Fresh water makes up less than 3% of Earth’s water, yet demand keeps rising. This archive tracks real progress in protecting rivers, aquifers, wetlands, and watersheds — from policy wins and technology advances to community-led restoration efforts that are actually working.
Earth Day began on April 22, 1970, when an estimated 20 million Americans gathered at more than 12,000 events to demand their country pay attention to the planet. In New York alone, a quarter-million people filled a car-free Fifth Avenue. Within three years, it had helped shape a generation of landmark U.S. environmental law.
Irrigation emerged around 6,000 years ago in at least four corners of the world at once — Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, and China — with farmers in each place learning to channel rivers onto dry fields. Along the Tigris and Euphrates, the earliest known canals redirected water into otherwise barren land. It’s one of history’s clearest cases of parallel invention.
