Monday, May 2, 2011

..."Water On The Mind and In The Media"... (2009)


I click on my Mac widgets program and see all at once that the Alewife Brook gage depth is about 2.2 feet (United States Geological Survey), high tide in Boston was over 10 feet (iTide) and the global carbon footprint was racing unintelligibly past 84,676,368,629 tons (desmogblog.com) as another widget displayed a peaceful tropical seashore sunset, water lapping against a welcoming beach as palm trees waved in the balmy breeze, complete with digital wave sounds and an option for accompanying music. Even from my medium-tech net portal, I can keep track of the ebb and flow of this most important element….some call it a natural resource, smacking of use, rather than coexistence or respect or love, adoration, familial engagement. Some call it something deeper than a mere necessity, something that pulls us to the core of our very soul, a reflection of our very soul, reflective of our own essence, unable to be quantified in or qualified by feet or fathoms or fanciful digital imagery.
Franklin Pierce University, with the leadership of the New England Center for Civic Life, is embarking on a reflective and somewhat revolutionary project, “Art for Water”, under the creative guidance of artist Christine Destrempes. With collaborative, interdisciplinary work proposed, film screenings, open discussions and art creation in the plans, a major shift in our understanding of our relationship to this element is possible and required if we are to conduct ourselves as conscious members of, not only a world community, but of nature itself.

Water at beach, Gloucester, MA
Water at beach, Gloucester, MA
Water is an assumption in popular modern life. It pours endlessly from our mundane and grandiose fixtures, a fantasy in much of the indigenous world, the mother of the thankless, relatively young world of modernism. A close friend related a story of a woman from India who cried when she saw a water-fight on a college campus, knowing the fundamental struggle for water’s life-giving power in her own country. How often do we turn on the water in our opulent sinks and then walk away, even for a moment? When has our heart sunk because we spilled potable water on the ground? There is always more water readily available to us at every turn, in every domicile, every store, bodega and gas station.

The documentary “Planet Earth”, in it’s “Fresh Water” episode, states that just 3% of all water on the earth is fresh water – and that only 1% is drinkable. That’s food and water for thought.

At the core of Destrempes’ “Art for Water” project (picture on eRaven) is the undeniable case that we are in danger of destroying our water “resources” (within the human perspective) to a point in which we will be thrust into the growing reality of water wars, a concept brought to light in the world of international and even inter-state politics in this country. One need only look at the relationship of Colorado and California and their water battles over the Colorado River’s dwindling volume to see the depths of this conflict on the domestic level. Did you know that the Colorado River ceases to reach the Gulf of Mexico in it’s disempowered amble from the north? The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom has also brought clarity to the deeper dynamics of Middle East war and politics, defining the battle for water resources in concert with that for oil in the region. Many reports have pointed to water being central to the political dynamics of Sudan, in addition to Iraq.

Water is clearly a necessity in the minds of the learned or the ignorant, but we are failing to realize the simple consequences of our lifestyles, politics and spiritual disconnection as related to this substance. Suburban sprawl and it’s insane deification of the lawn has been identified as a major component in the decline of the availability and quality of water in the United States of America and other so-called developed countries (I’m not so sure what kind of development “they” mean!). Modern agricultural practice has begun to deplete the Oglala aquifer, the principal supplier of water to the “breadbasket of America”. Business, manufacturing and domestic effluent are major sources of water pollution, with gains and losses seen in current changing practices around conservation and environmental protection.

Let’s look at a few more of our behaviors and social practices with and around water…and I bring these up for purpose of discussion and academic challenge, so bear with me.

We are water-poopers. Yes, I said it. Why is it that in a so-called “developed”, modern world that is able to send people, satellites, TV images of Paris Hilton and chimps into space we think it‘s a good thing to regularly, gleefully relieve the contents of our bowels into the one natural element that is required to be just about 100% free of contaminants before we take it into our bodies? In our grand and glorious technological megalomania, we have institutionalized the practice of crapping in the very substance that we cannot live without.

Interesting….interesting, I say. In my work as a water quality monitor with the Mystic River Watershed Association, it was a regular practice to take water samples to assist the Environmental Protection Agency in assessing the levels of fecal coliform and solids levels in the water reserves that feed our drinking water. When they say fecal, they mean poop. When they say solids, they also mean poop, amongst other things. We are water-poopers. We poop into the water we drink. Even a cursory, but courageous reading of “The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure” by Joseph Jenkins will enlighten us to the madness represented in the practice of one of our most hallowed United States of American institutions – the movement of bowel and bladder on and in our porcelain thrones. Is this an homage to our innate regal nature…at least with respect to our beloved water resources. Jenkins suggests that the best place for those ‘deposits’ is the earth itself. Properly composted, human manure becomes a benefit to the environment and is key to human-ecological balance. In addition, coal mining companies regularly use/lose thousands upon thousands of gallons to slough coal across the desert (no less!) so that we can burn it factories and power stations….that’s a great use of water, why NOT let’s take regular poops in it, too?

As you can see, academic refinery has given way to the required emotional rectitude of this watery exhortation. I thought it necessary to get your attention.
We bottle water to bring potable water into our homes and cars and gym bags and sports events. We bottle water in plastics that leech dangerous gasses and chemicals, using processes that use more water to clean out the bottles than they hold (“Say No to Bottled Water” campaign of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom), sucking precious water from the earth at the cost of the permit to pump rather than the actual cost – inestimable! – of water so that we can conveniently have water at our side, then conveniently dump the plastic bottles into garbage can, ocean, river and landfill. We know that it is a tremendously low number of the billions of plastic bottles of water (or anything else) that actually get recycled, right? But don’t just believe me. Sit in front of the television or listen to your satellite radio and wait for the data on our most precious water resources to come streaming (pun intended) into your consciousness. After all, I teach media studies, I had to go there. You might dehydrate before the popular culture media sources share any of this important information with us on this contentious practice of commodifying life-giving substances. Our best bet is to wait for the Brita and Pur water filter commercials that ask us gently to filter our tap water and save ourselves the scourge of wasteful and toxic practices of plastic bottle usage, a wise practice also being supported, of course, by the local municipal water authority in the Boston area. The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority’s website gives us an ocean full of data and content to absorb in this regard.

Assortment of ways to hold and relate to water...the lablels are instructive.
Assortment of ways to hold and relate to water…the labels are instructive.
Suffice to say, on this issue of bottled water, that there are issues that belie our insistence of understanding our fundamental dependence upon clean, drinkable water. Bottling water damages water resources, not only in the process of pumping and transport, but in the disposal of the noxious receptacles that have become a center-piece in modern USAmerican life and beyond. Our behaviors are in conflict with our human needs. How thoroughly modern is that, Millie? A walk around any of our university buildings will reveal Aquafina vending machines. Since when did Pepsi know what to do with water? It makes cents to bottle water, but it does not make sense to bottle water. Pepsi and Coca-Cola have both been embroiled in battles with governments and communities, activist organizations and indigenous villages around their thirst for potable water to turn into soft drinks. I remember reading a tragic (to me) story of Coke’s search for potable water sources for sodie pop production in Africa. Now there’s a continent with plenty of clean, available water over-running its cups with such surplus that corporations like Coca-Cola and Pepsi would love to tap. I’m being drily sarcastic – for the record. Please check, again bravely, into the work of the Barka Foundation to get some deeper clarity on that. Their “Walk for Water” is a powerful statement of the need for us to raise our awareness about world water issues and how our behaviors have impact.

