Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

I want to talk today about water. It may be the most abused natural gift on the planet — overused, exploited, wasted, source of increasing conflict, under-appreciated — necessary for all life, for life to exist at all.

And we are running out. Without changes in how we use water, the prospects for our human future are very, very grim.

I have been in Wisconsin much of the summer, my home state, and always take time to renew my bonds with Lake Michigan. Talk about abused. The Great Lakes are the world’s largest fresh water source and way too many eyes (of developers especially) are on this water as a way to support the very worst kinds of development — like housing developments in the western deserts.

It doesn’t get much more insane than this — to think of creating pipelines for water from the Great Lakes to support economic development in places that don’t have water. If places don’t have water sources, those places should not be developed. No development should happen that cannot exist in balance with its local bioregion.

Anyway, wanted to make note of this front page article in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel from July 25, with the boring title of Water technology seen as way to replenish region’s economy. That’s not really what the article is about. I mean, it is about developing fresh water technology that can be used around the world and contribute to the region’s economic growth, but the article is much more about the use and abuse of water and the growing needs of a thirsty population.

1.1 billion people around the world without access to safe drinking water, 4,000 children dying every day from water-borne diseases, 30% of water in the US lost to leaky infrastructure, and another 30% lost in the pumping of waste water out of our homes.

In suburban Waukesha, just west of Milwaukee, sprawling, inappropriate development has depleted the underlying aquifer — the ground water table has dropped 500 feet — and folks are getting a good dose of radium now with their water. They are using bottled water for drinking, another grossly inefficient and damaging way to get water, while looking greedily at Lake Michigan to fill their needs.

But lake authorities around here do not allow Lake Michigan water to be pumped outside its natural basin without expensive technology to return every drop, treated, of course, back to the lake. Other communities outside the basin just keep growing, and expecting the lake to fill their needs.

This is how nuts we are — we let developers feed ‘white flight’ and the suburban dream (which has now congested highways and increased air pollution all through this region) by letting them build without a reliable local fresh water supply.

Because we are crazy.

But this is wrong.

More about Lake Michigan. I was stunned the other day to see this photo in the newspaper of a beautiful section of lake shore, the bluffs near Port Washington, now farmland and woods, where a developer is planning to build condos, homes, a golf course right on the edge of the bluff, and retail. Check out the article and see the photo of the area about to come under an astonishing act of violence against nature. It is so beautiful, so beautiful.

This is a mortal sin. This must be stopped. The lake and its magnificent bluffs are not our human playground, not scenic views for the rich, not a space for profit-makers, or yet another project that expresses our profound alienation from the natural world — that alienation that is leading us to ecological catastrophe.

More on water: this little story, that weeks of flooding in Texas has led to massive runoff, fresh water full of nutrients from agricultural runoff, flowing into the salt water of the Gulf of Mexico creating an area of 1,750 square miles depleted of oxygen threatening all sea life within it — what is called a ‘dead zone.’

More: we crazy US Americans purchased one billion personal-size bottles of water in 2005. This is unbelievable — and this does not even take into account the number of bottles containing carbonated drinks and juices which means more plastic bottles and more water pumped from somewhere.

You know this, right? that Aquafina and Dasani are both just tap water, the kind you get by turning on your spigot? Coca-Cola and Pepsi are really taking this culture for a population of saps.

The phenomenon of bottled water, especially all those little bottles we buy to fit in our car cup holders and attaches, present several troubling issues — the oil and carbon emissions involved in making them, the waste because the vast majority of these bottles are NOT recycled, the energy and carbon emissions that go into the recylcing process, the de facto privatization of drinking water, and the drain on aquifers and water sources where spring water is tapped — to name a few.

As Derrick Jackson notes in the linked article, this pursuit of what is symbol of a healthy lifestyle (and an empty symbol for the most part), ‘gives us putrid environs.’

What is the matter with us? All of these stories, this information, are expressions of our relationship with water — as if there is no end, as if it is here to be at our service upon demand.

And we one of only some millions of species that need water to live, to keep this planet habitable.

Water, sacred water. It used to flow freely, replenishing the Earth. From water came life. Our bodies, mostly water. Nothing more necessary, and yet no natural wonder of the Earth’s biosystem is more abused, more threatened. Like draining blood from our bodies, we are draining the Earth, polluting and destroying, what we need for there to be life at all.

[tags]sacred water, Lake Michican, access to drinking water, bottled water, dead zone, aquafina, dasani[/tags]