World Water Day

    Next time you sit down for your favorite chicken fettuccine Alfredo, consider how much water you are eating.
    Producing every piece of food requires several liters of water just to make it onto your table. According to United Nations Water, a coalition designed to support countries’ clean water efforts, one plate, containing chicken, pasta, vegetables, butter and cheese, costs almost 900 liters of water to yield. This includes watering the wheat for your pasta, growing the plants into vegetables, and feeding the chicken and cow for the rest of the items.
    Although the earth may carry seven large bodies of it, water is a finite resource slowly being flushed down the drain. Annually, the entire world raises awareness on March 22 with the World Water Day event to ensure water is not sucked dry from the planet.
    Since its beginning in 1993, World Water Day has been internationally recognized as an educational event, engaging and teaching the community about the importance of conserving water for the future. Contributing to the campaign hosted by UN Water, CSU has set aside the same day since 2010 to teach students through guest speakers, movie showings and vendor booths.
    This year’s theme for World Water Day is about “ensuring water and food supply is secure for the future,” Elle Sundar explained. Sundar is an assistant researcher for the Society of Global Health Researchers in Action (SoGHR), a Fort Collins’ based nonprofit organization, and will oversee the event this coming week. “The connection between food and water is not something you think about all the time.”
    Putting the campaign into perspective, Sundar described the importance of not wasting food. For instance, children throwing away food after meals are not only wasting food but water as well. When they toss out half of a sandwich, they pitch with it numerous liters of water.
    To spell it out, no water equals no food. To keep your favorite pasta dish around for the future, we need to understand the first half of this equation presently.
    According to UN Water’s World Water Day website, cities, industries and agriculture are growing in their demands for water creating competition. “Increased competition for water often translates into loss of access to water for the poor and other vulnerable groups,” the website revealed. The amount of water these groups are quarreling over is no large ocean either.
    From The Story of Drinking Water by the American Water Works Association, 97 percent of the Earth’s water supply is two salty to make use of and two percent is frozen glaciers, leaving humans a mere one percent.
    “Humans have used or polluted much of the one percent that is left for us,” Tyler Richlie reveals. CSU student Richlie will be screening an educational movie on World Water Day in the LSC’s Grey Rock room. That minuscule drop of water supply is divided among the world’s cities, industries and agriculture.
    This lack of water causes developing countries to suffer from “famine and undernourishment, in particular in areas where people depend on local agriculture for food and income,” UN Water indicated, connecting water scarcity back to food shortages. “The future production of food and other agricultural products will not be possible without increased efforts aiming at better using water.”
    People are struggling to stay alive in places like these where water, the most basic element needed to survive, is a rarity. Such drastic circumstances call upon awareness from the rest of the world. By volunteering for World Water Day, Richlie said he hopes his efforts will trickle down to other CSU students since he believes most are uneducated.
    “While a child dies every eight seconds now due to lack of fresh water, Americans seem almost complacent to sit on their asses, either ignoring or being uninformed about the physical and psychological exigencies that scream to be heard,” Richlie pours out. “Too long have innocent children around the world suffered without being heard--this is why I wanted to raise awareness to people on World Water Day.”
    Understanding and being informed about the impact humans have on the water shortage is simply the first step towards imprinting an ecological footprint. “I think the education is one of the biggest things we can all do,” director and founder of SoGHR, Phoenix Mourning-Star stressed.
    The next step is to learn what humans can do to alleviate the disappearing water supply. SoGHR, parent group to World Water Day, is a passionate organization innovating ways to solve global issues such as clean water.
    “We’re a group of crazy people that do whatever we want. We’re an umbrella group for students with no boundaries,” Mourning-Star noted. Keeping in mind the current food and water shortages, “SoGHR’s flagship project [uses] poppy oil as a renewable energy and the waste of the poppy seed [is crushed] for alternative livelihoods in Afghanistan. It's a lot of these food water and security issues all in one.”
    Their fire, fueled by the members’ drive and motivation, splashes light on their journey to a cleaner, more sustainable Earth, which begins with conversing water themselves. Mourning-Star decreases shower time and only runs a full dishwasher. Richlie mainly sacrifices meat, such as beef, hamburger and steak, when he can. Believe it or not, producing just over two pounds of beef uses up about 15,000 liters of water, according to the World Water Day website.
    “We need a global movement of humans ready to rise up in courage and fix problems that arise on the earth, this pale, small speck hurtling through space that we call home,” Richlie declared. People’s dietary choices and attitudes are main factors that will ultimately decide how the water issue progresses.
    World Water Day at CSU will begin at 10 in the morning in the LSC’s Cherokee Ballroom this Thursday. The movie “Blue Gold: World Water Wars,” will show at noon and five p.m. in the Grey Rock room. Environmental speakers Karen Ann on Renewed Respect and Value for Water presents at 11 a.m.; Mark Easter talks about the impacts of NISP on agriculture at two p.m.; and Keynote speaker Dr. Tindall speaks at 4 p.m. There will also be a free concert in the LSC Ramskellar beginning at 7 p.m.
    “If humans want to continue on this wonderful journey called life,” Richlie advised, “it would be wise to seriously reconsider how vulnerable we actually are.”