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Health & Fitness

World Water Day, March 22

Earth Day Every Day # 13

 

Today is World Water Day, a day to celebrate water and to recognize and address water issues:  protecting water resources and managing them well, and keeping life-sustaining water available to all humankind.

We are surrounded by water here in the Puget Sound area and the whole rainy, rainy Northwest, and most of us have good drinking water.  But only about 2.5 per cent of the world's water is fresh water, and less than 1 per cent of that is usable.   1.4 billion people in our world lack clean water, and that lack results in serious concerns regarding health, sanitation, education and safety.  Our kids at Enumclaw Middle School recently learned about such troublesome water issues in Sierra Leone and took on a fund-raising project to provide a well in a village there.

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We  maybe don't think a lot about running out of water, either, as people do who live in parts of the world and other parts of our own country that experience droughts.   But supplies of fresh water are being used up.  And we have polluted a lot of waterways over the years.  The privatization of more and more water resources also threatens water's long-term availability to everyone.

It's a big topic, and there's lots to learn, with a wealth of resources online.  Since it's World Water Day, let's Think Water and Celebrate Water in some way today or this weekend...like, for example,

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--Look for ways we waste water at home and take steps to cut back on use.

--Buy a new reusable water bottle from the EHS drama Department when we go to see Legally Blonde this weekend.    Or--get another very local water bottle just by connecting to Austin's new Spring to the Tap website   (and explore the issues of bottled water vs. tap water).

--Watch a film on water issues, like Flow, a documentary on dwindling fresh water supplies and their increasing privatization; or Tapped, on the bottled water industry.

--Contribute to an organization that works on restoration and preservation of our waterways, such as The Nature Conservancy.

--Help fund a water project to get life-saving water to those who desperately need it.  We can actually probably still donate to the project at Enumclaw Middle School.  Or, a search online for World Water Day brings up information and giving opportunities like Water Wells for Africa: We Walk for Water or Action Against Hunger or CARE and others.  Compassion International has a 90-second video which illustrates the need.

Lots more possibilites, I'm sure.  Add any you think of....

"Thousands have lived without love; not one without water."  W.H. Auden

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