Specific Purpose: To persuade my audience to conserve and protect our oceans and fresh water supply. Central Idea: Our water is a treasured resource that should be protected for our future generations Introduction I. About 70% of the earths surface is covered with water. (show globe) A. Of all this water, only .3% is usable by humans, the remaining 99.7% is either unusable salt water or unavailable fresh water. (show graph #1) B. Much of the useable .3% is out of reach and locked up in icecaps and glaciers. II. We all know that water is important. A. Plants and animals need clean water to survive. B. People cannot survive more than a few days without water. C. Almost everything we do uses water: drinking, bathing, growing food and gardens, even making the toys and tools we use today. III. Although water covers most of the earth, all of us share less that 1% of all the water on earth. A. The water we have now is all we will ever have. We can not produce anymore. B. Water is a commodity that is essential to all life on this planet, and it needs our help. It is our responsibility to not only conserve our water supply, but to clean it up as well. Body I. Most people do not know this, but our fresh water supply has never been abundant. A. Statistics indicate that the world will be severely challenged to conserve what little there will be in the next century. B. In 1998, 30 nations possessed less than the minimum supply of water required by a human to meet the basic needs of the nations population. C. For Florida, management of our water resource is critical as population demands increase, especially in the coastal counties. II. We not only have to consider conserving our water supply, but cleaning it up as well. A. As we enter a new millennium, it is appropriate to keep in mind how much we've already done to clean up our polluted waterways, how much further we still have to go, and the role that each of you can play to get the job done.