Water, Water Everywhere

A Sermon by Dave Weissbard

from

The Unitarian Universalist Church

Rockford, Illinois

10/17/04

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his Rime of the Ancient Mariner, told of how a ship, becalmed because of the killing of an albatross, found itself in the midst of water, but without any to drink:

If there is anything that is obvious about our planet, it is the abundance of water. There are about 330 million cubic miles of water on the earth. We know that all we need to do when we want water for anything, is simply turn on the faucet. While our ancestors had to work a little harder to get it, they infrequently doubted that there would be enough. They just had to go where it was plentiful, which is why civilizations developed on the shores of rivers and lakes and oceans.

The reality, however, is that of all that water that exists, only about 2.6% of the total is “fresh” water, and of that only about a third is readily accessible and renewable. In truth, today, about a quarter of the people on earth are living under conditions of “water stress,” which is to say limited access. North Americans consume an average of 132,000 gallons of water a year, Europeans just over half that, Asians under half, South Americans about a quarter, and Africans about 15%. And the problem is that the supply is diminishing rapidly as the population is increasing. Several authorities have predicted that the wars in this century will be not about oil so much as about water.

Water has been treated as sacred in most of the world’s religions. Our reading from the ancient Hindu Vedas is but one indication of that. William Marks, in his book, The Holy Order of Water, points out:

There are many examples of the ritualistic use of water – John the Baptist cleansing people of their sins by baptism; Jesus Christ washing feet; Pontius Pilate washing his hands before turning Jesus over for crucifixion; . . . using water to exorcise demons; Japanese Kamikaze pilots using hand-painted cups to drink from a common bowl before flying off to their deaths; . . . the washing of hands by Moslems before reading the Koran; and the washing away of sins by millions of worshipers in the Ganges River each year, to name only a handful. The physical use and presence of water for washing, healing, sprinkling, drinking, pouring, anointing, sound effect, and worshiping is an ongoing practice in many religious ceremonies; as is the symbolic touching and blessing of oneself or of an infant with water believed to be “holy.”

It is not coincidental that there is a fountain running during our services and that we use water in our ceremony in which we welcome babies into our religious community. Water is primal stuff. We are made of it - 90% of our bodies is water. We need water to survive, just as we need air. Of course it has been considered sacred.

But that has changed. In the growth of science and technology, with the demystification of the world, humans have come to see water as something fully in our control. And so we have built aqueducts to carry water where we want it, and built dams to control the flow of rivers, and we have dug deeper when the immediate supplies have diminished. We have created cities where there was no water, and allowed those with limited water to grow beyond what the immediate supply could support. We have drained swamps and filled in bays to construct cities. We have created farms where there were deserts, and built homes by the sides of rivers where floods were common. In our arrogance, we have believed that we were the masters of the environment and that there were no limits, or few limits, to what we could do.

Only relatively recently have some of us begun to envision our limits. Only recently has the word “ecology” come into common use, although Professor Mohan Wali notes that:

The formalisation of the word ecology, as even many non-ecologists now know, was derived from the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel's use of ÖÖikologie in 1866 (oikos meaning house, and logos meaning discussion or study of). McIntosh states that the first use of the word, ecology, in its current Anglo-American mode without the diphthong oe, came in 1893 at the "Madison Botanical Congress...

Ecology came into the common consciousness since World War II, and it has increased in importance over the decades. The seventh of the Principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association calls upon us to affirm and promote, “Respect for the Interdependent Web of all existence of which we are a part,” which is a reflection of our ecological awareness. We have belatedly come to realize that, in truth, you can never do just one thing. When you move water from one place to another, you are having an impact on the place from which you are taking it. The supply of water is not infinite. When you dip into the reserves and exhaust them, they cannot be readily replenished.

We have polluted rivers and lakes with human and industrial wastes, and have thereby caused the illness and deaths of people and animals. Today, an estimated 40% of our food comes from irrigated lands, and most of the irrigation is wasteful of water - 80% runs off, often carrying fertilizers with it into the lakes and streams. Industrial pollution is an enormous problem. The production of computer chips, which we think of as a relatively clean industry, is a major polluter. Producing a single six inch silicon wafer requires 2,275 gallons of de-ionized water. A plant producing 2,000 of these wafers a week needs 4,550,000 gallons of water a week, or 236,600,000 gallons per year, and the waste water that comes out of the plant carries harmful chemicals.