Privatization of water management in an age of capitalist globalization brings the issue of water to a boiling point. It was in our very recent past that the people of Bolivia ran Bechtel out of their country, torches and pitchforks raised, in a successful attempt to safeguard their spiritual, national and natural heritage. The collusion of bureaucratic government and private corporation around the issue of water is bringing to light the deep rifts of understanding and practice around the distribution of water in the world. Organizations like the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom have been doing great work on the ground and in the media around clarifying what’s at stake and how government policy and corporate practice impact people’s lives. A look into their “Save the Water” campaign reveals a depth of engagement in this matter that is not seen in our more readily apparent media sources. Related to the bottling issue, this oversteps the pedestrian connection to drinking water as the international World Water Council, a consortium of private water management corporations and organization, that promotes the World Water Forum that has been held in Istanbul, Mexico, Kyoto, the Hague, and Marrakech since 1997 advances its promotional campaign. Their corporate puffery touts “a global water movement for a water secure world”. Then why are indigenous and non-governmental organizations and academic leaders the world over decrying their practices and policies? Their website is a gorgeous display of seemingly sensible rhetoric about water and its conservation and management, giving lip-service to Mother Nature herself with statements such as:
“In addition, nature plays a role of regulation and purification of water resources, thus contributing to better water supply and quality” (http://www.worldwatercouncil.org/index.php?id=21)
As if nature itself is OUR subordinate servant. As nature IS our mother, the WWC is subverting our most sacred human traditional knowings of the primacy of nature in the sustenance of the health and sanctity of nature itself, in addition to our own collective human life. Corporate practice has not revealed technological or conceptual mastery enough to improve upon the eternal abilities of nature to keep itself in balance. Issues of male-dominated, capitalist ideology in contrast to and conflict with humanist, feminist/eco-feminist and socialist/populist/ communalist discourse are raised here. The WWC suggests that it has nearly all the answers in sustaining a “water secure” world. The Tlatokan Atlahuak Declaration made at the Indigenous Peoples Parallel Forum of the 4th World Water Forum in Mexico City, Mexico in March, 2006 disagreed firmly and stated:
“We, representatives of Indigenous Peoples and organizations of Mexico, the Americas and other continents of the world participating in the Indigenous Forum parallel to the 4th World Water Forum, declare our solidarity with the Indigenous Peoples of Mexico and their struggle for their ancestral territories and natural resources of which water is aprimordial element. For all Indigenous Peoples of the world, water is the source of material, cultural and spiritual life.”
They went on to affirm their responsibility as indigenous people to safeguard and protect their spiritual and communal birthright, their humble stewardship of the gift of nature and water and earth that they live in such close familial communion with. I “bullet”, or better yet, ‘water drop’ excerpts of their declaration as their viewpoint is instructive and due to a knowing that my prosaic ramblings may do an injustice to their clarity:
“We reaffirm the same Declaration to honor and respect water as a sacred being that sustains all life. Our traditional knowledge, laws and forms of life teach us to be responsible and caring for this sacred gift that connects all life.”
“We reaffirm that the relationship we have with our lands, territories and water constitute the physical, cultural and spiritual basis of our existence. The relationship with our Mother Earth obligates us to conserve our fresh water and seas for the survival of present
and future generations.”
“Mexico and countries that are accomplices of the multinational corporations, violate with impunity the human rights and fundamental freedoms that they themselves have consecrated in the Covenants, Conventions and Declarations of the United Nations and the Organization of American States.”
“Our lands, territories and natural resources, particularly our water (rivers, springs, wells, lakes, groundwater) continue to be stolen or ruined with extreme pollution. The water multinationals, with the support of the international finance agencies like the World Bank
and the Interamerican Development Bank are accomplices in the privatization of our territories and our water. This creates a scarcity of water raising its economic value and furthering the view of water as an object of commerce.”
“We reject the neoliberal model of life that views water as merchandise, not as a public good, or a fundamental human right. Agencies such as the World Trade Organization promote privatization projects of our vital liquid.”
“We denounce the structure of the World Water Forum for being financially prohibitive, which excludes the very Indigenous Peoples who are impacted. We denounce the format of the World Water Forum for denying the legitimacy of the indigenous world and spiritual vision of the sacredness of water.”
(gulp!)
Indigenous people are in current battle with corporate, capitalist structures of globalization that seek to privatize and commodify water at its source, in the womb of Mother Earth, if you will. The divine feminine screams a war cry that shakes the very foundation of modern thought, reverberating through our human core, the heart of us, if we are open and receptive enough to feel it. Caught at the wrong end of modern developmental practice (IS there a good end?) and policy, the indigenous people of the world are standing strong in the face of the calamity of global warming, being the first groupings of humans on the earth to feel its effects, a reality supported by United Nations reports, to defend OUR right as humans to an organic, healthy relationship with water.
In an attempt to come full circle in my blogospheric rantings, the progenitors of water commodification and privatization are trying to turn the whole world into water-poopers. Toilets sold equal profits gained. Water privately piped means bottom-lines strengthened. Consider for a moment what that means…let alone the 3-day meditation that is due the above declaration. Modern corporate ideology suggests that it is actually a benefit to the world that we continue to foul our waters through the daily usage of the toilet. The documentary “Oil on Ice” reported that one of the benefits of oil development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) would be indoor toilets for the indigenous people. Scary ideas when we really sit down (pun again intended) and think about the repercussions of our cultural practices.

Furthermore, touching upon the indigenous cultural embrace of water, the Dagara of Burkina Faso and Ghana hold water to be one of the five spiritual elements of its cosmology. Called Kuon by the Dagara, water represents and embodies peace, reconciliation, unity, community, balance and observant reflection, amongst other attributes. Even a quick consideration of current socio-political reality reveals that water’s spiritual qualities are needed desperately. The Dagara contend that water, as all in nature, must be respected and held in balance in our understanding of it’s importance to life itself and to the spiritual balance of the universe. Pollution of water is not only a physical affront and a socio-political pathology, but a spiritual transgression that has repercussions far beyond our intellectual grasp. To the Dagara, it is the lessons and qualities of water that are needed most urgently in the fire-dominant culture of modernity, as stated by Malidoma Some’ in his book, “Healing Wisdom of Africa” (1999).
The powerful regenerative and redemptive powers of water are being curtailed by the constant physical mistreatment and spiritual neglect of this most fundamental element of our life and times. Our social and private cultural behavior is damaging not only our spiritual and emotional health, but our prospects for life itself. Turning on a faucet or paying for a bottle of water to slake thirst are not inert activities. The ripples of our actions extend to the very depths of the oceans and across every lake, river and stream, through the very cycle of water and of life itself, to the physical and spiritual core of our humanity.

Our participation in the academic endeavor of enlightenment, our understanding of the relationship of the individual to the community of human and nature behooves us to reconsider, to meditate, to pray, to think, to discuss, to engage, to act. The media component in this discussion is as evident as the integrative presence of the very waterways that course through the earth body like veins in our own. We are called as an academic community, as world citizens to reassess our relationship to water, to question the absence of information and engagement of substantive discourse and education in mainstream media, to challenge the commodification of a human right, to challenge the privatization of the social commons, to embolden and validate the wisdom of the indigenous voice, the indigenous soul that has carried heart of humanity in its hands at risk of its own demise now in this modern construct, to live in such a way that will reveal the true genius that humankind has the potential to bring to bear, instead of living in the exigencies of our own ignorance and unwillingness to bravely, boldly, courageously face the facts of life. We are called, required by our humanity, by our humble childhood in the womb of mother nature, still, to do better on the behalf of water. As students-cum-communicators, as scientists, as producers, business people, sociologists, marketers, educators, we must identify new ways of living and working as if we are conscious of human life and need, not merely the force of the market.

As a start, support the work of the New England Center for Civic Life and it’s work around these very key issues of water, life and culture. Inquire into what “Art for Water” is really about. Download that PDF file linked on Franklin Pierce University’s eRaven page. Go to the discussions or start a few of your own. See the movies or produce your own. But do something about water.
We won’t live without it.

