We
need a global approach to this from all sides. We
need to educate people, we need the scientists to
create new technologies, we need the engineers to
create the networks, we need every human being to
be aware of how precious water is and save it. Everybody
has to be involved in a very firm and assertive way.
-- Isabel Allende
Fierce
national competition over water resources
has prompted fears that water issues contain
the seeds of violent conflict.
-- Kofi
Annan
As
I travel around the world, people think the
only place where there is potential conflict
[over] water is the Middle East, but they
are completely wrong. We have the problem
all over the world.
-- Kofi
Annan
|
|
"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
"Thousands
have lived without love, not one without water."
-- W.H. Auden
|
|
"Kids
can help the environment by riding a bike. Always
wear a helmet of course and stay in the bike lane.
Take public transportation with your parents and
your friends and see if you like that. That’s
a good way to get around. Start a home garden,
be energy efficient, turn off the lights and the
water. All of those things are very good for the
environment and good for your pocketbook. "
~ Ed
Begley, Jr. |
"Creating
a world that is truly fit for children does
not imply simply the absence of war. It means
having the confidence that our children would
not die of measles or malaria. It means having
access to clean water and proper sanitation.
It means having primary schools nearby that
educate children, free of charge. It means
changing the world with children, ensuring
their right to participate, and that their
views are heard and considered. It means building
a world fit for children, where every child
can grow to adulthood in health, peace and
dignity."
-- Carol
Bellamy
|
|
"I
have little need to remind you that water has become
one of our major national concerns."
-- Ezra Taft Benson, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture,
1955
The
quality of water and the quality of life in all its
infinite forms are critical parts of the overall,
ongoing health of this planet of ours, not just here
in the Amazon, but everywhere... The hardest part
of any big project is to begin. We have begun. We
are underway. We have a passion. We want to make a
difference.
-- Sir Peter Blake (1948-2001)
When
we talk of flood control, we usually think of dams
and deeper river channels, to impound the waters or
hurry their run-off. Yet neither is the ultimate solution,
simply because floods are caused by the flow of water
downhill. If the hills are wooded, that flow is checked.
If there is a swamp at the foot of the hills, the
swamp sponges up most of the excess water, restores
some of it to the underground water supply and feeds
the remainder slowly into the streams. Strip the hills,
drain the boglands, and you create flood conditions
inevitably. Yet that is what we have been doing for
years.
-- Hal Borland
"If
we lived in a desert and our lives depended on a water
supply that came out of a steel tube, we would inevitably
watch that tube and talk about it understandingly.
No citizen would need to be lectured about his duty
toward its care and spurred to help if it were in
danger. Teachers of civics in such a community might
develop a sense of public responsibility, not only
by describing the remote beginnings of the commonwealth,
but also how that tube got built, how long it would
last, how vital the intake might be if the rainfall
on the forested mountains nearby ever changed in seasonal
habit ot amount. It would be a most unimaginative
person, or a stupid one, who could not see the vital
relation between the mountains, the forests, that
tube and himself."
-- Isaiah Bowman
We
must begin thinking like a river if we are
to leave a legacy of beauty and life for future
generations.
-- David
Brower
|
|
It
takes 1,000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of grain.
As water becomes scarce and countries are forced to
divert irrigation water to cities and industry, they
will import more grain. As they do so, water scarcity
will be transmitted across national borders via the
grain trade. Aquifer depletion is a largely invisible
threat, but that does not make it any less real.
-- Lester A. Brown, Michael Renner, Brian Halweil
The
number of people displaced by dams is estimated at
between 40 million and 80 million, most of them in
China and India. The costs of dams were on average
50% above their original estimate. Some designed to
reduce flooding made it worse, and there were many
unexpected environmental disadvantages, including
the extinction of fish and bird species. Half the
world's wetlands had been lost because of dams.
-- Paul Brown
|
|
"We
can use our scientific knowledge to improve
and beautify the earth, or we can use it to
...poison the air, corrupt the waters, blacken
the face of the country, and harass our souls
with loud and discordant noises, [or]...we can
use it to mitigate or abolish all these things."
~
John
Burroughs
|
"In
an age when man has forgotten his origins
and is blind even to his most essential needs
for survival, water along with other resources
has become the victim of his indifference."
