The Blue Voice

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Water for Life

One of my most frequently read posts on this blog is one I wrote two years ago for World Water Day. At the time I wrote that post I was getting ready for a major move from the East coast, fifteen miles from Atlantic beaches and plenty of rainfall, to the Southwestern desert. In the two years I've been here, my appreciation for every drop of water has grown exponentially.

The readers of the aforementioned post are mainly in Africa or Asia, places where people are very aware of the growing global importance of available sources of water - clean potable disease-free water. World Water Day is now celebrated on March 22nd every year, and each year has a clear and important focus. This year's World Water Day's focus is on Sanitation. Not, perhaps, a very attractive topic, but an increasingly important one. An article in the UK paper, Telegraph (An Unmentionable Global Crisis), offers this statistic: "1.5m small children die each year from excreta-related diseases - a crisis everyone covers up by talking about 'unsafe water'." Maggie Black, the article's author, has written an entire book on the subject, Opening the Door on the Global Sanitation Crisis.

We may think we are safely exempt from worries of this sort here in this country with our modern sanitation systems just about everywhere people live. But, as drought becomes more of a problem in all sections of the USA, and populations continue to expand, even our modern sanitation systems will soon be deeply stressed. The plethora of internet chatter about drug residue found in most of our urban water supplies should be a wakeup note. Here in the Albuquerque area rapid population growth is depleting our aquifer at a scary rate, and the plans being made to solve the eventual crisis may bring more problems than actual solutions. We will soon be drinking water from several of NM's rivers, a project that will necessitate extensive filtering and cleaning of that water. The continuance of water flowing down the rivers will depend on the snowpack levels remaining high. Not something we can count on. World Water Day will eventually be something we all pay much more attention to, everywhere. This year's events in observation of the day are listed here. We can all get out there and get walking and talking for water now, sooner - later may be too late. (Photo from waterforpeople.org)

Technorati Tags: sanitation, water, World Water Day,

posted at 4:28:00 PM by marigolds2

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