“Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.” —W.H. Auden
“When the well is dry, we know the worth of water.”
—attributed to Benjamin Franklin
“Overdrafts on aquifers are one reason some of our geologist colleagues are convinced that water shortages will bring the human population explosion to a halt. There are substitutes for oil; there is no substitute for fresh water.”
—Paul R. Ehrlich
“Where water flows, equality grows.” —UN World Water Day
International Day of Forests is marked on March 21, and World Water Day on March 22. Water and forests are critically intertwined. When there is deforestation of large tracts of primeval forest, a steady decline in water accessibility takes hold. The land heats up and biodiversity languishes.
An article in ScienceDirect,“Trees, Forest and Water: cool insights for a hot world,” points out that a solution for our forests and water conservation is reachable:“Forests and trees must be recognized as prime regulators within the water, energy and carbon cycles. If these functions are ignored, planners will be unable to assess, adapt to or mitigate the impacts of changing land cover and climate. Our call to action targets a reversal of paradigms, from a carbon-centric model to one that treats the hydrologic and climate-cooling effects of trees and forests as the first order of priority.” https://tinyurl.com/water-trees-and-forests
Women and girls are the first to experience water scarcity. UN World Water Day 2026 looks at how gender inequality affects women’s lives. In a powerful TED Talk titled “Water is a women’s issue. Here’s why,” water and sanitation campaigner Eleanor Allen focuses on how it is vital for communities to have clean drinking water and sanitation near their homes, schools and places of work. When this happens in areas of clean water scarcity or inadequate sanitation, women’s and girls’ lives are almost magically transformed, enabling them to pursue education and be free of the scourge of waterborne diseases as well as violence perpetrated against them. As a result, men’s lives are also vastly improved. https://tinyurl.com/eleanor-allen-water
The UN World Water Day website elaborates: “Where people lack safe drinking water and sanitation close to home, inequalities increase, with women and girls bearing the brunt. They collect water. They manage water. They care for people made sick by unsafe water. They lose time, health, safety, and opportunities. And too often, the systems that govern water leave women and girls out of decision-making, leadership, funding and representation. This makes the water crisis a women’s crisis. We need a transformative, rights-based approach to solving these challenges, where women’s voices are heard and their agency recognized. All women must be equitably represented at all levels of water leadership – helping design every pipe and policy. And women must drive change in water as engineers, farmers, scientists, sanitation workers and community leaders.” https://tinyurl.com/observing-water-day
The great biologist, Nature activist and may I say soothsayer (who sometimes predicted wrongly) Paul R. Ehrlich died this month. Over the last 30 years I have had the good fortune to read his books on overpopulation, consumption and human hubris. His scholarly articles and books on civilizational collapse and the outsized malevolent contributions to a global ecological/economic collapse led by the United States—now accelerated by its present administration—have had critics say Ehrlich was way off the mark with his predictions, or that he was too controversial. Nevertheless, like fellow biologist E.O. Wilson, he has turned out to be a convincing public figure who has unflinchingly spoken out on humanity’s dire ills brought on relentlessly by governance breakdown and wide-scale corporate greed, not to mention a tangible indifference by many individuals in the global north. His book One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future is a cautionary tale about the striking similarities that can be found between the collapse of ancient Assyria’s capital city and the modern world. In section of his book titled Water: Overdrawn and Under Appreciated Ehrlich wrote that, today, “in developing regions, more than 2 billion people are surviving with inadequate supplies of water for household use—lacking even a minimum amount for drinking water, cooking and washing.”
The Assyrian Empire’s greatest Mesopotamian city, Nineveh, collapsed in 612 BCE. It was the largest city in the world at that time. A prolonged siege finally resulted in its destruction. When archaeologist Austen Henry Layard discovered the remains of Nineveh in the 1840s, he wrote in his book Discoveries Among the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, “Desolation meets desolation… On all sides, as far as the eye could reach, rose the grass-covered heaps marking the site of ancient habitations. The great tide of civilisation had long since ebbed, leaving these scattered wrecks on the solitary shore.” But it wasn’t only constant war that brought on the demise of Nineveh. Through a combination of failed elitist despotic governance and a pillage of its ecological integrity, that vast cultural and religious centre collapsed.
For a case in point that parallels Nineveh’s destruction, present-day Iran’s water crisis has been accelerating for decades. Before the current war took priority for Iranians, the main conversation amongst the population was the proposed relocation of millions of citizens from Tehran to the coast because water was no longer plentiful.
Water is quickly becoming catastrophically scarce in Iran. In the interior of the country, Lake Urmia, once the largest saltwater lake in the Middle East and the sixth-largest in the world, and at millions of years old one of the Earth’s oldest lakes, has all but disappeared in five decades. It is vital for migrating birds and for general biodiversity. As a result of a combination of negligence, greed and outright ignorance, we are seeing repeated what happened to the Aral Sea, now a windswept toxic desert after cotton production diverted water away from it. This short video explains what is presently happening in Lake Urmia: https://tinyurl.com/iran-lake
“For most Canadians, the accessible portion of the world’s renewable water is a mere 2.6%—a far cry from the mythic 20% figure.” Canadians are just behind Americans in their consumption of water as measured throughout the world. https://tinyurl.com/Canada-water-reserves
North Americans need not be such profligate users of water. As super-consumers of everything, though, why would we be any different with regard to water conservation and water usage? Climate breakdown can also easily be linked to a mindset that doesn’t understand limits. Whether we like it or not, Canadians are inexorably connected to the planet’s finite capacity to tolerate stupidity. Can we find the collective will to change our course? Or are we the next Nineveh?
Meanwhile, March 20 was World Frog Day. Healthy forests, amphibians and clean water go happily together. https://tinyurl.com/world-day-of-frogs
Around April 15, tiny spring peepers will emerge from ponds and wetlands to start to sing for a few weeks from dusk into the night. If you can, bring a child and put up a tent nearby or open a window to listen to these small musicians and take in their multi-million-year-old chant to Nature. You can learn more about protecting frogs and even listen to tree frogs in Margaret Renkl’s article “Why tiny ponds and singing frogs matter so much.”