Beach and persistent algae bloom, Lynn Beach, Lynn, MA
Beach and persistent algae bloom,
Lynn Beach, Lynn, MA

~~~~~~

as posted on the Franklin Pierce University, Pierce Arrow blog
(This entry was posted on Sunday, September 20th, 2009)

..."Peaceful Waters Out of Balance: The Quiet Cultural Conflict at Spy Pond"...

Peaceful Waters Out of Balance: The Quiet Cultural Conflict at Spy Pond
© 2010

In the midst of a summer heat wave, Arlington’s Spy Pond becomes a place of respite, of relaxation and of adolescent nocturnal restlessness. Idyllic to the eye, often a breathless beauty to the sensibilities and a necessity in essence to the body and spirit, the pond brings visitors from numerous neighborhoods and cities, from all walks of life. Business people with an extra ten minutes of time to reflect, mothers, fathers and their toddling children, young adults deep in bikinis, bass fishing lures and books, shamans and healers with their spiritual offerings, teenagers with their weekly loves and/or cheap beer and dogs with their diverse multitude of walkers, companions and poop-baggers all, in some way, call Spy Pond their solace, their mini-vacation destination, their home.

Spy Pond is also home to grey catbirds, largemouth bass, Canada Geese, cottontail rabbits, gigantic carp, snapping turtles, cormorants, coyotes (though probably just a way station for them) and a stop-off for the glorious and sundry great blue heron. Spy Pond is many things to many beings and people and is also the placid and distressed mirror for the human society that seeks its safety and daily jeopardizes its very existence. As has been said, the ocean is downhill from everywhere and, likewise, Spy Pond, catching all of the chemical, physical and social pollution that Arlington has to offer. Our lawns, verdant and green, though still anathema to the safety of the pond, are still being treated with herbicides that still make their way into the once pristine waters. Every rain, heavy or not, opens up new exposures to road oils and heavier flows of flotsam and jetsam plastics of all kinds from the indifference and ignorance of our automotive shipping lanes and local foot traffic. Close observation of the ebbing and flowing of shoreline plant life has revealed a constant undergrowth of often numerous beer cans and bottles left from likely teenage gatherings, with many, many bottles found broken in the shallows in particular places. If it weren’t for the presence of a few condom wrappers, it could be surmised that these parties were completely devoid of any insight, self-reflection or larger social perspective.


The ever-presence of multi-levels of pollution raises rolled eyes assuredly, but many deeper questions in micro and macroscopic perspectives. Spy Pond, in this instance, raises for us the larger question of how our lifestyles, knowledge, ignorance and apathy impact the natural world, which, for the record, is actually every inch of the globe. Upon reflection on the easily observed contradictions exposed by this issue, it would seem that the Pond represents our deepest impassivity concerning environmentalism in a town that would easily call itself “aware”, what with the proliferation of blue plastic boxes every second monday on neighborhood curbs. How does a citizenry of such means and presumed environmental intent allow itself to foul its most prized aquatic jewel in such myopic disregard?


This is not a question for the ages as modern society has relatively recently created for us (and by us) an intricate set of cultural distractions, busy-ness, media consumption and digital communications maintenance and a deification of individualism, that are a constant set of “jingling keys” that keep our eyes off of our own distorted reflections that we would clearly see if we were able to see beyond the paradise we think we have. One cannot see themselves clearly in tranquil waters yet littered with (ironically) bottled water container caps, plastic candy wrappers, dunked donut drink straws and a steady supply of abandoned plastic bobbers, fishing line, foam and plastic bait containers, hooks and lures from the fisherfolk. Or maybe this watery image of ourselves is the clear picture of ourselves that we must learn to engage. If our waters are fouled by our love of convenience and distraction, then so are we.


And what of these nocturnal teenage gatherings, increasing with the heat of the summer, sometimes heralded during “all hours of the night” by numerous loud, unconcerned voices flowing down Linwood Street, Spy Pond’s main artery, tributary crossroad of speeding cars, entitled bikers and little league baseball families, their voices babbling downstream toward the pond, the repository of their need for communal connection, parental separation and the concomitant and dangerous sexual release that some of the physical evidence points to?

“American culture” has glamourized the shoddy, faulty youth initiatory experience of heterosexism, alcohol and hyper-sexualism and whether in the backseat of the mythical ’57 Chevy, the hidden rural woodland clearing or the sloping shores of Arlington’s natural treasure, these alcoholized experiences are often rife with physical, natal and gendered risks, our daughters, neighbors and friends going along for the dangerous ride that culminates in the high school graduated statistic of one in four college women becoming victims of rape or sexual (and/or psychic) attack, exacerbated deeply by the presence of alcohol, legal or otherwise. More directly, what is our concern for the safety of girls, their bodies, their images and ideas about themselves, their self-esteem and spiritual power? Though men and boys are most often the perpetrators in gendered violence, they are also victimized by the assumption and embodiment of imbalances of power within themselves and in the society that spawns them. How does a citizenry of such means and presumed cultural-environmental intent allow itself to foul its most prized communal jewels in such myopic disregard?



Water, to indigenous people, represents and embodies life itself, peace, community, connection and balance, the very harmony that allows us to really see each other, care for each other, providing a safe, secure cultural container for childhood and beyond. Even in our modern scientific data-driven minds we “know” that we cannot live without water. Are we just as sure we cannot live with fouled and polluted water? The indigenous heart recognizes not only the sacredness of water, which doesn’t allow for its degradation or abuse, but also perceives its power to mediate our worst consumptive tendencies and fiery, masculinized acts of commission. This power, when engaged with open heart, is an ever-present healing force yet forgotten by the modern mind and its sublimated emotional nature, held in contempt by the presence of broken glass, baseballs and bottle caps, just under the mirror-surface. This power is no less deeply derided by the presence of carp ridden with DDT and chlordane. This power no less clearly disdained by the adult culture that lets its children find their own social and sexual way on the darkened shores of those gentle waters, unaware of that energetic power, unaware of their own, sparking their way into the infrastructure of the social fears and contempt of the very generations that created them.

The ice cream truck makes its rounds, a scratchy, digital, annoying instrumental version of the Disney (Walt’s bastion of socio-cultural distraction) tome, “It’s A Small World” playing on its very loudspeaker. We have yet to see just how small this world really is, possibly unaware because we participate still so completely and fully in the culture that poisons and defiles its own sustenance and source of life. Without the popular engagement of this industrial and social infection, we may be unable to sense the contradictions that our children present to us in our own midst, the contradictions that our own societal and commercial run-off represent, habits formed and habits forgotten. A disease undetected, a disease denied is a disease that can destroy the strongest of bodies, political, social, spiritual or corporeal. Our inability to see and feel through our own distorted viewpoints may well be the disease born out of this local and universal conflict of disinterest, further destroying the world of water in which we live and Spy Pond itself, the diamond in our rough, imbalanced unconscious.

(all above photos © Ukumbwa Sauti; taken at Spy Pond)

Friday, February 11, 2011

...Water, Mining and Spirit: the Northern Cheyenne...

The following is excerpted from the chapter entitled, "First Nations Survival and the Future of the Earth" by Rebecca Adamson from the book "Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future", edited by Melissa K. Nelson.

"In the field of economic development, economists like to think western economics is value-neutral, but the fact is, it is not. What does the finance system tell us about function and form, about our very values, when the same system pays a merger acquisitionist millions of dollars and a teacher $40,000? The Cartesian reductionist approach defined success according to production units or monetary worth. The contrast with successful Indigenous development is stark.

For example, because the Northern Cheyenne understand the environment to be a living being, they have opposed coal strip mining on their reservation because it kills the water beings. There are no cost measurements of pollution, production, or other elements that can capture this kind of impact. There is an emerging recognition of the need for a spiritual base, not only in our individual lives, but also in our work and in our communities. Perfect harmony and balance with the laws of the universe means that we all know that the way of life is found by protecting the water beings. The Indigenous understanding has its basis of spirituality and recognition of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all living things - a holistic and balanced view of the world. All things are bound together, all things connect.

As the famous quote by Chief Seattle states, "What happens to the earth, happens to the children of the earth. Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves." The environment is perceived as a sensate, conscious entity suffused with spiritual powers through which the human understanding is only realized in perfect humility before the sacred whole. The Hopi express this concept of being and harmony and balance with the laws of nature at Novoiti. The Tlingit refer to is as Shogan." (pg.33-34)

This quote is part of a presentation given by Adamson at a Bioneers conference in which numerous indigenous people presented their perspectives on issues of nature, governance, women's issues, food, sustainability, spirituality and culture. This book is highly recommended by this writer to anyone who is even remotely interested in creating and/or supporting progressive human development and a continued presence of healthy and sustainable human life and society on Earth.


