Clean Water – Essential for Life: A UN Earth Day Conversation

Join the United Nations Association-Southern NYS Division in celebrating Earth Day at Queens Museum. On February 26, 1971, U.N. Secretary-General U Thant signed a proclamation saying that the United Nations would celebrate Earth Day annually on the vernal equinox, thereby officially establishing the March date as the international Earth Day.

In his Earth Day statement on March 21, 1971, U Thant said, “€May there only be peaceful and cheerful Earth Days to come for our beautiful Spaceship Earth as it continues to spin and circle in frigid space with its warm and fragile cargo of animate life.”€ The United Nations continues to celebrate Earth Day each year by ringing the Peace Bell at U.N. headquarters in New York at the precise moment of the vernal equinox.

Join us for a panel discussion on Sustainable Development Goal #6: Clean Water and Sanitation . Worldwide, 663 million people are without access to clean drinking water.  In the United States. 21 million people are exposed to unsafe drinking water. Hear how  and United Nations agencies such as UNICEF and federal, state and city agencies in the United States promote clean water for all.

We will conclude with a short documentary screening of Water Warriors and Q&A with Director Michael Premo. Water Warriors is the story of a community’s successful fight to protect their water from the oil and natural gas industry. In 2013, Texas-based SWN Resources arrived in New Brunswick, Canada to explore for natural gas. The region is known for its forestry, farming and fishing industries, which are both commercial and small-scale subsistence operations that rural communities depend on. In response, a multicultural group of unlikely warriors–including members of the Mi’kmaq Elsipogtog First Nation, French-speaking Acadians and white, English-speaking families–set up a series of road blockades, preventing exploration. After months of resistance, their efforts not only halted drilling; they elected a new government and won an indefinite moratorium on fracking in the province.