The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that nearly one-fifth of the population of the United States drinks tap water that is contaminated with lead, fecal bacteria, and other harmful contaminates. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that more than half the wells in the US are contaminated with pesticides and nitrates.

As serious as the problems of waste and pollution are, they are being compounded today by a new one. One of the key words in understanding what is happening to water is “commodification,” which is to say, water is being turned into a commodity, a product, something which can be sold to the highest bidder. The implication of that is, of course, that it can be taken away from those who can’t afford to bid. Transnational corporations are now in the water business, and it promises to be bigger and more profitable than the oil business.

There are several dimensions to this commodification. One is the privatization of water delivery systems - both in the major nations, and in developing ones. There are huge corporations which are coming to cities and saying, “Look, it is a major hassle for you to distribute water and collect the fees. Let us do it for you.” Corporations are fundamentally answerable to their stockholders, not to customers. Their job is to turn a profit. In many, if not most, communities which have bought into this model, there have been major reductions in water quality and in the reliability of delivery, because of corporate pressure to reduce expenses. And once a community has signed on, it is very difficult to get out from under the contracts.

This is particularly troubling in the third world. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have worked hand in glove with the major transnational corporations. When countries have applied for development loans, it has been common to insist as a condition of granting the loans, that they privatize their water systems to show their commitment to modernity.

The corporations have gone in, been granted exclusive rights to the water supplies, installed water lines, and then, to make a profit, have demanded payments from poor people that represent an enormous percentage of their income. We use a lot of water at my house, but I would estimate that it costs us less than ½ of 1% of our annual income. In their book, Blue Gold, Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke report that in India, some people are being required to pay 25% of their income for water. In Ghana, the water company demanded rates that equaled 50% of the earnings of the poor. In Bolivia, families with incomes of $100 a month are being charged $20 a month for water. In South Africa, where the constitution guarantees access to water to everyone, after Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux, one of the top two water corporations took over, according to Vedana Shiva, “Water soon became unsafe, inaccessible, and unaffordable. Thousands of people were disconnected and cholera infections became rampant.”

It now becomes understandable why so many people are protesting so passionately at the meetings of the World Bank.

There is a form of this commodification that is growing like Topsy here in the United States. Companies are discovering that Americans, who have read about the dangers of tap water, are prepared to pay enormous sums for plastic bottles full of water. In many cases, they give it sexy names, and then run it from the taps into their bottles – some filter it first, others do not bother. There are no quality controls on bottled water, and studies have found 1/3 of the bottled water brands were contaminated. But think of the profits! The water costs virtually nothing, but in a bottle with a label, it can bring $1 or $2 of not-so pure profit. For the price of one bottle, 1,000 gallons of tap water can be delivered to the home. What a deal!

And where does the water come from? The companies move into a community, sink a deep well that taps into the aquifer, and then drain it. This depletes the local supply of water, but that is hardly the concern of the corporations, which move on when the supply is gone.

In the ‘70's, the world wide total for bottled water was 300 million gallons,. At the end of the ‘80's it reached 650 million gallons. In 2000, 22.3 billion gallons of water were bottled and sold for about $22 billion. Nestlé is the major producer, using 68 labels including Perrier, Vitel, and SanPellegrino. Perrier brands include Deer Park, Ice Mountain, Oasis, and Poland Spring.

Both Pepsi and Coke are in the water business in a big way with their Aquafina and Dasani labels, which are both just filtered tap water with some minerals added.

One of the problems, in addition to the draining of the water supplies in some communities, is the enormous pollution involved in the production and disposal of all those plastic bottles! 1.5 million tons of plastic goes into the water companies bottles every year.

Gilbert Grosvenor of the National Geographic said in 1998, “Civilization as we know it will either survive or fail depending on our ability to solve the problem of water within ten years.”

