CAP M1A2 Journal

1. What are your Degree Depths? Environmental Studies, Arabic

2. Area of interest within one of your Depths? Pollution, which relates clearly to environmental

studies

3. Identify a global issue/problem that's related to this field: Access to safe water is a basic human

need that is not being met in much of the world today.

4. How does this relate to your Degree Depths? I learned how to test water quality in my Ecology

class and studied attitudes toward environmentalism in different world cultures in my

Globalization class. I have also worked on water rights in the desert setting of Kuwait.

5. Why is the problem significant? Depletion of fresh water is a dire consequence of population

growth, climate change, and modern industrial and agricultural practices. A huge percentage of

the human population already has little to no access to clean fresh water, so it is already a

quality of life issue that could easily factor into global unrest.

6. Five academic journal articles that examine this global problem:

Aron, J. L., Hall, R. K., Philbin, M. J., & Schafer, R. J. (2013). Using watershed function as the

leading indicator for water quality. Water Policy, 15(5), 850-858.

Dai, L. (2014). Something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue:

Tackling diffuse water pollution from agriculture in China: Drawing inspiration from the

European Union. Utrecht Law Review, 10(2), 136-154.

Foster, S., Chilton, J., Nijsten, G., & Richts, A. (2013). Groundwater—a global focus on the ‘local

resource’. Current Opinion In Environmental Sustainability, 5 (Aquatic and marine systems

themed issue), 685-695.

Trigueros, A. (2012). The human right to water: Will its fulfillment contribute to environmental

degradation? Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 19 (2), 599-625.

Wyman, R. J. (2013). The effects of population on the depletion of fresh water. Population &

Development Review, 39(4), 687-704.

7. How do these scholars view this global problem? Depletion of fresh water is a major concern

worldwide, and not much is being done about it that has proven effective. It’s primarily up to

policymakers to come up with solutions, and these scholars provide a snapshot of some different

solutions, but not much more. Aron (2013) focuses on US ecology. I won’t be using this one, I

guess! Dai (2014) advocates more awareness of the impact of industrial-model pollution controls

on human-scale agriculture in both the EU and China. Foster et al. (2013) address concerns

about the sustainability of depending on groundwater for the maintenance of human society.

However, they don’t deal with pollution. Another article I won’t be able to use, probably!

Trigueros (2012) treats water access as a basic human right and carefully examines the impact of

honoring this right on fragile environments. Wyman (2013) tries to demonstrate that people’s

indulgence in food and agriculture is more responsible for water depletion than is global

warming, with some attention to equity and to pollution.

8. What’s common among these studies? My initial selection of articles turned out to be more

about types of water sources and how they are being depleted than about pollution or human

impacts. That’s a negative commonality! With the discovery of the Trigueros article, I

encountered the concept of “clean water as a human right,” and that led to a more productive

search. I’m confident I’ll find more relevant articles using this concept.

9. What are the major points of disagreement? As might be expected from the journals in which

they appeared, some of them are very policy oriented (Aron, Dai) while others focus on the

science (Foster, Wyman). Only the Dai and Trigueros articles really address impact on

disenfranchised groups, which I know I’ll have to cover in my research. The Aron article is limited

to the US, so it is probably not valid for global issues research.

10. What inferences can you draw from analyzing the differences? Differential importance of water

pollution based on socioeconomic status is something that many scholars don’t even touch on.

Climate change politics can be blind to the impact of decisions on individuals. Increased water

use definitely ties in with population dynamics, and the consequences are differential depending

on climate. For example, Wyman points out that the Green Revolution in India led to the

expansion of agriculture into essentially arid zones where it could only exist with extensive

irrigation (using water that is by definition scarce in these zones).

11. How does each article add to the scholarly literature related to water quality and pollution?

Most of them don’t really deal with pollution very much, and though they do address water

quality, they are more concerned with scarcity/depletion, except for the Dai article that explicitly

compares policies in the EU and China and of course the Trigueros article that focuses on clean

water for human use. The Dai and Trigueros articles will definitely be on my final list.

12. What challenges do you anticipate while completing this research? Although I do have

coursework in environmental science, I have not had a lot of exposure to scientific journal

articles. The reading is incredibly dense! Also, I don’t know much about the cultures I’m being

introduced to – agriculture in the Netherlands, for example – and felt sort of defeated as I

discovered so many of my neat-sounding articles weren’t going to be useful.