~~~~~~
"Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future", Melissa K. Nelson, Editor, Bear and Company, Rochester, Vermont, 2008

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

...reconciliation...

...I sit here at a computer, projecting thought streams into a virtual world, terrestrium digitalus, one that gives deep homage to repetition, to sameness, that bases its very process, its very reason for being on only two numbers, nothingness and unity. Maybe those numbers point us to the essence of the world's diversity, to the essence of the world, the yin yang dance of complementary forces that call us into deeper question of our place within it all...and where we must someday more so be.

Outside the window, there on the other side of my digital portal is the actual world-wide web - of life, of experience, of feeling, of nature and Spirit and soil and bone and water and leaf, coyote, squirrel, hawk, raven and worm. Outside that window lies a frozen lake of tears, hiding a world's-age of memories inside the stone-cold casing that allows us to walk like that mythological ghost-man from Nazareth. Outside that window is everything we've ever wanted, everything we've ever feared and needed and destroyed.

But we play with that destruction, those fears, those wants and desires in our virtual worlds, echoes of what was once real to us as our bodies cry out for justice as we force them to live at the portal of the virtual. We carpally paralyze as our hands are made more for chopping wood, skinning rabbits, soothing babies and welcoming friends than diving into the shallow bay of repetitive motion, sending ones and zeroes into the constant scream of consciousness that may be merely beckoning us to do that act of modern resistance - to go outside and play.

My body finds in it a simple, but tenacious growth, a widening of the midsection that brings some of our deepest adolescent and uninitiated fears to bear in the pages of women's magazines and men's magazines and health magazines and late night infomercials, "as advertised on TV", our banner ads poking and prodding our waistlines and our now wasted minds left dormant because we forgot to keep them both engaged as we wallowed at the portal of the digitally unreal...or at the altar of televisual god, a nasty, vengeful, ubiquitous god. So we attack the midsection, battle the gut with wheels and electrocution belts and lipid-burning pills and life-system bypassing choke chains, melting creams, salves and solutions that send incendiary messages to the part of the body that is more the effect than the cause.

And at the altars of modernity, we lie in abject torpidity, tired-blood offerings to our own social pathological demons, beleaguered by what we think life is, or worse, what it was, raising inaction, inactivity, inactivism to new and lofty heights of deism that have never been seen before and would have been the very scourge of any sane and conscious society. But we wallow on, de-activating the brain in ever-quickening spirals downward, downward, downward because we can't actually fly, more so because we've forgotten our kinship to the crow than that our wingspan is insufficient to be carried into ecstasy on the breath of our Ancestors.

We watch our children, the innocents, the tender, beautiful ones, kill us. They break our hearts. We damn them for not knowing. We scorn them for not seeing. We malign them for not becoming. We report them for failing, for shooting each other with impunity and we impune them when they use the very tools we created for the purposes we made them. We scream at them, even in the silence of our neglect, to do as we say, not as we just did to them. We lock them up in prisons because they disappointed our expectations. We lock them up in schools because we've forgotten to trust, forgotten to divine that they already know what they need to remember. We lock them up in our faulty, dusty, moldy, rank and file expectations because we fear we will lose the life of that child within us, but who dies from that self-same prison imposed upon it by all of the children who drive cars and dig mines and build bridges and run stock markets and who brutalize motherhood who never grew up in the first place.

I see a vast wasteland of the bodies of what we would call, what we could call, what we should call women and men, mere and rotting echoes of the spirit within. They are the walking dead in the night of the living, crawling out of the shadows for their forfeited life-blood pacts with the Creator, slavering after the elixir of life at the jugular well. Our telescreens dance with images of the zombied and and the vampirical, the ones who can't live without the others, the last living things on earth, running from the light, from their own death, from that which will pass them into physical oblivion even though that is the only way life can continue. The sapling grows out of the cool humus born of old bark and branch. What kind of hell is it in which the tree of life eats its young?

True pathology is not born, it is made, even if it shows up in the twisted body-mind of a newborn terminator-seed baby. Atrazine cocktails, the insanity of pharmaceutical aquatic concoction, poison-water amalgams of experiments gone bad, but cheered in great pomp and circumstance like the naked emperor in his new clothes. What kind of twisted kool-aid have we conjured for the kids? Living lives of disconnected, not asked, not told fantasies of something long gone, but waiting in our hearts' shadows, beckoning the vampire to walk through its twilight and back into the substance of a new day. The crime of the centuries has been committed and the smoking gun will always be responsible to the one that forged the trigger.

And we've integrated the virus into our very lives. We have committed them to the eternal Inquisition, to the mawkish embrace of the iron maiden, chained her to the boiling cauldron of our own demasculinized machinations into which we daily commend her spirit. If she floats we will kill her. And if she drowns she has killed herself. She asked for it. She is mine. She is mined for the liquid gold of her tears, her fossil-fuel blood spilling, killing her children. She is raped in her ability to give life and we will sell her tears in the twisted, dime store narrative of our own tragic buffoonery, drink from her cup that runneth over with her own endless capacity for acceptance and the making of peace. We have walked on her moon and left upon it the garbage of our mechanism, the spawn of the ma(n)trix. Her pill will be blue and she shall consume it verily, thusly and without fail, without hesitation, without protest, without consideration. This is the word of the lord. This is the world of the lords.

The penis was never a license to kill or to blind oneself to the gift in the hand that fed you or to destroy the essence of that which gave you life with that spiteful, sybaritic, saline solution of scientific human blasphemy.

Reconciliation is not the dizzny-fictional apparition of glowing castles, awakened walking-dead princesses or Powhatans and Pilgrims both marked as savages. How dare we act like this is so! Reconciliation is not the psychic-trauma-insult to colonial injury of some so-called truth panel pseudo-Khosa-celebre that leaves the crime yet unpunished, wounds bleeding out into continued township bloodshed and the sustenance of gated cities within nations of disenfranchised warriors who thirst for water, arable land and sweet succulent quiet soothing healing living breathing justice. Reconciliation is not the feel-good process that requires us to close our eyes to reality or to the corporeal nature of our own regret, frustration and grief. Reconciliation is not shallow forgiveness. Reconciliation is not giving up...or laying down...or giving ground...or giving in.

Reconciliation makes things real. It requires us to realize with real eyes what is, what was and what must be. We must be able to reconcile the dysfunction of a society that places great importance on the sustenance of virtual realities and in those same instances is destroying the balance of the natural systems upon which all terrestrial life depends, forsaking the real for the virtual, the actualized for the fictionalized, the Creation for the manufactured, the body for the robot, the ghost for the machine, the baby for the bathwater.

Reconciliation unifies experience. We must be able to unify our concerns for our own looks, our waistlines, our health, our lives and that our lifestyles are creating our wasteful styles and broadening waists. Our bodies are not the criminals, but we have criminalized, to some extent, the clarity that brings us to bravery that brings us to enacting the kind of change in what we eat and how we eat and how we more and why we move so that the beautiful ways we look and feel and are and become are born of the beautiful ways we treat each other and grow and cook and nurture food and nurture and grow life within our homes and villages, communes and communities.

Reconciliation requires the bravery and courage inherent in the execution of human responsibility. Reconciliation requires us to love the children more powerfully, most powerfully, who take up our arms and kill each other, whether in the villages of Uganda and the Congo, the inert-cities of Boston, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles or the quaint, peaceful, idyllic and idealized communities of New Hampshire and Colorado. The children, the truant students, the inattentive fifth-graders, the violent gang members, the pubescent mass-murderers, the disrespectful teens, the ignorant mall-rat vermin consuming our high-fructose commercialism are not the problem, but the symptom of our own inability to reconcile the history of the modern manufacture of commodified youth, the recipients of every neuroses and disease, social or otherwise, that we adults could blindly and sometimes not so blindly create for them. Reconciliation calls us to look our children in the face, beaten and bloodied by and with our own hands and weapons, and see ourselves.

