I recently read a book I have been waiting a while to get my hands on. Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization by Derrick Jensen. I first read Derrick Jensen’s work in 2006 when we moved to Neversink in the Catskills, among the reservoirs that supply New York City with its world renowned water. His book A Language Older Than Words, rings strong and true, the examples he uses clearly express what we all know.

As it turns out, the USA is so desperate for energy now that it is considering drilling the Marcellus Shale that runs from West Virginia to New York for natural gas. They say the process “should cause minimal environmental harm.” How many times have we heard that before? The number of things that could easily go wrong would result in contamination of the entire NY water supply-how many people is that? Should we call this a terrorist threat? Read the New York Times Editorial: Shale and Our Water.

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Published in Far West Almanac, September 2009.

Perhaps I have been watching too much Al Jazeera, but that, along with the film Blue Gold: World Water Wars, has got me worrying about folks down in LA. I honestly still can’t believe that Arnold Schwarzenegger is really the governor of California—I keep wondering when I will wake up and find that I have somehow gotten stuck in a chapter from Robert A. Heinlein’s book Job: A Comedy of Justice. In a parallel universe this must be a big joke. It seems that Los Angeles in particular is at the forefront in showing the world how the United States of America handles our economic difficulties. I have recently rediscovered long lost friends from my high school days in Pasadena via facebook, and I wish I had more answers for establishing sustainable community under the difficult conditions of LA.

The summer has been hot and dry in Vancouver, BC and I have enjoyed the ritual of nightly excursions to water my little garden under the sky-train, which unfortunately recently got mowed. Hauling water under the constantly changing moon gives me time to think and I wonder how different it would be to be doing this in LA. The documentary Blue Gold also highlighted the issues around water that LA faces. We talk about sustainable living and eating locally until all they are is buzz words, and once again we find we are just frantically putting bandages onto something we know is built on a corrupt foundation.

To the extent that people separate themselves from nature, they spin out further and further from the center. At the same time, a centripetal effect asserts itself and the desire to return to nature arises. But if people merely become caught up in reacting moving to the left or to the right, depending on condition the result is only more activity. I believe that even “returning-to-nature” and anti-pollution activities, no matter how commendable, are not moving toward a genuine solution if they are carried out solely in reaction to the over-development of the present age.

Masanobu Fukuoka

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I stumbled across this really practical and well done video on how to make water kefir. Although I have been reading about kefir for years, I hadn’t had an opportunity to make it myself until this year when my sister brought some up to me from a friend who had given her some. This stuff is fantastic. Convenient, quick to make, and very healthy. I love that she uses the ole fashioned cane sugar. It is said to be good for your drains too–who’d have thunk it, right?

Anyway I had to share this video, it is short as well, exactly the amount of time it takes to refresh your kefir gems for the next batch.

This video is by castingvaldes.

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We grew up on some of the best water in the world, it was definitely the tastiest. As a matter of fact, my sister stopped drinking water when she left PNG, she says nothing comes close to that sweet rain-water and its just too much of a let-down to drink any other! We lived in a village 6,000 feet high in Papua New Guinea. We had three huge water tanks behind our house that collected rain water. Every morning and evening each of us kids had to do 200 pumps, by hand, to get the water to the water tank on the roof of our house so that we could have running water indoors. We also had a solar panel to heat our water, since we didn’t have electricity.

Recently we watched the documentary Blue Gold: World Water Wars, which everyone must see. Water must remain a basic right. Affordable clean water is a common property of all humanity, animals and plants. Recently the information about bisphenol A and how it is leaching into water from the plastic bottles that have become all the rage has put the focus back on public water and the cleanliness of that supply. Around the world countries are taking fluoride out of their public water and it has also been found that high levels of pharmaceuticals — statins, birth control, antibiotics, prozac — you name it are in our drinking water.

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