You are rich. Yes, you, dear reader, and we, too. Being “rich” meant, in the classic formulation, lighting cigars with $100 bills. That is, having so much wealth we can waste it.
While no one really lights cigars that way, consider that we do use clean drinking water to flush our toilets and to water our lawns. There are literally billions of people in the world for whom that would be profligate waste of a precious resource.
We’re “rich” when we spend $2 on a bottle of water flown thousands of miles from France. Evian spelled backwards is “naive.” And often we are – we simply don’t realize that $2 a day is what much of the world lives on. Food, shelter, clothes – everything.
These people are just like us. They didn’t choose to be born in poverty or in deforested lands, ruled by dictators they didn’t elect. To these people, every one of us in America is “rich,” based simply on our access to and use of water.
Water certainly is a big topic for us in Sonoma Valley, too, and important work is being done in conservation and reclamation. Next Wednesday, in fact, is a joint meeting among the Sonoma City Council and its Planning and Community Services and Environmental Commissions, along with the Sonoma Valley Citizens Advisory Commission (it will be carried live on SVTV Comcast Channel 27).
And nationally, consciousness grows about water use. The Ogalalla water table below eight Midwestern states was charged over millennia – no, make that eons. That’s hardly a “renewable” resource. And, yes, American farmers and cattlemen are depleting that source a rate that’ll empty it in, some say, less than 100 years.
We’ve commented that the biggest benefit to come from fusion power will be desalinization of salt water, making clean water plentiful and turning deserts into farmland. But that cheap power source is still beyond current technology.
In the meantime? We pay attention only sporadically to suffering and death in Third World lands, where 4,000 children die every day from contaminated water. These people can be – and are – ignored by most of us, most of the time. But at this time of the year, when the Christmas season is upon us and we think about gifts, let’s remember those people.
We can get excited, adults as well as children, about the gifts we exchange. But catch that word: “exchange.” That’s really an economic term, describing a transaction of goods or services, and it’s likely apt, as we seldom give gifts without expecting to get some back. Yet, isn’t that the essence of a “gift” – giving without the expectation of getting something back?
You will give a gift that way, a life-saving gift, when you support efforts to build wells, purify water and teach sanitation for people around the world, and we list below just a couple of many such efforts. But don’t expect the people you help (or even save) to send you anything in return.
Yet what you do get – the feeling of giving freely, generously, without calculating who got what from whom – is itself gratifying. You might even reconsider the money spent on those “obligatory” gifts, the ones that get set aside after being opened, then put on a shelf in the garage, and eventually end up in rummage? How about a card, instead, one with a message inside that says, “Merry Christmas! You have just brought the gift of clean water to [pick your number] families around the world, who will certainly have a Happy New Year!”
In our view, that’s a rich gift.
Building Wells: lifewaterinternational.org, knowh2o.org,
livingwatersfortheworld.org
Purifying Water: csdw.org ($30 gives a family clean water for a year)