Reconciliation is redemption. Reconciliation is the ability to put our own mistaken identities of childhood and adulthood into the solitary confinement of historical memory and to forge into a new relation with the child within and the child without. Why is it that modern culture refuses to consciously and compassionately initiate its youth into adulthood, that we leave them with cinematic visions of the back seats of '57 Chevies and six-packs of beer and HIV-free and nubile blanched bodies as opposed to concretized stories of bodies-become-battlefields and nations-become-decivilized-warzones and futures-become-forsaken-dreams of drunken fathers and mothers pimped-out for their thoughtless, thankless ability to love? Why do we not teach them to envision a world boldly beyond the confines of our own spiritual disability? Why do we not prepare them fully and courageously for the world that we have actually created, but for the one we still fantasize about, but don't tell them because we were too busy dropping them off at soccer, dance class or into the hands of the cult of surreality tv. We don't have time. We are busy. We create a vacuum of parenting, mentorship and elder guidance and direction and we will allow our children to be sucked into that vacuum, to fill it with their grief turned depression turned anger turned self-destruction turned destruction. Reconciliation requires that we stop "teaching" and start listening because we've learned to trust that children come into the world with things we need and we won't figure that out from the results of a bastardizing, standardizing test. A gift is a unique expression of the understanding of one life form to, for and on behalf of another life form. Children are a gift for us. Our communally responsible adulthood, our Eldership, is a gift we have kept from giving to our children as they require. We are the shit of the next generation and we can continue to be a toxic-body-waste or turn ourselves gently over in the cultural compost heap of history and allow the hope of future generations to be fertilized by the gift of our death and the gift of what then will have been a life of love and purpose, responsible to time and space, to the sublime, to grace.

Reconciliation is a river bed through which men will make fertile the sacred forest of their own desacration by the volume of their new-found tears. Reconciliation requires us to look deeply into the mythology, real and imagined, of masculinity, of the maleness, of men, of what they think and what they do. It requires of men that we be singularly and communally able and willing to hold our psychic phallo-weapon in one hand and embrace the body and soul of those victimized of rape in the other. Reconciliation requires us to see, in our mind's eye and in the flowering of our cultural expressions, at the same and simultaneous moment of plausible and achievable absolution our birth mother and our earth mother - that our birth mother is our earth mother and that our earth mother is our birth mother.

Reconciliation requires in all of us that we see the unity in our actions and inaction, in our thoughts and in our behaviors, in our statements and in our production, in what we say we intend and in what we see clearly that we have caused to come into being. Reconciliation requires us to make peace, but not simply take the privilege of power and tell the disempowered that they have access to power, but still make it ultimately and tragically impossible to live peacefully on the land or in a house or with people who love and understand them or drink clean water or grow and eat food that actually is alive and sustains life without selling your body and soul to a machine that does not know your name, but can map your DNA as if we were toys for genetic-rape, tools for patriarchy's prostitution of everything sacred and repositories for drugs so vile that we rob our children of their spirits, their childhood, the food from their lips so we could stay high for one more day.



Reconciliation calls us to write history books that tell the truth of the world that exists in reality outside of the pages.

Reconciliation demands that we tell and disseminate stories that have everything to do with not only the world that truly is, but also the world that we know must and can truly be.

Reconciliation brings us home to the realization that we can not espouse one idea and act in such a way that devalues and unravels, confuses and distorts that idea with dissonant behavior.

Reconciliation is the act of seeing something that needs to change and grow and heal and then creating and manifesting and sustaining that change, that growth, that healing.

Reconciliation behooves us to be honest with each other in ways that our modern, anti-cultural story says is dangerous, damaging and damn-near impossible.

Reconciliation means we may actually have to talk about religion, about religions and their place in our past, present and future and if they should have and hold that same place in our present and future.

Reconciliation will be the perfunctory destruction and dismemberment not only of the ideas and ideology of sexism, racism, classism, ageism and homophobia, but also the structural, social, political systems that validate, maintain and sustain these social diseases.

Reconciliation does not exclude the possibility that we must destroy something that we wish to not even fleetingly gaze upon for the deep, corporeal and earth-shattering emotions it engenders within us.

Reconciliation does not exclude the eventuality that the enslaved might have to set fire to the house of the enslavers.

Reconciliation does not eliminate the necessity for us to come out on the other side of the process slightly or wholly and fundamentally changed for all time.

Reconciliation will bring us to the realization that we ultimate and finally need each other - for everything.

Reconciliation is fucking hard.

Reconciliation must be understood, felt, touched, created, nurtured, created, remembered, enacted, made real, made now, made eternal.

Reconciliation is one of the qualities, one of the energetics, one of the sacred facets of the Spirit of water, Kuon, in the cosmology of the Dagara people of Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Ghana.

And so it is that reconciliation is yet another water story. The spirit of reconciliation is in the water. The hope of reconciliation, of peace, of unity, of clarity, the healing nature and spirit of who we are as humans becoming human as Spirit embodied - is in the spirit of water.



In the Spirit of Water...

Saturday, January 22, 2011

...water in emotion...

...I've gleaned somewhere that blogs, or at least many of them, are about what people think and feel about things, responses to the world around them, the worlds inside of them. I've spent hours and hours on my blogs, finding links and resources and information, researching this or that and it seems it might be time to speak from the heart.

There is a multitude of joy, of anger, of frustration, of concern, of awe, of respect, of gratitude and admiration with respect to water. For as close as my heart and mind and body feels to this powerful, life-giving element and for as much as I believe in the ultimate human ability to rise above its own mediocrity and behave as though it is a conscious, living, breathing, intelligent earthen dynamic, I have a lot of fear and dread.

My heart sinks every time I see a student look up at me with a bottle of water next to their notebook. I cringe when I see a young person, or anyone, like I have on the trains and busses, ravenously glugging down seemingly ignorant swigs of corporate water, trying not so diligently to keep my judgements in check. I recoil at the the idea and presence of the suburban lawn or the over-abundance of golf courses all over north america that suck up fluid resources more and more because mono-culture doesn't work. I die inside when I see the televised smoke of burning rainforest billowing up into the sky, forcing its fiery way disrespectfully into the hydrological cycle. I cry inside when I think of billions of toilets flushing every day, swirling "waste" into the sacred waters of the earth when it is the earth and nature that more readily accepts this gift from our sacred bodies. My anxiety deepens when I think of people who walk away from running faucets or statements to the populace that remind us that letting the water run when we brush our teeth or shave is a bad thing when by all estimations we should have already known that a trillion gallons ago. Red flags go up as I hear of well-meaning organizations trying to bring flush toilets to indigenous people instead of composting toilets...as if they needed these things instead of their own balanced ways that have been colonized out of their consciousness. I weep when I think that we don't even think or hear or learn or feel...about water.

So many of us in the "western", modern, capitalist, industrial, "developed" (what parts of humanity have actually been developed in this screwed up society?!?), pseudo-democratic sub-world act as though nature is our plaything, that we can simply call a sacred element a “natural resource”, a commodity and that there will be no negative repercussions on any physical, emotional or spiritual level. Comedian Kyle Grooms did an insightful and tragically hilarious bit on bottled water and water parks that points us to one of our deepest modern pathologies...our disrespect for water and it's ultimate importance in our physical, social and spiritual lives. Seeing sculptured, controlled water fountains in industrial parks hits me like a brick in the gut. Watching us chlorinate gallons and gallons and more thousands of gallons of water just so we can slide one hundred feet into a chemicalized pool of cool water gives me serious pause, makes me sick, makes me wonder if we haven’t been seriously cognitively affected by those chemicals.

There IS something in the water!


