Would you swim in a pool of brown water? Some people drink brown water. Lack of clean water kills up to 42,000 people each week. Imagine waking up and having nothing to drink but a nice tall glass of brown water.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, these are the three basic human rights. Water is not only a health issue but a human rights issue and everybody has the right to access to clean water. We are currently pushing a petition for clean water well in Africa funded by the United Nations. With enough signatures for clean water we can end infant mortality due to dirty water. The biggest vaccine against infant death is a glass of clean water.

We commonly think that water is all around us but only 1% of clean water is readily available. This may seem like a lot to a developed nation like America or Great Britain but to developing nations like Uganda and Zimbabwe fresh water is a luxury.

The cotton t-shirt you’re currently wearing took 400 gallons of water to make, the jeans took 1,800 gallons. We take so much for granted without thinking of those less fortunate. Even in America 40% of our rivers and 46% of lakes are too polluted for fishing, swimming, or aquatic life.

Climate change ties in strongly with clean water. When we don’t recycle the trash in the land fill or the trash we just throw on the ground eventually ends up in our rivers, lakes and oceans. The same bodies of water we swim in are the same bodies of water polluted by the trash we produce.

Health issues raised by clean water are by far the most alarming. Waterborne diseases kill 1.4 million children each year, that’s 3,832 children per day around the world. That number is unacceptable. Half of the world’s hospitalizations are due to water-related diseases. That is unacceptable. Over 50% of all water projects fail in the first few years. These are issues that, with the United Nations help, we can overcome. We must prevail, for the benefit of mankind in general. Those with everything were put here to help those with nothing and while some people live for nothing, other’s survive for everything.

Nika Water Crisis from Nika Water on Vimeo.

This is the poster I designed for National Blog Day 2010. I decided to change issues this year because I’m pretty sure the one I want to do will be voted down by the popular vote in the end. There are a lot of people who visit my blog who support the same things I do who want to see the Islam and anti-war posters (I know who you are you emailed me a while back) and other posters about various issues. I’ve been having a bit of difficulty posting them, so they won’t be posted for a while. I have the National Blog Day 2010 poster I made that discusses which issue I decided to tackle. I chose the AIDS crisis because back when I had the internet readily available to me I spent a lot of free time watching activism videos in Vimeo’s Activism category. Vimeo is a youtube-like website that hosts a different kind of video. While Youtube is more geared towards home videos and music videos Vimeo is geared towards design videos and motion graphics and videos with an advocacy purpose. I chose the Aids crisis because of those videos. I didn’t understand the gravity of the situation until I watched a few of those mini-documentaries on there. You’ll see a post this October about what I’ve learned about the AIDS crisis and what I think we can do to help. The photograph is courtesy of NASA. I used Photoshop CS5 and this is the first time I’ve ever used any of it’s 3D rendering capabilities so tell me what you think. Also, if you host your own blog, tell me what issue you voted for. I hope the AIDS crisis wins, if it doesn’t then I’ll do the winning topic and the AIDS crisis as a subtopic.

Edit: The poster is supposed to say “National Blog Day 2010″ on the poster in curved type. This will be fixed tomorrow.”