Access to Water is a Human Right. But …

The story of the New York City water supply is actually one of the Great True Stories. The quest for good drinking water is as old as the city (approaching the end of its fourth century) and involves Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton, banking law, Irish immigrants, transported communities and abandoned villages, wile, guile, imagination and ingenuity. Photo at left: Many homes from old Katonah were moved to a new site a mile away, to allow for the construction of the Croton reservoir.

And as a resident of Westchester County, New York City’s water comes out of my taps — and it’s probably the best municipal drinking water in the world. Why any of my neighbors wants to buy bottled water is beyond me! Our water really does come from giardia-free crystalline mountain streams and is rigorously protected, not just by the city but by the people who live in the hundreds of square miles of the watershed. NYS DEC map at right: You can be hours from New York City (shown in purple) deep in the mountains and still have an NYC reservoir nearby.

The UU Service Committee is promoting a movement for water rights in California. And that's a grand idea ... but wait a minute. What does California do with the water it's got? Does California -- do most communities in the arid southwest use water wisely? Why should UU energy be directed toward providing more water to people living in a part of the country that cannot support the population it had forty years ago, much less today?

This question has several parts. One relates to public policy about a part of the United States that has far exceeded the carrying capacity of the land it occupies. One of the parts relates to public policy that continues to promote settlement there. And a third part relates to the goals of the UUSC. Yes, I believe that access to drinking water is a human right. But before we encourage Californians to take to the streets and the airwaves to demand more of the world's resources -- and given that nobody is lying dying in a dusty Marin street as I write -- why not assess the true starting and ending points of any suggested policy change?

In the first place, why should our denominational energies go to supporting anything as unsustainable, in any guise, as development in the southwest? Here we have a direct collision of long-term goals. The western and southwestern states need a water policy that goes further than water. The UUSC should be lobbying for a clear-eyed evaluation of today's real water management in the southwest in terms of future water needs across the continent.

Here's what I believe the UUSC should be working for. 1) Acknowledgement that access to clean, drinkable water is a human right and a government responsibility. 2) Therefore, government provision of trucked-in (if necessary) water to communities that lack other access to it. 3) Making equitable distribution of existing water a first step in any water-provision plan. As long as existing water supplies are unfairly priced and inequitably distributed, no state should be looking beyond its own borders for water. 4) Making desalination of sea-water the second step in any large water-provision plan, rather than a someday step. 5) Acknowledging that the abandonment of existing communities in unsustainable locations will happen, and plan for it -- starting now -- as a rational solution.

It's been only a year since the Great Lakes Compact was finally signed. The eight states and two provinces that surround the Great Lakes agreed on their management, today and into the future. There have already been legal challenges to companies wishing to bottle water from the GL watershed and sell it outside the watershed. It's hard for me to believe that politicians in the arid southwest don't have their eyes on GL water as a solution for their own foolish overdevelopment and bad management. The Compact pledges the signers to wise management (which includes effective use, reuse, and even re-reuse) and I predict that it will come under pressure from the arid southwest. Sending Great Lakes water south and west is not good management, wise use, or sustainable. I also believe the UUSC should have, as a goal, support for the Great Lakes Compact.

Which is the story of a large international community that made a good-faith, successful plan for resource management long into the future. It's kind of like the story of New York City's water supply! And nothing at all like the we'll-think-about-it-tomorrow greed that has characterized planning in the southwest.

Big Bend fandom

Today's Clade piece is about hiking at Big Bend. Interestingly, Nevada Barr's newest mystery, Borderline, is set in the national park at Big Bend.

The Clade piece is written by Bill W (presumably not the same Bill W who founded AA). Lyrical writing, and another person struck down by love for the desert. Who wouldn't fall in love with a place where both plants and animals have spikes?

Barr's newest just doesn't grab me the way some of her earlier books did; I read A Superior Death (1994) alone in the house, and it ranks right up there with Life's Creepiest Experiences. AND: One of life's creepiest experiences, and containing a thorough explanation of the formation of adipocere, and set at Isle Royale, yet another reason to revisit Lake Superior.

Snark, smirks, and the Great Lakes

This week, the Great Lakes Town Hall website has a quick quiz about the Great Lakes. Biggest, smallest, longest shoreline, etc — just what you’d expect. But it left out one amazing fact about the Great Lakes. I won’t tell you what it is until I finish this diversion.

The anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell (a student of Margaret Mead’s, among other distinctions) called himself a kinesiologist, studying movement in context. You can study movement in context by watching TV or a movie with the sound off, and decipher the unfolding story through the actors’ movements. Birdwhistell argued — contradicting the body language people — that a movement has meaning in context, rather than an absolute meaning.

In other words, yeah, maybe the person who folds her arms as she speaks to you is shutting you out. But that movement could have a different meaning if you look at the entire scene: all the movements being made by all the participants.