And I can't get past the thought and deep, gut-bone knowing that we could and should be doing PETA-style tactics on anyone we see carrying a plastic bottle of store-bought, corporate-stolen water. Why wouldn't we scream at them that they are killing us by buying into this twisted concept of CON-sumerist exploitation...why wouldn't we call them to task on the bus or the train or at the office or at the conference or in their homes for this ultimately disrespectful, wasteful, damaging practice?! We would easily think someone nearly insane for singing and dancing freely on a city street, but we walk quietly past anyone who carries a bottle of water when every sane and informed perspective on this practice shows us that it is a wasteful, earth and "resource"-damaging concept that displaces ground water from the places that need it most, from the very places nature herself decided it should be to send it to places and people far away, the essence of enviro-benefit displacement. People in India threw Coca-cola out of their farming communities when the factory polluted the environment and the pumping of water decreased the water well levels to dangerous, crop and life-threatening lows. And we don't rise up and scream and fight and yell at the top of our lungs when a Coke truck rolls by?!



Where is OUR anger? Where is OUR outrage?! Where is OUR intelligence and principled thinking?! Where and when is our action to be seen doing what is necessary to destroy the systems and ways of thinking that are destroying us?!?

Where is the heart-felt knowing that we are desacralizing the sacred, that we are violating the inviolable, that we are killing the life blood of the earth, our bodies and our very souls?


(Bechtel's Hoover Dam, now 75 years old)

We have accepted, probably unknowingly, the privatization of water treatment and delivery in so many USAmerican cities by the very same company and kinds of companies that the people of Bolivia ran out of their country. Bechtel, Thames, Suez, Vivendi and others operate quietly in so many cities in this "free country"and we don't even democratically realize that they are locking down access to life itself. Water activists and warriors (yes, water WARRIORS!) all over the world have warned us about them because they have fought them, seen the idiocy and tragedy of their ways of working and thinking, seen and felt the harsh reality of globalization and capitalism in places where it does not work, where it is killing and poisoning and sickening people day and night, robbing us, ALL OF US, of life and the simple hope that we might project ourselves safely, peacefully and consciously into a future where humanity, nature, life itself and the water that could guarantee them all is respected, protected and understood for its core and essential value.

In the Dagara indigenous spiritual and cultural tradition, water carries the energetic, the properties and gifts of observation and focus, of clarity, peace and unity. How can we continue to desacrate and disrespect AND waste the very naturo-spiritual element that carries these important energies and lessons for us at a historical and cultural time like this? How can we NOT listen to the Dagara as they implore us to protect that very element that will continue to secure our place as conscious, caring, compassionate, communal and living, breathing humans being on this earth? How can we sit here at our computers day after day, with access to all the intelligence and wisdom of many indigenous societal ways AND the burgeoning, though late awareness of modern science and political thought to the importance of our protection of this vital fluid?

How dare we spend our hours, our days and nights watching twisted surreality tv shows, (US)American idolatry, lost plane passengers and housewives turned desparate when there are documentaries like "Thirst", like "FLOW", like "Blue Gold: The Water Wars", stellar short films like "PUMZI" by Wanuri Kahiu, that point to us to the very clarity that will save our mortal lives and possibly preserve a humble place on the earth we've been moderno-maniacally raping for the past 150 or so years at the behest of and ignorant acquiescence to capitalist globalization!

There is no sane culture that disrespects water or complains about rain and the blessed offering and gift from Spirit and nature that that is. We would shake our heads at people who live around the dried up lake bed of Lake Chad in Africa if they dared waste a jug of water. We'd think them truly off their nut! But we send billions of gallons of water into fetid sewers and into chemical-laden plastic bottles, pour thousands upon thousands of gallons of pollution constantly into our rivers, poison our lakes and rivers with pesticides like Atrazine (outlawed in the very country that is home to the capitalist corporation that produces it!), piss billions of gallons of dangerous and damaging pharmaceutical chemicals from our bodies into the water systems of the world, rain down acid on the gentle, loving earth - and we don't see our own insanity??! Indigenous people who don't wear pants in the jungles of South America have soberly pointed us to our own aquatic and earthine pathologies - CORRECTLY! - and we marginalize their healing message because who wants to listen to a dude with red paint on his face that eats monkey meat that is telling us how we can stay alive on a troubled planet?

There is no insane culture that disrespects water, complains about rain and privatizes water that will last on this earth. Vandana Shiva has likened the rampant industrial-IMF/World Bank-age damming of rivers all over the earth to the blockage of the human arteries that cause heart-attacks. Modern anti-culture has brought the earth close and closer to a terrestrio-cardiac arrest. It has created a culture of blockage and commodification and desacration and servitude. It constantly destroys cultures and viewpoints of freedom, flow, true connection, harmony, sacredness and fair exchange. Ms. Shiva IS right. The no-pants, red-faced, monkey-eating, jungle-dwellers ARE right. Those documentaries and movies that get seen far too infrequently and far less widely than they should ARE right. Wanuri Kahiu’s science fiction-cum-science-non-fiction narrative IS right.


("PUMZI" still shot)

And I feel the madness, the insanity, see the sickness, the disease-state mind-set of the culture within which I live (in spite of). And I AM sick of the notion that we can't do better than this, that we are actually living in an advanced society because we wear pants and eat mystery-meat and have our women use poisonous chemicals to make them more beautiful. I am truly hurt, deeply hurt by the thought and functional knowing that we are but a simple mindset shift away from seeing our own collective spiritual pathology and that we seem to be making that shift, if we are making it at all, in such a dangerously and tragically slow manner...when we think we are so very, very advanced, smart, informed, educated, intelligent and entitled to our modern-cultural-arrogance.

My tears are made of the very water that sits atop Mount Kilimanjaro, less and less, though each year, receding with the changing of climate and scientific bullying of the global hydrological cycle. My sweat is made of the same water of the powerful, insistent Amazon river, encroached upon by petrochemical companies and falling trees for livestock grazing to feed the fast-food addiction of lipid-heavy westerners. My saliva churns with the retiring waters of the Colorado and Columbia rivers, diverted and sullied by dams and urban faucets whose owners never see the dwindling salmon runs or dry, disappearing deltas that flush our collective soul no more.


(from www.bechtel.com)

I am that water that Bechtel, Vivendi, Thames and Suez burns into thin air. I am that pacific ocean that thickens with plastics floating out of the sewers of Japan and California. I am that well that is drying up in the farmlands of India. I am the water, stilled and dying behind the dam nation of international capital's disease-state. I am the Oglala aquifer, dangerously low from mechanized, modern irrigation techniques. I am the 1% and decreasing supply of potable fresh water on the earth, our only home. I am dying because the society I live in has forgotten the very thing that gives it life and the very opportunity to have the strength to have the choice to destroy itself -



...

Sunday, January 16, 2011

...taking action on behalf of water, human and all life...

The following organizations are listed on the "Blue Gold: World Water Wars" 'Action Plan' page:

* Food & Water Watch
* Council of Canadians
* Polaris Institute
* People and Water
* Flow For Water
* Ryan's Well
* Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation
* River Alliance of Wisconsin
* Save Our Groundwater
* FogQuest
* Potters For Peace
* France Libertés Fondation Danielle Mitterrand
* Navdanya
* Anti-Privatization Forum in Johannesburg
* Controlled Environment Agriculture Center
* One Drop Foundation
* Better Globe
* Global Water

http://www.bluegold-worldwaterwars.com/actionplan/index.html

Saturday, January 15, 2011

...question #2...

Why IS it that we urinate and defecate into the very element we need to keep ultimately pure, pristine and clean?

~~~~~~

"The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure" -

http://www.humanurehandbook.com/

Monday, January 10, 2011

...water stories...

http://blog.gulflive.com/mississippi-press-news/2013/07/low_oxygen_levels_red_tide_con.htmlHere are links to websites, articles and on-going, on-flowing stories that can be helpful in understanding our current challenges with preserving the sanctity of water. Please be free to share your impressions and ideas here.