-- Rachel
Carson
|
|
|
|
Acknowledging
the physical realities of our planet does not
mean a dismal future of endless sacrifice. In
fact, acknowledging these realities is the first
step in dealing with them. We can meet the resource
problems of the world -- water, food, minerals,
farmlands, forests, overpopulation, pollution
-- if we tackle them with courage and foresight.
~ Jimmy
Carter
|
|
"I
have never believed we had to choose between
either a clean and safe environment or a growing
economy. Protecting the health and safety of
all Americans doesn’t have to come at the expense
of our economy’s bottom line. And creating thriving
companies and new jobs doesn’t have to come
at the expense of the air we breathe, the water
we drink, the food we eat, or the natural landscape
in which we live. We can, and indeed must, have
both."
~ Bill
Clinton
|
 |
"The
air, the water and the ground are free gifts to man
and no one has the power to portion them out in parcels.
Man must drink and breathe and walk and therefore
each man has a right to his share of each."
~ James Fennimore Cooper
|
|
Water
and air, the two essential fluids on which all
life depends, have become global garbage cans.
-- Jacques
Cousteau (1910-1997) |
|
Every
human should have the idea of taking care of
the environment, of nature, of water. So using
too much or wasting water should have some kind
of feeling or sense of concern. Some sort of
responsibility and with that, a sense of discipline.
--The
14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso
|
|
|
|
Inanimate
objects are sometimes parties to litigation.
A ship has legal personality…The corporation…is
an acceptable adversary and large fortunes ride
on its cases…So it should be as respects valleys,
ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even
air that feels the destructive pressures of
modern technology and modern life. The river,
for example, is the living symbol of all the
life it sustains or nourishes – fish, aquatic
insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer,
elk, bear, and all other animals, including
man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it
for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river
as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit
of life that is part of it.
-- Justice
William O. Douglas
|
|
|
"...In
a world riven by inequity, medicine could be
viewed as social justice work." -- Paul
Farmer
“If
access to health care is considered a human
right, who is considered human enough to have
that right?” -- Paul
Farmer
"Clean
water and health care and school and food and
tin roofs and cement floor, all of these things
should constitute a set of basics that people
must have as birthrights." -- Paul
Farmer
|
We
never know the worth of water till the well is dry.
~Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732
|
|
We
must treat water as if it were the most precious
thing in the world, the most valuable natural
resource. Be economical with water! Don't waste
it! We still have time to do something about
this problem before it is too late.
-- Mikhail
Gorbachev
The
shortage of fresh water is the major ecological
problem of this moment.
-- Mikhail
Gorbachev
|
Water,
like religion and ideology, has the power to move
millions of people. Since the very birth of human
civilization, people have moved to settle close to
it. People move when there is too little of it. People
move when there is too much of it. People journey
down it. People write, sing and dance about it. People
fight over it. And all people, everywhere and every
day, need it.
-- Mikhail
Gorbachev
“A
river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure.”
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
By
2015, according to estimates from the United Nations
and the United States government, at least 40 percent
of the world's population, or about three billion
people, will live in countries where it is difficult
or impossible to get enough water to satisfy basic
needs. "The signs of unsustainability are widespread
and spreading," said Sandra Postel, director of the
Global Water Policy Project in Amherst, Mass. "If
we're to have any hope of satisfying the food and
water needs of the world's people in the years ahead,
we will need a fundamental shift in how we use and
manage water."
-- Douglas Jehl
"No
one has the right to use America's rivers and America's
Waterways, that belong to all the people. as a sewer.
The banks of a river may belong to one man or one
industry or one State, but the waters which flow between
the banks should belong to all the people."
~ Lyndon B. Johnson
But
we have not used our waters well. Our major rivers
are defiled by noxious debris. Pollutants from cities
and industries kill the fish in our streams. Many
waterways are covered with oil slicks and contain
growths of algae that destroy productive life and
make the water unfit for recreation. "Polluted Water—No
Swimming" has become a familiar sign on too many beaches
and rivers. A lake that has served many generations
of men now can be destroyed by man in less than one
generation.
-- Lyndon B. Johnson
A
nation that fails to plan intelligently for the development
and protection of its precious waters will be condemned
to wither because of its shortsightedness. The hard
lessons of history are clear, written on the deserted
sands and ruins of once proud civilizations.
-- Lyndon B. Johnson
|
|
"If
we could ever competitively, at a cheap rate,
get fresh water from saltwater, ..(this) would
be in the long-range interests of humanity which
could really dwarf any other scientific accomplishments."