Birdwhistell was also a student of faces. He got five minutes of fame on late-night TV explaining his observations, and manipulating his own face into regional configurations. For instance, people who grow up on the southern Great Plains do this and this and this — and, wow: there’s Eisenhower (from Abilene, Kansas). An upper-class Englishman does that and that and that with his eyelids and nose and upper lip, and wow — there’s the Tory then-prime minister of Great Britain. Before the world had heard of Jimmy Carter, Birdwhistell showed us the toothy, ever-smiling face of the southerner.

One night, long ago, with friends in Poland, Ohio, we watched Birdwhistell go through this performance … which he concluded with the face of people “in states bordering the Great Lakes.” The key to the Great Lakes states face, he said, is that “people there smile with their mouths closed so you can’t see their teeth.” We looked around the room at each other — and we were all smiling without showing our teeth! Suddenly the roomful of friends had turned into an anthropological experiment. And I remembered specifically being taught (by my mother and aunts) to not show my teeth when I smiled.

I’ve thought of Ray Birdwhistell often, especially during the last eight years of snark about W’s smirk. I too am at a loss to understand that look (although I associate it with certain upper-middle class women, and it blows me away when I see it on Christmas card pictures), and wish that Ray Birdwhistell were still around to decode it.

Incidentally, in Belles on Their Toes, the sequel to Cheaper by the Dozen, Mrs. Gilbreth is interviewed by someone who refers to her making a “deprecating moue.” “I’ve never made any kind of moue in my life,” snorts Mother.

That magic night not far from Wawa

Long, long ago in days of yore, I was On the Road. See America before it burns, I told my friends. So Dig, Doug, and Duke the Dog hit the road in an eleven-year-old Ford Econoline van, with Crosby, Stills & Nash on the radio and Kent State still happening on the backs of our eyelids.

In those days I thought it too self-conscious and inauthentic to experience something and write about it at the same time. Everyone else on the road was writing and photographing, but I wanted The Pure Experience. There wasn’t enough experience in the whole world for me to experience, so I really wanted to experience what I was experiencing, if you get my drift. Writing, photographing — all those mediations might get in the way. I thought, while other people have their yellowed journals, I will have the purity of memory.

What can I say? Maybe I was right. The memories that survive are more vivid than any photograph. We were on the road many months; I didn’t get eaten by bears, and I fell in love with Canada forever. And I gained priceless insights into human nature too.

At some point we reached Wawa, Ontario, which has probably not changed much in the intervening decades. We continued to head north and by late afternoon arrived at Neys Provincial Park, near the northern end of Lake Superior. I was fascinated by traveling on the Canadian Shield, which is some of Earth’s oldest rock, and finding unusual plants in the woods in the region. At close to 45º N, it was as far north as I had ever been.

We stretched out on the beach to watch the sun set across the lake. I noted that the lapping waters were actually slightly tidal, since Lake Superior is just large enough and lies north/south. Duke lay sprawled across my feet.

We were joined by some other Americans. In conversation we learned that they had all gone to Forest Hills High School together and were now doing some post-law-school traveling. From a cloudless sky of blue and gold, the sun set. Brilliant Venus hovered in the west.

One of the lawyers told us about Velikovsky, the plotting by Macmillan Publishing and Harvard, and the unreadable Erik von Daniken. The Forest Hills gang talked about conspiracies and what really happened.

As it grew darker, the moon appeared. A red-gold full moon, huge at the horizon, getting smaller as it climbed … and, we noticed, getting still smaller. An eclipse! With Venus setting, and other stars appearing, we sat mesmerized watching it. Finally the last shadow passed off the face of the moon. Clusters of shooting stars came and went. We’d had a small campfire going on the beach and someone brought out marshmallows. Then some damn fool back in the parking lot turned on his headlights.

Jeez! What a jerk. Stripes of bright light pierced the night sky. We were all drowsy, so nobody went back to ask whoever it was to turn off his lights, but we muttered about it.

Then the lights started to dance. Curtains of green and pink lights danced in the darkness over our heads, sweeping through the sky. The lake was still, with an occasional splash, and the dancing lights were bright enough to silhouette pine trees along the shore. After a few more hours, the Northern Lights faded away and so did we, asleep on our blankets getting covered with dew.

The early fingers of dawn woke Duke and me. I went back to the van to get a towel to dry off, and feed him, and we returned to the beach as others stirred. The sky was still cloudless and the sunrise was as picture-book perfect as the sunset had been. And Venus once again appeared, as if to greet it.

If I had to pick out a piece of time, in my life, that was absolutely perfect, I would choose that night: sitting on the northern shore of Lake Superior letting the solar system speak to me.

And as we said goodbye to the Forest Hills lawyers, one of them said sorrowfully to me, “Oh, man! If only we’d had some acid! -- wouldn’t last night have been great?”