~~~~~~
Water Pollution "is so globally severe that the Malaysian government imposed the death penalty for anyone caught contaminating water"
- Blue Gold: World Water Wars
(documentary based on Maude Barlow's book of the same name)
~~~~~~


"97% of earth's water is salt water. 3% of earth's water is fresh water.
Much of that is polluted beyond human use."
- Blue Gold" World Water Wars
* The BBC's "Planet Earth" episode on water reports that only 1% of all the earth's water is potable for drinking by humans.

~~~~~~

Countdown on the Columbia
Deadline looms for the river that turned darkness to dawn
By Aimee Brown
Posted on October 2nd, 2010

http://oregonstate.edu/terra/2010/10/countdown-on-the-columbia/

~~~~~~

Say No to Bottled Water - Women's International League for Peace and Freedom - 


http://www.wilpf.org/water_bottled


http://www.wilpf.org/taxonomy/term/2

~~~~~~

Indigenous Environmental Network - Sacred Waters - 
"A network of Indigenous Peoples empowering Indigenous Nations and communities
towards sustainable livelihoods, demanding environmental justice and maintaining
the Sacred Fire of our traditions."

http://www.ienearth.org/water.html

~~~~~~

The Barka Foundation - 

http://www.barkafoundation.org/


~~~~~~

















~~~~~~

Bottled Water Scorecard 2011 - Environmental Working Group

"Top brands are keeping secrets..."

http://breakingnews.ewg.org/bottled-water-2011-home

~~~~~~

Best and worst bottled water brands

posted on Yahoo!Green, Wed Jan 5, 2011 9:18am PST
written by Lori Bongiorno

http://shine.yahoo.com/event/green/best-and-worst-bottled-water-brands-2436818/print
"Sweet ninja-sauce! They're doing it AGAIN!!! They're trying to make sense out of a system of abuse and commodification that destroys the very essential "resource" that they try to sell to us...which we ultimately cannot and should not own!.....does it ever end?! Oh yeah.....it does end." - Ukumbwa Sauti, from facebook
~~~~~~

"Most Expensive Bottled Water"

http://most-expensive.net/bottled-water

~~~~~~

Tap Water & Chemicals: Debating the Concerns

"A new report finds 31 out of 35 American cities have dangerous chemicals in their tap water."
On Point - WBUR 90.9FM, Boston
Wednesday, January 5, 2011 at 11:00 AM EST

http://www.onpointradio.org/2011/01/chemical-water

~~~~~~

Pakistan’s Enviro “Stress” As “Threat Multiplier”

On Point - WBUR 90.9FM, Boston
Wednesday, August 18, 2010 at 11:55 am

"What are the strategic implications of Pakistan’s flooding? For more on that, here’s an interesting, new Congressional Research Service report. More terrorist recruiting? Conflict with India over water?"

http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/08/pakistans-epic-flooding-crisis


~~~~~~

Water Wars in the West

On Point - WBUR 90.9FM, Boston
Wednesday, June 20, 2007 at 10:00 AM EDT

http://www.onpointradio.org/2007/06/water-wars-in-the-west


~~~~~~

Chemicals in Our Bodies
On Point - WBUR 90.9FM, Boston
Monday, July 6, 2009 at 11:00 AM EDT

http://www.onpointradio.org/2009/07/chemicals-in-our-water


- this show describes the presence and dangers of various chemicals in USAmerican drinking water

~~~~~~

Ukumwba Sauti's Cultural Media Literacy - Special Issues: Water youtube playlist


CML-Special Issues/WATER
Issue of water rights, conservation, bottled water, etc,...

http://www.youtube.com/user/sauticml#grid/user/51F58C5C65709DAA

- please pay special attention to the Maude Barlow videos, "Blue Gold" (based on a Maude Barlow book) and the Current TV video, "*Vanguard: World Without Water: Vanguard"

~~~~~~
























~~~~~~

"China Report Shows More Pollution in Waterways"

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/world/asia/10pollute.html

~~~~~~

The FoLOWing are key water issues documentaries, essential to the understanding of the importance of being conscious of the use of, the nurturance of and protection of water:

"FLOW: For Love of Water" - http://www.flowthefilm.com/
"Thirst" - http://www.thirstthemovie.org/summary.html
"Blue Gold: World Water Wars" - http://www.bluegold-worldwaterwars.com/

"Barka! Burkina" - watch online at http://www.wiredcinema.com/mdb/barka-burkina/

"Earth Wisdom: For a World in Crisis" -

watch online at http://www.linktv.org/globalspirit/wisdom

(This video is a more generalized and spiritual approach to the issues of living in balance with the earth and states an important spiritual perspective around recreating and sustaining a healthy, familial relationship with nature and,of course, water.)

~~~~~~

Blue Water Alternative (from the "Blue Gold" documentary website) -

http://www.bluegold-worldwaterwars.com/actionplan/blue_alternative.html

~~~~~~

Zapatistas and Vicam Yaquis: In Defense of Water, Tuesday, November 23, 2010 -

http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2010/11/zapatistas-and-vicam-yaquis-in-defense.html

~~~~~~



















~~~~~~

Straightjacket: Navajo president completes water rights coup, Friday, Nov. 19, 2010 - 

http://censored-news.blogspot.com/2010/11/straightjacket-navajo-president.html

~~~~~~

Navajo Hall of Shame: 51 Council Delegates' Water Rights Giveaway, Mon., Nov. 8, 2010 -

http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2010/11/navajo-hall-of-shame-51-council.html

~~~~~~

Benny Bahe Photos:
Navajos March Against Council's Water Rights Giveaway, Thurs., Nov. 4, 2010 -

http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2010/11/benny-bahe-photos-navajos-march-against.html

~~~~~~

Navajo Water Rights: Free, Prior and Informed Consent, Monday, Oct. 18, 2010 -


http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2010/10/navajo-water-rights-free-prior-and.html


~~~~~~

Proposed Navajo Water Rights Settlement (Document), Monday, October 11, 2010 -

http://censored-news.blogspot.com/2010/10/proposed-navajo-water-rights-settlement.html


~~~~~~
















~~~~~~

State Environmental Resource Center, Water Privatization Policy Issues Package -

http://www.serconline.org/waterPrivatization/fact.html

~~~~~~

Institute for Responsible Technology, GMOs, Dangers to the Environment -

http://www.responsibletechnology.org/gmo-dangers/dangers-to-the-environment

~~~~~~

"World's Most Expensive Ice"
(you would think this would simply be a joke, but - )

http://most-expensive.net/ice

~~~~~~

Music video created for Duran Duran's, "Before the Rain" -

http://genero.tv/watch-video/28754/#


~~~~~~

American Petroleum Institute - Water Issues page

http://www.api.org/ehs/water/


~~~~~~

Low Late Fall Salmon Runs Leave Eagles Starving, Falling Out of the Sky -

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/02/25/starving-eagles-fall-from-sky-in-canada/?iref=obinsite

~~~~~~

World Bank Backs Marine Dumping Of Mine Waste In Papua New Guinea -

http://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/papua-new-guinea/world-bank-backs-marine-dumping-mine-waste-papua-new-guinea

~~~~~~

















("Art for Water" - Christine Destrempes)

~~~~~~

Oppose Delta Water Package and $12 Billion Water Bond! -

https://secure2.convio.net/sierra/site/Advocacy?alertId=2893&pg=makeACall

~~~~~~

Sloan Waterfree Urinals -

http://www.sloanvalve.com/Our_Products/Waterfree_Urinals.aspx


~~~~~~

Mio Liquid "Water Enhancer" (I was completely unaware that this powerful, pure, sacred element needed "enhancing"...deep, I'm telling you....it's just deep.) -

http://www.drinkwhat.com/mio-liquid-water-enhancer/

~~~~~~

"Water Joe"...that's what they call it -

http://www.waterjoe.com/who.php

~~~~~~

Hydrophilia: Becoming Water Wise - featuring "Inside the Well with Christine Destrempes"

http://www.waterdeva.com/blog/