I said earlier that it was predicted that wars in this century would be about water. They already are. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has significant water dimensions that we hear little about. We have been told that Yasser Arrafat was stupid in not accepting the map for two nation’s which Israel proposed. Most Americans are not aware that the map Israel proposed had a rather strange Palestinian state that was divided into two parts with Israel between them. The reason for that was Israel insisted on controlling the West Bank water which lies outside its former borders. Israel consumes 82% of the West Bank water, while Palestinians have access to only 18%. When Palestinians get permission to dig wells, they are limited to 140 meters in depth, while Jewish settlers are permitted to go 800 meters down. The land of milk and honey that Israel has created has been dependent upon a disproportionate share of the region’s water resources.

But this is only one of many areas where there are tensions over water, and as the supplies diminish, the tensions are bound to increase. Should water be taken from the poor and provided to the wealthy so they can have lush golf courses and private swimming pools, while others are dying of thirst and diseases from poor sanitation? Is this our vision of civilization?

Back when I was in college, as an honors project for Sociology, I studied the little village of Heuvelton, NY where I found some interesting dynamics. The only real industry in that farming community was the McAdam cheese factory. The people in the village decided to meter water, so all would pay on the basis of how much water they used. The meters were purchased and installed, but never read. Why? Mr. McAdam had the only swimming pool in town, and he didn’t want a big water bill. Since the part time head of the water department was an employee at Mr. McAdam’s plant, he was told that the meters were not to be read. They were not read.

That’s a microcosm of today’s world. Those of us with abundant resources make a disproportionate demand on the available water, but do not accept responsibility for our consumption.

I mentioned in the newsletter that this sermon began with a lecture I heard at Chautauqua last summer, and was brought to the fore by the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. The UUSC is urging our attention to the issues of the human right to access to water. Attention is particularly called to House Concurrent Resolution #468, the “Water for the World” resolution introduced by Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, and co-sponsored by 39 other representatives, among whom Don Manzullo is not included.

The resolution offers a summary of the problem, and an approach to solutions. Let me share it with you:

Expressing the sense of the Congress with respect to the world's freshwater resources.

Whereas freshwater is fundamental for life, a finite natural resource, and belongs to the earth and all species for all time;

Whereas available freshwater represents less than one-half of one-percent of the world's total water stock;

Whereas global consumption of water is doubling every 20 years, more than twice the rate of human population growth;

Whereas 31 countries currently face water shortages with another 17 likely to be added to this list by 2025;

Whereas more than one billion people lack adequate access to safe drinking water; 2.5 billion people have no access to proper sanitation and more than five million people, mostly children, die each year from water-related diseases;

Whereas unsustainable practices lead to depletion of aquifers, falling water tables, and ground and surface water pollution;

Whereas indigenous peoples have had the waters on which they depend dangerously polluted and exploited;

Whereas current United Nations' Millennium Development Goals call for reducing by one-half the number of those without safe drinking water and sanitation by the year 2015; and

Whereas the United Nations' Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has adopted the General Comment on the right to water, which states that the human right to drinking water is fundamental for life and health, and sufficient and safe drinking water is a precondition for the realization of all other human rights: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That this resolution may be cited as the `Water for the World Resolution'.

(1) affirms water as a public trust and global public good that should not be treated as a private commodity where this would limit or deny public access to freshwater resources;

(2) recognizes that government policies should ensure that all individuals have equitable access to water to meet basic human needs and that no one is cut off from water for survival due to economic constraints;

(3) upholds the principle that governments should engage all members of society, including local civil society organizations, citizens' associations, environmental groups, indigenous peoples, farmers, women, workers and others, in direct and meaningful participation in overseeing decisions about the conservation, distribution, use, and management of water in their communities, localities, and regions;

(4) asserts that water management priorities should reflect the goals of safeguarding and sustaining water resources;

(5) recognizes that more sustainable agricultural practices are necessary to protect water resources;

(6) affirms that the United States Congress firmly commits itself to meet the Millennium Development Goals, especially as they pertain to universal access to water and sanitation;

