You are walking your dog in a meadow on the hottest summer day. Lifting the water bottle to your parched mouth you gulp down the last drop. Your eye catches a glimpse of a cool, bubbly, clear stream. Running towards the stream you stop at the noise of a truck. Turning your head to see two men dumping waste into the stream that is right, waste, like the kind of waste that you flush down the toilet. You look again at the stream it no longer looks like the cool, bubbly, clear stream, for it now looks green, thick, with pieces of trash floating on top this is called pollution, the dumping of waste in our water sources.

If we do not do anything our population rate will go down because we will get sick and some sicknesses are untreatable. Yes, cleaning our waters will help us live a healthier life. Trash makes up the largest volume and most visible type of pollution in our rivers and lakes. And all that trash come from us. It is the gum, candy wrapper, and coke bottle that you threw on the ground that makes our waters and its creatures unhealthy for us. Some toxins found in the water are metals, inorganic elements, acids, salts, and organic chemicals like pesticides. This you may think may not seem dangerous because most of our water is filtered. Wrong! Mercury is a metal found in the water (it is released by mainly power plants). But fish accumulate the mercury which is dangerous to humans. And extremely dangerous for people with health problems and pregnant woman who eat fish on a regular basis. Some dangerous waterborne diseases are cholera, dysentery, polio, infectious hepatitis, and schistosomiasis. Together these diseases can kill about six to eight million people a year. This is why factories should care about what they dump in the water and what will happen because they have no idea that they could kill us and even themselves.

But pollution can not only kill us but it kills animals too. Some sea creatures mistake pieces of trash for food or the get caught in it and die because it strangles them. An example of this is a plastic bag is thrown on a beach the tide comes in and takes it out into the ocean. Now a plastic bag filled with water floating around in the ocean looks like a jellyfish, and a wonderful sea creature eats these stinging jellies is the turtle. But when turtles mistake plastic bags for jellyfish they eat it. It then gets stuck around their lungs; it suffocates them and kills them. It has happened too many turtles but we are doing a lot more to help them. Dolphins and whales come up to the surface to breath, if they don't they will die. You see unlike other fish dolphins and whales do not have gills, actually they are not classified as fish at all, they are actually mammals. Oil spills in the ocean affect this because oil in the ocean covers the top which makes it very hard to come to the surface. Also dogs and cats that drink from streams can get sick if the water is strictly polluted.

Polluted water makes everything look ugly. In a fairy tale a forest is described like, the beautiful willow tree hung over the glistening water where the colorful fish swam blowing bubbles while dear little bunny rabbits hopped around, squirrels scuttled around looking for food, and slim deer graze in the grass. That is just fake, a real forest would probably be like, the tall pine trees shaded the deer that ate the wild grasses that grew by the dirt filled stream. Some forests are pretty but some forests are ruined by streams. So take the trees from the fairytale forest and mix them with the water from the real life forest. It does not look good. There are some places that care about rivers and streams and do not let them get polluted but some do not care. When I stayed on a ranch in Wyoming the stream that ran behind it was how they got water. It was so clean, cool, and fresh that you could just put some in a cup and drink it right there without worrying if it was dirty. Now I have a creek in my back yard but it is very polluted so I could not drink from it. Seeing trash floating down the creek and stuck at the bottom is disgusting. And there are many more areas that are like this and need to be improved.

Everyone can help clean our waters. And there are so many things that can be done too. But if you want to help you really have to believe that you can make a difference. And encourage others to take a stand against water polluters because the more and more people there are doing something to help the bigger chances there are that our world could be clean and healthy once again.