--
John F. Kennedy
|
|
"We
in Government have begun to recognize the critical
work which must be done at all levels—local,
State and Federal—in ending the pollution of
our waters."
~ Robert
F. Kennedy
|
 |
|
|
"What
we are fighting for is not just the fishes and
the birds. We protect nature not for nature's
sake but for our own sake because it's the infrastructure
of our communities, and if we want to meet the
obligations of our civilization and our culture
which are to create communities for our children
that provide them with the same opportunities
for dignity and enrichment as the communities
that our parents gave us, we've got to start
by protecting that infrastructure; the air that
we breathe, the water that we drink, the landscapes
that enrich us. We're not protecting nature
for nature's sake. We're protecting it because
it enriches us, yes, it enriches our economy
and we ignore that at our peril. But it is also
enriching us aesthetically, recreationally,
culturally, historically and spiritually. Human
beings have other appetites besides money. And
if we don't feed them, we're not going to grow
up…we're not going to become the kind of beings
that our creator intended us to become."
~ Robert
Kennedy, Jr.
|
Industrial
agriculture now accounts for over half of America's
water pollution.
~ Robert
Kennedy, Jr.
|
|
"All
ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise:
that the individual is a member of a community
of interdependent parts. . . . The land ethic
simply enlarges the boundaries of the community
to include soils, waters, plants, and animals,
or collectively: the land."
~ Aldo
Leopold
|
Multinational
companies now run water systems for 7 per cent of
the world's population, and analysts say that figure
could grow to 17 per cent by 2015. Private water management
is estimated to be a $200 billion business, and the
World Bank, which has encouraged governments to sell
off their utilities to reduce public debt, projects
it could be worth $1 trillion by 2021. The potential
for profits is staggering: in May 2000 Fortune magazine
predicted that water is about to become 'one of the
world's great business opportunities', and that 'it
promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to
the 20th'.
-- John Louma
"Civilization
has been a permanent dialogue between human beings
and water."
-- Paolo Lugari (founder of the Gaviotas Community
in Colombia
"Water
helped ancient man learn those first lessons about
the rights of others and responsibility to a larger
society.... It became part of the moral and mental
legacy parents passed on to their children."
-- M. Meyer
|
|
"...Good
luck and Good work for the happy mountain raindrops,
each one of them a high waterfall in itself,
descending from the cliffs and hollows of the
clouds to the cliffs and hollows of the rocks,
out of the sky-thunder into the thunder of the
falling rivers."
-- John
Muir
|
|
Water
is the most precious, limited natural resource
we have in this country...But because water
belongs to no one - except the people - special
interests, including government polluters, use
it as their private sewers.
-- Ralph
Nader, 1971
|
 |
|
|
War
over water would be an ultimate obscenity. And
yet, unfortunately it is conceivable... Water
has been a source over so many years of erosion
of confidence, of tension, of human rights abuses,
really, of so many in areas whose traditional
water supplies have been controlled and depleted
by occupational authorities. That must stop
if we're going to be able to develop a climate
for peace.
-- Queen
Noor of Jordan
|
"What
may be possible for a minority of humankind, albeit
at great cost, simply cannot work for the humankind.
Our kind of progress depends on lacerating the Earth,on
gouging out its riches, on stripping is life-sustaining
skin of soil and forest, on poisoning its pure air,
on defecating copiously in its pure water... the single
most important indicator of environmental decline
is the extent to which the damage done is reversible.
The most heinous ecological crime of all is for any
one generation so seriously to assault the web of
life that the damage done is literally irreversible
for every generation that follows."
~ Jonathon Porritt
|
"For
many of us, water simply flows from a faucet,
and we think little about it beyond this point
of contact. We have lost a sense of respect
for the wild river, for the complex workings
of a wetland, for the intricate web of life
that water supports."
~ Sandra
Postel
"Water
is finite and we have not done a great job of
managing it in the past."
~
Sandra
Postel
|
 |
|
|
"We’ve
poisoned the air, the water, and the land. In
our passion to control nature, things have gone
out of control. Progress from now on has to
mean something different. We’re running out
of resources and we are running out of time."
~ Robert
Redford
|
The
wars of the twenty-first century will be fought over
water.
-- Ismail Serageldin, World Bank Vice President for
Environmental Affairs
Clean
water is not an expenditure of Federal funds; clean
water is an investment in the future of our country.
