Water…it’s everywhere! As the most precious resource to living creatures on Earth, water constitutes about 71% of the planet’s surface, with 96% of it belonging to the oceans. The amount of freshwater on Earth exists on a much smaller scale, with most of it being contained far below the ground or frozen as glaciers. Water is also in constant movement thanks to our friend The Water Cycle, which means it is changing form and redistributing all the time, a feeling I’m sure we can all relate to during our busy day-to-day lives.
Access to fresh water is vital to our very survival, yet so many around the world still lack this basic human right. Water is such a huge part of what makes us human that it is only fitting our friend H2O receives its very own international holiday!
Mark your calendars for March 22, because this is the day we celebrate all things water, known as The Water Cycle! The Council of United Nations first conceived World Water Day in 1992, its purpose being to highlight the importance of freshwater on Earth and how people globally interact with water. World Water Day encourages and highlights initiatives developed by people across the world to preserve this precious and scarce commodity.
This holiday hopes to raise awareness regarding how water is distributed globally, and how many people around the world, approximately 1 in 6, still do not have access to a source of clean, reliable drinking water.
Water connects people throughout the entire stream of the human narrative, and is a constant resource that all people, throughout time and culture, have shared. It is embedded in our lives on a day-to-day basis, from basic survival needs, to agriculture, to entire industries, and is the most heavily relied on resource in human existence.
Here at CIMI, water is an incredibly important and sometimes scarce resource. 
Most of our daily activities revolve around water activities, like snorkeling, kayaking, or tidepooling. For freshwater, we rely on only a few very shallow groundwater wells located in the middle of the island to supply most of our freshwater. The other portion of our freshwater comes from a desalinization plant near the small city of Avalon. It is incredibly expensive and time consuming to desalinize ocean water, which makes this process a relatively difficult source to rely on.
Right now Catalina Island is considered to be in an extreme drought, which means we all need to do our part in saving water…anyone up for attempting the CIMI shower challenge? We challenge YOU to save your shower and utilize your natural ocean baths during your stay with us! To succeed at this challenge, you must skip showers for your entire stay, and receive endless bragging rights in return.
World Water Day encourages us to observe all aspects of how we interact with water. It is a day for all of us to understand the importance of water in our own life, and how our lives might be different if we did not have access to clean, reliable drinking water. The reality for many people is just this.
So take your day on March 22 to calculate your own water footprint, or perhaps meditate on some creative solutions to saving water in your own life…whatever you do, celebrate our friendly polar molecule H2O and all it has to offer!