~~~~~~




















~~~~~~

Navajo Aquifer Concerns May Prove True - Indigenous clarity on the Peabody coal mining debacle -

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/08/black-mesa-aquifer-concerns-may-prove-true/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

~~~~~~

Powerful Coonrod Ceremony, Progress on McCloud Salmon Return:
http://www.winnememwintu.us/2011/08/23/powerful-coonrod-ceremony-progress-on-mccloud-salmon-return/

~~~~~~

The Debating Chamber - Water worlds: scarcity and access
:

http://www.trust.org/alertnet/blogs/the-debating-chamber/water-worlds-scarcity-and-access/

~~~~~~
















~~~~~~


Dams and Water and Indigenous Peoples:

http://indigenouspeoplesissues.com/index.php?option=com_fjrelated&view=fjrelated&id=0&Itemid=111

~~~~~~


Department of Fisheries and Oceans
in conflict on fish farms:

http://www.timescolonist.com/technology/conflict+fish+farms/5382406/story.html


~~~~~~


"California's Fruit-and-Veg Behemoth: Too Productive for Our Own Good" by Tom Philpott at Mother Jones - 

http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2011/09/california-agriculture-too-productive-our-own-good

~~~~~~

"Returning Salmon Being Tested for Radiation from Japanese Nuclear Plant as a Precaution" by Wawmeesh Hamilton, Indian Country Today Media Network

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/09/returning-salmon-being-tested-for-radiation-from-japanese-nuclear-plant-as-a-precaution/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_content=returning-salmon-being-tested-for-radiation-from-japanese-nuclear-plant-as-a-precaution/&utm_campaign=fb-posts

~~~~~~

Colorado, tribe consider appeal of water ruling, Durango Herald -

http://www.nola.com/newsflash/index.ssf/story/colorado-tribe-consider-appeal-of-water-ruling/00a812f013774fb09b660c8ae8b4a97e

~~~~~~

Contaminated Creek in Bakken Oil Fields, North Dakota -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=tmoLgXF02LY ~~~~~~

Hopi/Navajo message: "Water Is Life", the struggle against Peabody Coal mining -

http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/#!/2011/11/hopi-land-water-is-life-saturday-nov-12.html

~~~~~~


Spy Pond, Arlington, MA - recipient of lawn chemical run-off,
innumerable amounts of plastic pollutants (straws, bottle caps,
wrappers, labels, coffee cups, coffee cup tops, styrofoam of all
kinds, packaging materials, etc,...), beer bottles, street oils, winter
road salts and necessary spiritual offerings for energetic
rectification and repaying of the energetic debt incurred by
constant disrespect and degradation
























~~~~~~

"Water's quantum weirdness makes life possible": (thanks Ian M. for submitting this story)

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.900-waters-quantum-weirdness-makes-life-possible.html

~~~~~~

"Alert! Don't Frack With Our Water" - keeping the ban alive in New York, USAmerica


~~~~~~

"Psychiatrist calls for lithium to be added to water" - now there's some modern madness for you...wow!
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/1202/1224308474582.html

~~~~~~

Fracking Chemicals in Wyoming Water Further Illustrate Risks of Controversial Process -

http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/pressreleases/fracking-chemicals-in-wyoming-water-further-illustrate-risks-of-controversial-process/

~~~~~~

"The Wonders of Water: Amazing Secrets for Health and Wellness" -

http://www.watercure.com/wondersofwater.html

~~~~~~

Mystery of the DEAD herring: What made 20 TONNES of fish wash up on Norwegian beach? -


~~~~~~

Mother Earth Water Walk -
















~~~~~~

"World Water Supply: Climate Change and Food Pressures Adding Challenges, UN Study Says" -


~~~~~~

La Via Campesina - Indigenous/Peasant Position Paper on the June, 2012 Climate Change Conference in Rio, Brazil -

http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/82721

~~~~~~

"Wasting Water is Weird" - by Michele Kirk (I'd have to agree. US)

http://www.spiritofchange.org/green-living-environment/wasting-water-is-weird

~~~~~~

Navajo oppose water settlement

http://www.facebook.com/notes/black-mesa-water-coalition/navajo-grassroots-overwhelmingly-oppose-water-settlement-council-decision-loomin/390062571041379

~~~~~~

"Dirty Waters, Dangerous Fish" - vimeo video

http://vimeo.com/11817894

~~~~~~

 "Thousand of Fish Die as Midwest Streams Heat Up" - ABC15.com

~~~~~~

"Bonding With the Water Element": - youtube video



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEUHGUFJ5lY&feature=youtu.be
~~~~~~

(Photo Essay) Gaeyang Halmi, the Sea Goddess of Korea by Helen Hye-Sook Hwang -
http://magoism.wordpress.com/  

~~~~~~

"Walking in a Fecal Wonderland" (you have to read it to believe it!) -                         

http://www.salon.com/2012/10/03/walking_in_a_fecal_wonderland/
~~~~~~

"Guardians of the River" - Papua New Guinea (vimeo video) -

http://vimeo.com/29738908

~~~~~~
"Ethical Waters: Healing Walk in the tar sands grows year by year" - by Rita Wong, August 8, 2012 -

http://rabble.ca/news/2012/08/ethical-waters-healing-walk-tar-sands-grows-year-year

~~~~~~

Hearth Moon Blog - "Hecate and the Waterway" -

http://hearthmoonblog.com/hecate-and-the-waterway/

~~~~~~

"Water On the Mind and In the Media" - written by this blogger, Ukumbwa Sauti!  Hey, did I post this already?!  Hopefully this is also helpful to the discourse -

http://howdeepthewater.blogspot.com/2011/05/water-on-mind-and-in-media-2009.html

~~~~~~

Massive Fish Kill, Mississippi Sound -


~~~~~~

"Sacred Spirit of Water" - PLEASE WATCH THIS ONE HOUR VIDEO -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BXAttsFEiQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player

~~~~~~

"Why Are Millions of Fish Dying in Mass Death Events All Over the Planet?" -

http://www.mediacoop.ca/story/why-are-millions-fish-suddenly-dying-mass-death-ev/18569

~~~~~~

Upworthy site post about a Texas town where the water has run out due in part to tracking -

http://www.upworthy.com/imagine-if-there-was-a-town-in-the-usa-where-you-couldnt-get-any-water-its-not-imaginary-anymore-10?c=upw1

~~~~~~

Montreal to Dump 8 Million Liters of Sewage into St. Lawrence River -

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/st-lawrence-river-sewage-bonaventure-mill-interceptor-1.3248937

~~~~~~

US Native Tribes: Movement to Revive Native Food and Lands

http://www.mintpressnews.com/for-u-s-tribes-a-movement-to-revive-native-foods-and-lands/209965/

~~~~~~

Youtube video illustrating severity of California drought -

https://www.facebook.com/TheOther98/videos/1078955342115443/

~~~~~~

British Columbia Site C Dam Endangers Indigenous Rights -

http://e-activist.com/ea-action/action?ea.client.id=1770&ea.campaign.id=40607

~~~~~~

"Environmental Racism" - Plan to Dispose of Nuclear Waste Under Yucca Mountain -

http://bit.ly/1WvHKuH

~~~~~~

Ahousaht First Nation Warriors Win  B.C. Salmon Farm Standoff -

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/jeff-matthews/ahousaht-tofino-salmon-cermaq_b_8186092.html?utm_hp_ref=canada-british-columbia

~~~~~~

"Nestle: Unbottle California" - illegal pumping in a desertifying California, various videos

http://storyofstuff.org/nestle/?akid=1470.624063.w3Pmya&rd=1&t=4&utm_medium=email&utm_source=nestle_film_blast

https://youtu.be/rEy4aT9Rd4g


https://youtu.be/t8uf0n2n0dM

~~~~~~
~~~~~~
~~~~~~
~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~

...more to come...

Please be free to suggest links to water stories that should be shared with a wider audience. Barka! Gracias! Asante! Thank you!