World Water Day, 2007

The Ancient Mariner, adrift on the salty ocean,surrounded by water unfit for his consumption, mourns: "Water, water, everywhere, nor yet a drop to drink." In a less literary fashion, this may soon become the plaint of much of the rest of humanity. Those who are paying attention to the depletion of global resources are probably thinking more about oil and gas reserves and what will happen to "civilized" society after they have ultimately dwindled. But it is that other dwindling resource, good old H2O,that actually sustains all terrestrial life. And how about this for a statistic: Only one-onehundredth of one percent of Earth's water is both fresh and constantly renewed by the hydrological cycle (you learned that cycle back there somewhere...middle school maybe?). We have been historically unthinking in our ecosystem disruptions of water resources: diverting rivers, building dams, dikes and levees, freely withdrawing groundwater, introducing exotic species, ignoring increasing land, air and water pollution, not to mention the unchecked and ever-increasing climate-altering CO2 pollutants. The incredible global population growth just since 1950 has placed great stress on water resources , due to land conversion (to agricultural or urban-industrial uses), dam construction and increased potential for global climate change. This last threat will fundamentally alter the hydrological cycle, as well as vastly reduce the natural water storage provided by glaciers and winter snowpacks. This is already happening, of course. Glaciers are already melting, and once they disappear the runoff they generate (a major source of freshwater for many of the world's large cities, as well as irrigation for vast areas of agricultural land) will disappear with them.

Last year I didn't post on World Water Day, didn't, in fact, even know about it, until it was over, Water Water Everywhere? Last year's theme was Water and Culture, a truly interesting and vast topic. World Water Day is celebrated yearly on March 22, and is an initiative that grew out of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro. This year I am living in an arid land - the American Southwest, the part of the USA most in danger from the future shortages of water, and I am ever more conscious of every drop I use. The theme for this year's World Water Day, will be Coping with Water Scarcity. This theme is one we all need to start concentrating on...we see the global unrest caused by the increasing shortage of oil/gas resources...imagine the possibilities for global unrest when it's water, the very source of earthly life, that international wars are fought over. This future alone is more than enough reason for the United Nations to be sponsoring The International Decade of Action Water for Life, 2005 - 2015, of which World Water Day is a part.

The keynote speaker at the Xeriscape Conference I attended last week was Sandra Postel, of the Global Water Policy Project. Her speech absolutely set the tone and pace for everything that followed, and I'll be posting more on what I learned from her speech and the articles passed out at the conference. There's a wealth of info in the links I've given here already, so read up, and start offering your gratitude to that last winter snowstorm soon to be blowing across the northeastern section of the USA; kinda makes you look at things differently it you can see it as a lifesource and not a major annoyance. (Of course if you're about to try to take a series of airplanes across the country to D.C., it's still kind of an annoyance, yeah.)

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