Putting aside the tons of pollution in lakes and oceans, what strikes me the most now is the abject failure and neglect in cities like Jackson, Mississippi and Flint, Michigan. How are people so powerless, governments so weakened, and politicians so detestable that something as basic as clean drinking water in cities is no longer functioning?
And that list doesn't even include the tragedy of the commons situation that is California.
But going back to Jackson, Mississippi, it seems that elected officials refuse to properly fulfill their role in governing. Ie. serving the public. What does that say about an empire? It's not some accident that they are helpless in, more that it is in decline.
When you consider the political incentives, it's an under-appreciated miracle that politicians in the US serve the public at all and that things shamble along as well as they do.
I do agree with part of your sentiment. Those two examples are the worst case scenarios where misfortunes happened to align, and there are periods in history, as well as other countries today, where this sort of problem was/is rampant.
This is also not (exactly) a recent problem - the groundwork, no pun intended, was often laid long ago.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/21/lead-contami...
[2] https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article268...
With that said, we're now actually putting the money towards replacing them.
https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/funding-...
https://www.nrdc.org/resources/lead-pipes-are-widespread-and...
“Lead service lines—the pipes that carry water from the water main under the street to residences—have long been recognized as the primary contributor of lead in drinking water (we’ll call them lead pipes for simplicity’s sake). After conducting a survey of these lead pipes in the United States, NRDC estimates that there is a range of 9.7 million to 12.8 million pipes that are, or may be, lead, spread across all 50 states, including those that claim to have none.”
This affects some 22 million people.
And that is how you get lead poisoning in Flint.
Formerly, we wouldn't live in a desert if there wasn't any water. So we drilled deeper wells where the heavy metals are. We also put a lot of heavy metals into watersheds at the surface. As the watershed levels are dropping from drought or heavy draw, that becomes more of an issue.
Water is heavy and expensive to transport, treat and distribute. I don't think it's a simple problem to solve. It's a political issue to be sure, but it wouldn't be a political issue if it wasn't also an extremely difficult logistical issue at its core.
In the long run, it would probably be better for people to live where clean drinking water is readily and easily available. To be clear, that doesn't mean trucking in, treating and desalinization, it means people moving to areas with more rainfall.
Tons of replies: No, we see it too in X, Y, Z ways as well.
B: <Specific example highlighting said decline>
C: The decline isn't real, people abdicating their responsibilities totally isn't a problem, life has always been shite so quit complaining
Sorry, that's just what I see when you reply with:
>Clean drinking water in cities isn't the default state of affairs
Honestly, I'd say you are gaslighting here because you're trying to convince people that regressing from forward progress isn't a loss. Also, cities and civilization aren't the default state of affairs. There's millennia more of prehistoric time where humans lived in the unforgiving wilderness. Are you suggesting that we are not allowed complain until we're back to living nomadic lives, hunting wild game on the steppes? Like you said, anything better than that isn't the default state of affairs.
If you define exponential population growth as forward progress, for instance. Or the status quo of watershed draw and depletion as "forward progress". It has worked well for decades and isn't working anymore. Just because the aquifers are running low does not mean anyone is particularly to blame, or that we have "regressed".