(7) recommends that international, regional, and bilateral trade agreements, should not include conditions related to the provision of water for human use that would result in reduced access to water;

(8) affirms that access to international loans and debt reduction programs should not be conditioned on implementing increased cost recovery policies when those policies would result in significantly increased water rates that reduce access to safe drinking water and sanitation;

(9) asserts that the United States' Executive Directors of International Financial Institutions should not approve loans that require increased cost recovery, or water privatization or public/private partnerships that would result in significant increases in consumer water fees that would restrict access to water;

(10) deems that federal funding not be conditioned on the consideration of public/private partnerships or other forms of privatization that would restrict access to water; and

(11) asserts that Federal policies should ensure that in the United States direct and indirect sources of water pollution, including factories, refineries, commercial agriculture, and wastewater treatment plants, are adequately regulated and those responsible held accountable for the pollution they cause.

This resolution was referred to committee, and it is not likely to see the light of day for some time to come. But it is a start, and we need to start somewhere.

I may be slower than many of you, but until I started to work on this sermon, I was blissfully ignorant about the magnitude of the crisis we face as a species in regard to water. Of course I knew there were shortages, but I had no idea of the magnitude, nor of the increased threat represented by privatization. It never occurred to me that providing water was anything but a civic responsibility.

We are creations of the entity we call water, a mysterious entity that exists in various forms at one time. Water is such that it is different from any other entity we know, But yet, water is the very thing that makes up the most of each one of us.

The water that flows through our veins is the same water that flowed through the very first life forms – no matter where they were born. It is the same water that flows in a river, fills the ocean, and makes clouds in the sky. . . .

Since water flows through all things through all time, it embodies all that ever was, is, and will be. The imprint of every unique creation ever composed by water, including you and me, lives on through all time as a part of water’s infinite stream. And just as it takes a million droplets to make one raindrop, so, too, a million lives make but one drop in the ocean of timeless waters. . . .

On an earthly scale, the way we treat water is, in a fashion, a reflection of how we see ourselves. If we love ourselves as a watery creation, certainly we will love that which has created us. If we care to have good health, then certainly we will do our utmost to care for the health of the water flowing in the world around us and through us.

Pollute the water –there is death and disease. Respect the water – there is life abundant and good health.

Sacred waters carry us beyond the marketplace into a world charged with myths and stories, beliefs and devotion, culture and celebration. These are the worlds that enable us to save and share water, and convert scarcity into abundance. We are all . . . thirsting for waters that liberate and give us life – organically and spiritually. The struggle over the kumbh [the sacred water pot], between gods and demons, between those who protect and those who destroy, between those who nurture and those who exploit, is ongoing. Each of us has a role in shaping the creation story of the future.

I ran out of time before I was able to share some concrete suggestions as to the roles we could play.

One is to watch for the reintroduction of Rep. Schakowsky’s resolution in the next Congress, and to encourage Don Manzullo to co-sponsor it..

I would suggest that another good way to focus on the issue is to refuse to purchase water as a commodity from any of the transnational corporations. Get your own water bottle and fill it, and refill it yourself!

One of our members expressed surprise that I did not comment on the watering (and I would add fertilizing) of lawns, which wastes a lot of water (and fertilizer pollutes.)

Someone else stressed the value of family farms which are far more water efficient and responsible than the corporate variety, and I agree.

Public Citizen offers a handy “Citizen’s Guide to Water Privatization.” [copies are available at www.wateractivist.org] It suggests:

The guide also offers a draft city council resolution that is not unlike Rep. Schakowsky’s resolution, but focused on a city’s supporting water as a public trust. Perhaps we should take it to our city council!

There is a lot we can do. Fundamentally, playing a responsible role in an issue like this requires being well informed. Consult the bibliography that follows and become knowledgeable: it matters!

Barlow, Maude & Clarke, Tony, Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water, The New Press, New York:2002.

Marks, William E., The Holy Order of Water: Healing Earth’s Waters and Ourselves, Bell Pond Books, Great Barrington, MA: 2001.

Shiva, Vandana, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit, South End Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002.