This ad appeared in The Washington Times Weekly on September 26, 2022.
Please click the photo to view the ad as it appeared in these publications.
“Water, water everywhere,
nor any drop to drink.”
Those words, from The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, are now over 200 years old, but they are appropriate for a very current trend.
Access to clean, safe drinking water remains a critical and growing problem for billions worldwide. The United Nations’ UNWater program reports that 2.3 billion people live in water-stressed countries.. The overwhelming majority of the earth’s water is not safe for consumption. And efforts to desalinate ocean water are incredibly expensive, therefore not a viable option for most.
If the United States (indeed, the world) already struggles to provide clean and safe drinking water to our current population, how will we cope in 10 to 20 years with tens of millions of additional people? The battle over the water in the Colorado River has raged for years as residents of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and California struggle to pull from the river’s natural flow to meet the demands of their towns and cities. In most cases, California comes up the loser as the northern states drain the river before it reaches the west coast.
Since 1972, NPG has worked to build wide-spread support for programs designed to slow, halt, and eventually reverse population growth in order to reach a smaller truly sustainable level. Only by achieving a smaller population size will we be able to protect our fragile water supplies.
You can help
By sharing this ad with family and friends, and encouraging them to visit our comprehensive website, www.NPG.org, you will help NPG spread our message and recruit more support for our efforts.
JOIN US AND SUPPORT OUR GOALS
This advertisement is part of NPG’s 50th Anniversary Public Awareness Campaign. NPG has committed to placing fifty ads in this commemorative year as we pursue our goal to educate more and more Americans regarding population size and growth.