Today is Purim, a day of celebratory abandonment, when we read a raucous and bawdy book about the Jewish people’s triumph over hatred and external threats, eat and drink a bit too much, and otherwise act as if we hadn’t a care in the world. We all deserve one day a year to slough off the burdens and worries life places upon us.

But Purim ends tonight, as Shabbat blessedly begins, and reality returns. Coinciding with Shabbat this year is World Water Day. At the urging of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, the UN designated March 22 as the annual day “to draw international attention to the critical lack of clean, safe drinking water worldwide.” Over a billion people worldwide lack adequate, safe drinking water. And the numbers are likely to grow as climate change threatens annual rainfall patterns and the rapid melting of glaciers robs many areas of a slower, steady seasonal water supply.

This week, click on http://www.worldwaterday.net to learn more about the problem, what is being done and what you can do. And check out http://www.thinkoutsidethebottle.org. This group is spearheading a return to drinking local instead of relying on bottled water (40% of which is tap water anyway!). Bottled water is not the solution for several reasons: the manufacturing, packaging, transportation and disposal of these bottles harms the environment, and wastes valuable resources, including good money that could be spent elsewhere.

Think Outside the Bottle website tells us that:  Each year more than 4 billion pounds of PET plastic bottles end up in landfills or as roadside litter. Making bottles to meet Americans’ demand for bottled water required the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil last year – enough fuel for more than 1 million U.S. cars for a year - and generated more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide. Never mind the billions of dollars spent unnecessarily which could better go to purchase or support things and services of real value.

And read about the increasing privatization of erstwhile public water supplies to meet the water demands of private water bottling companies.

Learn more about what you can do to do limit the use of the bottle, and to make it healthier. Many companies, businesses, buildings, organizations and schools are going bottle-free. Increasingly, conferences and hotels are going bottle-free. Thinkoutsidethebottle has a pledge you can take. Check it out.

You can still carry water around in your own reusable containers - just make sure it is the right kind of plastic (not the kind that leach unhealthy chemicals) or better, metal. More and more manufacturers are making attractive metal liquid containers that we can refill, wash and use again instead of disposable, one-use, throw-away containers. (And even if they can be recycled, reuse is higher on the sustainability scale than recycling, which still requires lots of additional resources to collect, transport, re-make and send back out into the consumer stream.) It can make a great gift to that someone who has everything.

But, meanwhile, today is still Purim. So while the sun shines, celebrate hilariously.

Shabbat shalom