Today is World Water Day and people across the world will be gathering to raise awareness for the 1 billion people - mostly children - who do not have acces to clean, safe drinking water. The problem may seem far away and insignificant, but if you need proof that the issue of clean water is applicable in your own life, look no further than the recent study that showed we may be ingesting an overabundance of yummy pharmaceuticals every time we head to the tap or grab a bottle to quench our thirst. One of the writers for The Blue Voice blog offers a perspective on the importance of acknowledging World Water Day.

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.

Hit the jump to read more of The Blue Voice or visit the official World Water Day website for more information.

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