Holidays by fiat are something different than awareness months. Designating a day, setting it aside, can generate understanding as well as giving one the chance to focus on a certain theme, with some needed pressure to set summits and not to allow it to be elided over. It's the same kind of tinge of regret for missing "Talk like a Pirate Day" or Pi-Approximation Day or committing some environmental heresy on Earth Day or buying festive candy when it goes on sale the day afterwards--because after all, one has been in training all year for such things. Avast ye there, aarg! The United Nations has declared a whole calendar of special days for social, cultural and environmental issues and celebrations.
This year's observance of World Water Day brings attention to urban resource management. Nothing else is quite so plastic, varied but also forgiving and abused, profligate as a universal solvent, diluting all of our poisons and what we'd like to hide away--not to mention the floodgate, magic carpet, weather and landscape and landscaper. Eventually what we are hoping to become so rarified and impalpable does, soapy or irradiated, however, become part of the rain and the beach.