-- Bud Shuster, U.S. Representative
"I
have left almost to the last the magic of water, an
element which owing to its changefulness of form and
mood and colour and to the vast range of its effects
is ever the principal source of landscape beauty,
and has like music a mysterious influence over the
mind."
-- Sir George Sitwell
"Water
is the most basic of all resources. Civilizations
grew or withered depending on its availability."
-- Dr. Nathan W. Snyder
 |
"The
cleanup costs of polluting a river, injecting
pesticides into the ground water, or putting
noxious gases into the air have not been figured
into the cost of the manufacturing or agribusiness
that put them there in the first place. Historically,
the economic incentive has been to pollute."
-- Gloria
Steinem
|
I
have always been a big advocate of tap water—not because
I think it harmless but because the idea of purchasing
water extracted from some remote watershed and then
hauled halfway round the world bothers me. Drinking
bottled water relieves people of their concern about
ecological threats to the river they live by or to
the basins of groundwater they live over. It's the
same kind of thinking that leads some to the complacent
conclusion that if things on earth get bad enough,
well, we'll just blast off to a space station somewhere
else.
-- Sandra Steingraber
More
than 5,500 large dams impede America's running waters,
leaving less than 2 percent of the country's 3.1 million
miles of rivers and streams flowing free. In the wake
of these river alterations trails a record list of
endangered aquatic species. Two of every three freshwater
mussel species are heading for extinction, or are
already there; half of all crayfish species are imperiled;
more than a third of the country's freshwater fish
are in trouble -- 17 of them missing outright.
-- William Stolzenburg
"Water
is life's mater and matrix, mother and medium. There
is no life without water."
-- Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Hungarian biochemist and
Nobel Prize Winner for Medicine.
|
As
we watch the sun go down, evening after evening,
through the smog across the poisoned waters
of our native earth, we must ask ourselves
seriously whether we really wish some future
universal historian on another planet to say
about us: "With all their genius and with
all their skill, they ran out of foresight
and air and food and water and ideas," or,
"They went on playing politics until their
world collapsed around them."
~ U
Thant
|
 |
|
|
A
lake is the landscape's most beautiful and
expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking
into which the beholder measures the depth
of his own nature.
~ Henry
David Thoreau
|
We
used to think that energy and water would be the critical
issues for the next century. Now we think water will
be the critical issue.
-- Mostafa Tolba, former head of the United Nations
Environment Program
|
"Plans
to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife
are in fact plans to protect man."
~ Stewart
Udall
|
 |
Water
is fundamental for life and health. The human right
to water is indispensable for leading a healthy life
in human dignity. It is a pre-requisite to the realization
of all other human rights.
-- The United Nations Committee on Economic, Cultural
and Social Rights
I
understood when I was just a child that without water,
everything dies. I didn't understand until much later
that no one "owns" water. It might rise on your property,
but it just passes through. You can use it, and abuse
it, but it is not yours to own. It is part of the
global commons, not "property" but part of our life
support system.
-- Marq de Villiers
Over
1 billion people have no access to clean drinking
water, and more than 2.9 billion have no access to
sanitation services. The reality is that a child dies
every eight seconds from drinking contaminated water,
and the sanitation trend is getting sharply worse,
mostly because of the worldwide drift of the rural
peasantry to urban slums.
-- Marq de Villiers
The
trouble with water—and there is trouble with water—is
that they're not making any more of it. They're not
making any less, mind, but no more either. There is
the same amount of water in the planet now as there
was in prehistoric times. People, however, they're
making more of—many more, far more than is ecologically
sensible—and all those people are utterly dependent
on water for their lives (humans consist mostly of
water), for their livelihoods, their food, and increasingly,
their industry. Humans can live for a month without
food but will die in less than a week without water.
Humans consume water, discard it, poison it, waste
it, and restlessly change the hydrological cycles,
indifferent to the consequences: too many people,
too little water, water in the wrong places and in
the wrong amounts.
-- Marq de Villiers
Wisdom
understands that in a world of ecological interconnectedness
there is no such things as “away.” We don’t throw
things “away,” we simply put them someplace where
they defile the land, foul the water, pollute the
air or change the earth’s atmosphere.
-- Brian Walsh & Sylvia Keesmaat
"Rain
is a blessing when it falls gently on parched fields,
turning the earth green, causing the birds to sing."
-- Donald Worster
www.WaterDay.us
www.EarthDayInfo.com
