Thread by @trevienstanger

Why focus on water when there’s so many other issues going on in the world ? Let’s explore this:

Water saturates nearly every land-use issue that human communities face, and it does so in a way that is hyper-specific to that place.

Because of this, the very process of solving water issues engenders intense study of one’s immediate environment. Water dissolves abstraction.

To study how water plays a role in one’s life is to confront one’s dramatic reliance on civilization to deliver us, constantly and reliably, this essential nourishment that we need to live.

(Remember: in addition to daily drinking this *stuff* in our coffee, beer, wine, seltzer, etc., we also need it available 24/7 to ferry away our bodily wastes that, while natural, sure can get us sick if not treated properly. Water truly cleanses our homes and business of harm)

To contemplate the *source* of yr drinking water demands different q’s & this reveals that the infrastructure that brings us this water only exists b/c there is water to access. Our pipes & treatment plants and water towers can’t tap into what isn’t there. We *re*source.

Contemplating source takes some time: i.e. you can identify the lake or the river or the aquifer or the glacier that your drinking water comes from, but what’s the source of *that* water? And then, what’s the source of *that*?

And the source of *that*?! Now you’re out in The Great Water Cycle. Dust this off from your high school science class and think it through. Your water is of The Water. To go through such an exercise is to remember just how much we live inside a liquid planet -

(For which the Womb is metaphor and more)

A baseline concept at this level of thinking: the presence and quantity of water in a given location, in addition to climate and soil type, is *the* determining factor for which species can live there.

(Some places host parties of thousands of unique species every year but only at specific times- which times? - the wet ones of course)

Another key concept here at the global scale: water is *everywhere* - including in the air - but it’s always in a flow within larger and larger cycles. The water in your area right now, tonight, is just passing through.

(The water you’re holding in/as your body right now is also temporary, destined to either drain or evaporate out of you to continue its journey)

(Also: you’re part of Water’s journey just as much as Water is part of yours. The difference? Water doesn’t need us, but we need Water)

One more from the global scale: a great deal of the water available to us in human communities has *already altered by us* when we bring it into our bodies. We *inherit* water from ancestors, and much of it bears their mark. In many places, we aren’t starting with “clean.”

(this is the no-fun-at-all part where you have to consider micro-plastics and acid rain and oil spills and fracking and for F’s sake this isn’t fun)

Ok, now to return to the local : whatever your drinking water source may be, it has a story that *is* knowable. But you have to ask the right questions.

Such as: how does this source get replenished? Why doesn’t it run dry? This gets you back the “source of the source” sort of thinking, but you needn’t zoom way way like we did earlier.

Possible answers: yearly wet seasons; glacial melt; melting snow pack; deep old aquifers; the Ocean. No matter what, you *can* answer this.

Another set of clues you’ll need to find to understand your drinking water are those that constitute the political and physical infrastructure. Easy to get bogged down here, so let’s skip across this like one rock hops over a creek:

Political infrastructure: water districts, power structures of who operates what and who makes decisions within those districts, and how much you can or can’t tap into them.

Physical infrastructure: save for the select few out there in rural places getting their water directly from hand-dug wells or from springs, the rest of us have infrastructure as an intermediary between source and us. A quick list of types:

City infrastructure, which runs through 1) the initial treatment plant (which deserves a field trip as soon as you can) 2) the distribution network (can involve water towers or canals, but definitely uses pipes to transport the water)

3) and of course the drains and wastewater. Deserves its own thread. Let’s wonder this: how clean is the water coming out of the *waste water* treatment facility ? And do we end up impacting our next round of drinking water or someone else’s in the process?

In summary: city infrastructure for water is big, complex, and precarious, and it ultimately depends upon the source. To endanger the source, or to allow any of the infrastructure to become impaired, is to risk serious threats to human and more-than-human health...

And with over half of the world’s population living in cities, these questions around drinking and waste water infrastructure are going to be crucial parts of any sort of “sustainable” society.

Now, another category is that of private wells: lots of folks on these too, myself included. This can be brief:

Well water is not off the table. Many wells are shallow and tap into the water table, which can most certainly become polluted by what we do up at the surface. See wells in flood plains after an oil spill, or wells beside agricultural fields.

Other wells are quite deep, & you can feel like you’re drinking from a source that is safe from human folly, but alas, even these can be polluted by fracking (which, if you have happening around you, & you care, you should consider it a crucial part of your puzzle)

But even w/o threat of pollution, take a moment to behold the marvelousness of both situations — we are a species that can shape mineral into metal & bend metal into pipes, and these pipes act like our capillary system, sending water up into our homes or out into the city.

(We’d all have to leave cities within weeks if we lost access to a constant supply of water. Just imagine hospitals or schools without water. They wouldn’t work.)

(Also, recall that for almost all of human history you had to go *fetch* the water somehow. Now it comes to us with a clever turn of the wrist and we send it away the same.)

So, you may be starting to wonder, what’s the point of examining water so closely like this? Is this really any different than taking a deep dive into any topic?

Perhaps just going through these motions now and again is valuable in its own right. I sure as heck can cheers you with a glass of water right now with a joyous smile on my face for having taken the time to let our imaginations flood our hearts with gratitude.

But there’s also an ethical and moral imperative to know more about one’s water. it is this imperative that has the potential to clarify *all* of our moral commitments in our daily lives. Water *is*Life.

But we currently don’t treat it that way or comprehend it that way, that much is clear. to correct this, I think *we’re going to need more than appreciation* We need what water advocate Brock Dolman calls “ecological re-Storyation” - we need a new story about and by Water.

I have some thoughts on what this next Story Of Water could look like, and I’m going to explore them in a separate thread very soon. If you enjoyed coming along this far and feel you learned or reconsidered something through these tweets, consider retweeting or commenting

(Comments could help me clarify my thinking and/or better equipment me to respond to curiosities besides my own)

Until then-
Trevien

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