A new round of the water wars is starting in California where, surprise! the rich demand their right to use however much water they want since they pay taxes and can pay for the water. (Diarist Walter Einenkel) The fundamental question is: when is 'your' water 'our' water? An analogy that comes to mind is not quite about rich vs. poor, but asks the same question. Property owners in a community are offered obscenely high prices--uh, payoffs--from people representing, it turns out, a company that wants to use properties for fracking (Galliardi). If you accept the buyout and I don't, 'your' water will endanger the quality and safety of 'my,' ultimately 'our' water. What can be done? When must the common good beyond the gated community impinge on the privileged? In California, the economy of scarcity comes into brutal play when there is, under current projections, literally not enough water given current usage patterns. When one entitled group uses profligately while others conserve, that bottom line limit is still there. In the case of water safety, the issues seem to be different but are really the same. When the entitled company wilfully risks water quality for everyone, whether property owners consented to it or not, the bottom line is still there. When water is undrinkable, it might as well not even be available. The overall amount of potable water is limited. What used to be unquestioned abundance Biblically granted by God for human 'domination' becomes a question of property rights vs. human rights, vs. a spiritual (!? Yes, you read that right) view of the cosmos, whether it's Coca Cola buying the rights to the water of a village in India, which then has no right to 'their' water, even for survival, or Oprah (neither mentioned in the diary) who still has a green lawn. It's not just about 'them', whether in India or California or Minnesota or Wisconsin: it's about 'us'. My 'spiritual (!?) take is beneath the mystical squiggle.
When I first came to CT from CA in 1993, I arrived from a situation of drought that pales in comparison to the current one. I had in place all my water conservation practices that had become automatic: fill a bucket while hot water is heating, turn off the shower when not rinsing, use gray water, 'when it's yellow let it mellow...' for the toilet, and other strange tribal customs. "But there's no drought here. We have plenty of water," people said. I felt a vague unease, and slowly resumed my old water guzzling habits. It took me a long time to realize that water is a spiritual issue. In regard to the Minnesota/Wisconsin community's fracking duspute, Sr. Galliardi speculates,
The anticipation of the pope’s encyclical on ecology and climate change grows with every passing day. Almost everyone seems to have their issue or angle which they hope will be addressed.... While I don’t expect to find anything in the encyclical about frack sand mining, it most certainly has to say something about the commons, those aspects of life affecting and shared by the entire global community, if the pope is to address climate justice as promised. Surely there will be a relationship able to be drawn to “your well and my drinking water.”... [We ]need something far deeper to walk us back from the precipice on which we stand as a global community on so very many fronts...it seems the invitation is to do the really hard work of internalizing what for sure will be behind every word written: the fact that nanosecond by nanosecond, we are held in existence, woven by Resurrecting Love with all our differences into the tight- knit fabric of one sacred Earth community – people and planet – together an irreplaceable manifestation of the Divine. Contemplating this will make all the difference.How can contemplation, ask the usual activists, "make all the difference?" Kos diarist accumbens cited Paul Farrell in Market Watch about the upcoming "revolution," the "perfect storm" of Pope Francis's anticipated environmental encyclical. There are "sacred groups" out there who will understand that the energy needed to fight this battle, or revolution, if it proves to be, requires more than economic or political positions. It will require a different sense of community, grounded beyond any one religion to the universal interconnectedness of a search for the holy, the sacred, or wisdom in this planetary crisis. Sr. Galliardi will be leading a guided retreat on the cosmos as 'home' at Wisdom House in Litchfield, CT in August that will surely touch on many of these issues, beyond even water wars. Prepare for the "perfect storn" with different tools than Kossacks usually think of. St. Louis de Montfort, the founder of the Daughters of Wisdom, has said that "the welfare of the world relies on a growing community of the wise". (Rabbi Rami Shapiro, A Revisioning of the Love of Eternal Wisdom). Unless the revolution is already upon us.