World Water Day
“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.” – Loren Corey Eiseley, The Immense Journey, 1957
Since 1992 the United Nations have declared each March the 22nd a World Day for Water to draw attention to the serious need for conservation and development of water world-wide.
“We no longer have a choice. Either humanity adapts its behaviour to support sustainable development, meaning it ceases to pollute the environment, allows the renewal of natural resources and contributes to improve everybody’s well-being, or it signs its own, more or less imminent, death sentence. Education plays a crucial role in training citizens. However, it is not always suited to the needs of future societies, both in developed and in developing countries. Environmental and cultural heritage education, for instance, does not always have the place it deserves in school curricula, and the links between culture and the sciences are not adequately emphasized.” – Ko?chiro Matsuura, UNESCO Director General, 24 February 2005
“I reflect on my childhood experience when I would visit a stream next to our home to fetch water for my mother. I would drink water straight from the stream. Playing among the arrowroot leaves I tried in vain to pick up the strands of frogs? eggs, believing they were beads. But every time I put my little fingers under them they would break. Later, I saw thousands of tadpoles: black, energetic and wriggling through the clear water against the background of the brown earth. This is the world I inherited from my parents. Today, over 50 years later, the stream has dried up, women walk long distances for water, which is not always clean, and children will never know what they have lost. The challenge is to restore the home of the tadpoles and give back to our children a world of beauty and wonder.” – Wangari Maathai (founder of The Green Belt Movement)
“Water is a key issue worldwide, as there is a strong push from corporate interests to privatize water resources and water delivery services. The FTAA, the WTO, and a whole list of smaller bilateral and regional trade agreements open the door to the privatization of water. For me, this issue had eerie echoes of the negative society I imagined in my novel The Fifth Sacred Thing, where the poor could not afford to drink and people were imprisoned for stealing water. The antiglobalization movement now must assert that water is a human right, linked to the right to life. There is no substitute for water; therefore there must be a limit to private ownership and control of water resources.” – Starhawk
“Children of a culture born in a water-rich environment, we have never really learned how important water is to us. We understand it, but we do not respect it.” – William Ashworth
“To privatise water is like handing down death sentences to the majority of the urban and rural poor in Ghana.” – The Christian Council of Ghana
“Earth my body, Water my blood, Air my breath, And fire by spirit!” – Traditional Pagan/Wiccan Chant
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