Reflection

To our dismay, we learned that access to clean water is increasingly threatened, not by naturally occurring climatic phenomena, but by human activities like pollution and climate change. Of course, whenever any life-sustaining commodity becomes scarce, the poor suffer the most. However, what made us especially angry was discovering that water scarcity is yet another source of gender inequality in many developing countries. Our feelings of anger slowly turned to guilt for not doing more to fight climate change and water pollution ourselves–especially after our grandmother told us that water collection is still very much a part of the lives of our distant female relatives in Sri Lanka. While water conservation is important here in the US, the most effective way in which we can all help women and girls in the developing world would be to make environmentally friendly decisions in our daily lives.