Water Week On TVO (March 21-27)
- 2.5 billion people in the world don’t have access to adequate sanitation – that’s two fifths of the entire world’s population!
- 97.5% of the earth’s water is saltwater. If the world’s water could fit into a bucket, only one teaspoon would be drinkable.
- A person can live a month without food, but only about a week without water.
Makes you think doesn’t it?
Monday March 22 is World Water Day and UN-Water has chosen “Communicating Water Quality Challenges and Opportunities” as its theme. To mark the day, TVO will air a week of water-themed programming featuring the world premiere of the Canadian documentary Water on the Table, and encores of films that examine political, economic and environmental issues dealing with water quality and availability. Get Involved is partnering with TVO to support this fantastic endeavor to spread water education.
Check out TVO’s Water Week schedule here:
Water on the Table
March 24th at 10pm (repeated March 28th at 10:30pm)
Is water a human right, or a commodity to be bought and sold like gold and oil? That’s the question at the heart of this timely new documentary by filmmaker Liz Marshall. Over the course of a year in Canada and the United States, the film follows Canadian activist Maude Barlow as she campaigns against the privatization of water and tries to bring attention to how industry is polluting the water table.
A World Without Water
March 21st at 8pm
Filmmaker Brian Woods examines the dramatic impact of the battle for water ownership on the lives of four disparate groups of people in Bolivia, India, Tanzania and the heart of the planet’s richest nation, the United States.
Toxic Trespass
March 21st at 10:30pm
Filmmaker Barri Cohen investigates the effects of the chemicals all around us, beginning with her 10-year-old daughter, whose blood carries carcinogens like benzene and the long-banned DDT. She heads to Windsor and Sarnia, Ontario, identified as Canadian toxic hotspots, with startling clusters of deadly diseases.
Strait Through the Ice
March 24th at 7pm
Scientists and explorers weigh in on how the melting of Arctic polar ice, opening up the Northwest Passage, can be both an ecological catastrophe and a commercial godsend.
National Geographic’s Extreme Ice
March 27th at 7pm
Photojournalist James Balog and his team conduct the largest photographic study of the cryosphere (the portions of the Earth’s surface where water is in solid form and ground is frozen) ever attempted – in order to assess the rapid glacier melt and its implications on the future environment of our planet.
Learn more at TVO’s Facebook Page or reading the Water Week Press Release!
Tags: a world without water, canadian documentary, maude barlow, tvo, water, water discussions, water on the table, water week
Everywhere you see over population, you see water shortages. The following I think explains part of the problem.
Where has all the water gone ?
One day while talking with my son Steven over lunch, the subject eventually got around to the water level of Lake Ontario in Toronto and Steve recalled that in school they were told that the shore line was at Dupont st. many year ago, about a 1 1/2 mile above it’s current level. This stuck in my mind and when I read about an orchard in Texas being turned into goat pasture due to low ground water levels, I questioned were all the fresh water in North America has gone over the years. Viewing this as a big change and questioning what other big change had taken place over time, the answer was increased population.
The following figures may not be accurate but will show the intent.
Consider the current population of the US at 287,000,000 and Canada at 30,000,000 for a total of 317,000,000 people in North America not counting Mexico. Next consider that the average person weighs 150 lbs and that 91% of each person is water we have 136.5 lbs of water per person. At 8.333 lbs per gallon (US) this 136.5 lbs of water translates into 16.38 gallons per person. So in essence we have 5,192,480,770 gallons of fresh water walking around these 2 countries in human form. Another way of looking at it is how many cubic feet does that equal. One cubic foot of water weighs 7.5 lbs. giving us 5,769400,000 cubic feet of water.