remains high. If we can imagine that this cost will decrease during the years to come the solution can't be applied as a general one yet.

The lack of water is finally linked to the demographic growth and the development issue. The resource is particularly insufficient in the regions where the demographic growth increases. This increasing of the population also increases the pressure on space and resource and increases at the same time pollutions and wastes.

If a global trend of a progressive reduction of birth-rate seems to have appeared, especially in the South Mediterranean countries, a lot of regions remain to have a huge potential of increasing, according to their young population. In the same way an acceleration of the populations' movements to the towns can be expected, we can foresee a probable and more and more important localisation of the demand of water, which will be accompanied by a tragic worsening of the uses conflicts. In a general way, the estimations for the future of the South Mediterranean countries indicate a huge increasing of the suffering from water-stress population proportion, from now to 2050[6].

Indispensable to all of us, only available in a relatively limited quantity, fragile, interdependent on our own species, water seems to appear as the common denominator of the Creation, the angular stone of the life, whatever, a wealth which must be respected. This respect will involve political and collective behaviours, but it will also involve individual behaviours. So it's time for us to wonder what can be the respect of water.