WORLD WATER DAY, MARCH 22

Today – Saturday, March 22 – is World Water Day. Sponsored by the United Nations since 1992, the purpose of World Water Day is to raise awareness of the need to protect and improve access to clean water supplies. According to the article I read, only 2.5% of the world’s water is drinkable. This would be ample if the water were clean and available when needed – but it’s not. 1.2 billion of the world’s people lack access to safe drinking water. 2.6 billion lack proper sanitation (adequate sewage disposal). 1.8 million children worldwide died in 2006 due to tainted water supplies, not to mention those who became ill. Uncounted numbers of women still carry water. What can I do against such odds? Yet, as a citizen of the world, I see it as my obligation to know something about our water.

We have given some thought to this issue since we didn’t have hot and cold running water on the farm prior to remodeling the house. In fact, for the Dobson family there was not a viable source of drinking water near the house and water had to be carried from springs or from town. The spring water was probably of questionable quality. Now that we have a good deep well, our water supply is still dependent on the supply of electricity to the pump and the storage tank. It’s easy to take water for granted until for some reason we don’t have it.

Mike and I are concerned about water conservation wherever we are, but I admit to being a consumption offender when I shower. Mike on the other hand is a study in shower efficiency. Quickly wetting himself in extremely hot water, he then turns the water to a trickle while he lathers. He rinses in hot water and then turns the faucet to cold for a final blast. He has done this forever. When we remodeled the farmhouse, the contractor and the plumber just didn’t understand why they couldn’t interest me in anything but a small functional stall.

I’m sure I’ve spoken before of our drought-tolerant garden here in town. Plants in our garden must be perennial or self-seeding, deer resistant, and drought tolerant. One of our main interests in establishing such a landscape is the conservation of water – which brings me to the next issue, a conservation problem. In this little modular home, it takes forever for the hot water to come through. In other words, when I want to draw a sink of hot water, I probably run two gallons of good fresh cold water down the drain before the water coming through the tap is hot. It’s even worse in the master bathroom because it’s that much farther from the hot water tank. We have wondered how we can improve that situation. We thought of some sort of auxiliary hot water heater under the sink. We thought of catching the cold water and carrying it to the plants – an idea that applies only in the warm weather months. Let me know if you have any ideas on this subject.

I guess for the millions of people whose water is contaminated, these issues would seem frivolous. But wherever we are, we should be thinking about our water – its quality, its quantity, its future. KW