World Water Day

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March 22nd is World Water Day and you can choose to celebrate the importance of water or commiserate on a rapidly dwindling resource. Either way it is important to understand the depth of the global water crisis.

Already more than 1.1 billion people don’t have access to clean drinking water while North Americans defecate and urinate into clean water. According to the Washington Post, just one flush of a toilet in the West uses more water than most Africans have to perform an entire day's washing, cleaning, cooking and drinking.

The Food and Water Watch Organization reports that each year 2 million people die of disease caused by a lack of clean water. Around the world, individuals use bottled water when healthy clean tap water is readily available. The lawn remains the most irrigated crop in North American. It takes more than 15,500 litres of water to produce 1kg (2.2lbs) of beef and 3,900 litres for just 1kg (2.2lbs) of chicken meat.

The future of water is only going to get more precarious as the negative effects of global warming increase. Additionally, population growth — coupled with industrialization and urbanization — will result in an increasing demand for water and will have serious consequences on the environment, reports The World Water Council.

This World Water Day, make a conscious commitment to use less water and think about, even for an hour or two, how intrinsic water is to our survival. To help you celebrate World Water Day, we have compiled a list of the top water-related films and books to help you explore the water crisis.

Crapshoot: The Gamble With Our Wastes

Every day, condoms, tampons, food waste, detergent, industrial solvents, paint, pharmaceuticals, oil, abattoir waste, asbestos, heavy metals, dental, and hospital waste, all end up in our sewer systems. In fact, each day billions of liters of water, combined with various forms of wastes, are flushed down toilets around the world. Crapshoot: The Gamble with Our Wastes, directed by Jeff McKay, is a documentary look at the world of toilet waste and explores if sewer systems are actually contributing to the world’s waste problem.

Blue Covenant

Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis And The Coming Battle For The Right to Water by the Council of Canadians national chairperson and world-renowned water activist Maude Barlow, is considered to be the most important book ever written about the global water crisis. Barlow explores how water is being commodified from a human right to something that is owned by multi-nationals. She argues that a right-to-water covenant is needed to ensure citizens have the ability to access clean, free water.

Blue Gold

Blue Gold: World Water Wars by Sam Bozzo, this definitive guide to the world water crisis is the best water rights film on the market. Blue Gold pulls no punches in letting us know what are the major issues around the world’s water supplies. A must see film for every person on the planet

Dry Spring

Dry Spring: The Coming Water Crisis of North America by Chris Wood demonstrates how water loss will affect countless communities over the next 25 years. With weather systems breaking down around the world, violent storms in some areas and extreme drought in other areas, it’s a paradox of uncertainty that we all have to become acquainted with in the present century, explains Wood.

Flow

While much of the western world has been wasting gallons and gallons of water each day, halfway around the world individuals are dying for lack of access to clean drinking water. Flow: For Love of Water, directed by Irena Salina, reinforces that we can no longer ignore the global threat to our right to access clean drinking water.

Gimme Green

Gimme Green: A Documentary About America's Obsession With Lawns is a funny little 27-minute film that explores, like the title suggests, our unhealthy obsession with the green tide of destruction – grass. Lawns, not food, are America’s biggest irrigated crops

Plagues & Pleasures

Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea, a brilliant, quirky documentary film by Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer with narration by John Waters, explores the Salton Sea in the USA, once known as the “California Riviera”, and now considered one of America’s worst ecological disasters, due in part, to farm water runoff and intensive fertilizer use in the surrounding farming communities. A once booming seaside town is abandoned and now, when the water warms up in the summer months, the algae bloom intensifies and the oxygen levels decrease in the water. On one scorching day, more than 7.6 million fish died due to lack of oxygen in the water.

Thirst

In Thirst, filmmakers Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufam explore the world’s most precious resources – water. Currently, around the globe, the right to access water is being privatized-away from people by numerous multi-nationals and even the World Bank. Thirst highlights the various water battles taking place around the world. Human rights are being pitted against corporate rights in the quest to control water. In the words of one protester at the World Water Forum, “Water is the next OPEC”.

The Hidden Messages in Water

Dr. Masaru Emoto is a Japanese scientist who believes our thoughts influence the molecular structure of water. He is gently and relentlessly, promoting love for water around the world. In 1999 he published the world-renowned Hidden Messages in Water and in 2001 The True Power of Water. Dr. Emoto’s work with water is nothing short of revolutionary. Using a magnetic resonance analysis technology (a sort of microscope in a very cold room) he has photographed water molecules from various holy waters around the world and has tested the effect of our thoughts, words and actions on the molecular structure of water. A fitting book for World Water Day.

Water Footprint Network

The Water Footprint Network recently launched a campaign to get people to think about their water footprint. Similar to a carbon footprint, the water footprint is an indicator of how much water is consumed to make food or a product. The results are fascinating and shocking.

Did you know it takes 15,500 litres of water to produce 1kg (2.2lbs) of beef and 3,900 litres for just 1kg (2.2lbs) of chicken meat? For each hamburger you consume, it takes 2400 litres of water to produce.