Giving Compass' Take:

• Camille Duvall Hero, writing for Medium, discusses why New Yorkers need to think about water conservation and sanitation in an effort to be more environmentally prepared.

• How are you supporting local water conservation efforts?

• Read about the benefits of prioritizing healthy rivers.

The Hudson River is beautiful in August. The river undulates, causing the sunlight to refract in fleeting brightly off of the dark blue swells. A few summers ago, I had the chance to waterski by Chelsea Pier as part of a David Letterman segment. As I went out onto the water that day, I remember marveling at how clean the water was. I hadn’t expected the Hudson to be beautiful, but at the time it seemed almost serene against the New York bustle.

But as awful as it is, the river’s beauty might fade away under gallons of misdirected sewage and spilled-over drains.

It’s easy to think of environmental conservation as someone else’s problem. We don’t think about the waste we produce over the course of a day, or week — or where it all goes after we turn off the faucet or put out the trash. We assume, in a city of 8.5 million people, that the municipal, state, and federal governments have set to the task of figuring out a way to control urban waste with minimal damage to the waterways we live, play, and drink from.

Unfortunately, we aren’t as environmentally-prepared as we should be. New York City standards for water sanitation are shockingly subpar compared to those set by federal regulations — as it stands, millions of gallons of untreated sewage and rainwater are routed through the city’s flawed storm drainage system and into New York’s waterways every time it storms. According to figures reported by the New York Time, an estimated 27 billion gallons of raw sewage are dumped into the harbor in an average year.

Read the full article aboutwater conservation by Camille Duvall Hero at Medium.