Lucid Ramblings

On a Drink of Water and on Slowing Down

By Dan Kingsbury
Suzuki Elder

Maybe climate change is the wrong message. Maybe fresh water scarcity and water wars are the right message, and unless we do something different soon, it isn’t going to matter much. Such as it is, we are a reflection of our environment.

Yesterday’s news said that PFOAs (think water repellent coatings, anti-stick pans) are in our blood stream, in our water, and everywhere they don’t belong because they don’t break down. It’s like they have the radioactive half-life problem on spent nuclear fuels. I digress. The PFOA issue is not new news. The David Suzuki Foundation did a report on carcinogens and neural disruptors found in personal care and hygiene products way back in 2012. It was ridiculous then and equally so now, that childbearing-age women working in hair and nail salons are still at risk daily using these products, and so are we, their patrons and our offspring. So what’s changed? Not much.

Recently, Antonia Guterres warned of ‘catastrophic’ consequences of a world without glaciers. That’s the Head of the United Nations warning, “The world’s water towers, represent the largest reservoir of fresh water there is, supporting our nutrition, health, economies, and energy production, and supplying snow-melt that provides water for one in every four people on the planet (and all Canadians). But these silent giants are facing a rude awakening… Human activity is driving our planet’s temperature to dangerous new heights, in the form of global warming, turning glaciers, into the canary in the coal mine.”  https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/03/1134927

I assert that we should focus on something that is not seemingly intangible, like carbon dioxide, that colourless, odorless gas you can’t see, smell, taste, feel or hear. How about water? We all know and relate to water. The water is an issue of ‘now,’  a matter of life or death that’s not on the politically distant horizon.

Have you noticed that with the weather changing there is more-or-less water?

I live in a rainforest on the Sunshine Coast outside of Vancouver and this year a “water emergency” was declared and our household was identified as contributing to the problem.  We have a large garden and apparently, we use too much water, relative to most of the local population, i.e. in August 2022, when our summer garden was in full swing, we were one of the 15% of properties accounting for 44% of residential water use, averaging more than 1,500 litres per day. Guess what? It’s time for me to give up on my summer garden for the greater community’s water security and fire safety. I’ll adapt and grow a winter garden. It seems like a drop in the bucket, as Tzeporah Berman said in this music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj2nWJEeSgs

Global warming is a slow horse race and nobody watches slow horses. Climate warming is not the problem anyway because even if we stop temperatures from rising, the core problem continues. The core problem is us and what we do – we engage in terracide or ecocide – the killing of eco systems; it’s death by a thousand cuts. Strip mining, drilling, fracking, burning, offshore oil, real estate development, and so forth devastate ecosystems, poison whole landscapes, destroy habitat, acidify rain, contaminate water, and risk catastrophic spills. I said I live in a rain forest; I should have said I used to live in a “rain forest” because now, have you noticed, the cedar trees are dying – we’ve had very little rain, and even if we did have the rain, our watershed lakes and our one reservoir are shallow, and development, it keeps happening!

So, given the fast rate of change, do we really need to produce more and more forever? Does it really contribute to our human well-being? What if the solution were not technical – like a 2% growth rate to match inflation? What if it came down to reclaiming our relationship to nature by slowing down? Why more billionaires, why more weapons, why more stuff in our ever-bigger houses – what and who does it all serve?

Recently, in an open letter citing risks to society, Elon Musk and a group of AI experts called for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI’s newly launched GPT-4. Ultimately, the “solution” to the ecological crisis is not technical. The solution is being able to “pause” and feel. Can you feel it? If you can’t feel it, then you don’t have a relationship to it.

That’s why gardening is more than food security, it’s about having a relationship to the land and the water. The 84% of us Canadians living in cities don’t have that. That’s the irony of it all, but where else other than in our cities can we live to support a better standard of living in today’s society? And the people, you know, they keep coming… and they don’t know where their water comes from because they don’t have to have a relationship to it, or their food for that matter, as long as they have a grocery store – it is no longer the river estuary or seashore or down by the bay where the wildflowers grow.

Do you remember how loud the frogs were this time of year? How slow time passed when you were a kid? Do you remember flocks of birds extending from horizon to horizon? Do you remember the starfish, the kelp, the butterflies? Do remember the last time you saw a tree frog or newt? Where are they now? You have to slow down to know, right here, right now. Being here now is where to newly find the environmental movement in relationship to nature – in the present moment. Breathe in, breathe out – because it’s a celebration if you think about it. Take a drink of water, ah….. and don’t take it for granted because of its scarcity in our warming, capitalized world. I digress.

Don’t Look Up (a popular movie on this theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbIxYm3mKzI) and don’t look down, but slow down to behold the earth as a being, a magnificent, gorgeous, sacred being and then, fall in love with her, offer her praise and gratitude for all that is, and… it will be here that we’ll find the thirsty soul of the environmental movement again and wet its destiny to transform “what” we are relating to, to “who” we are relating to. It is in the “pause” that we can imagine transforming our human nature from an extracting, denuding, colonizing, and fracking one to a different reality where there could be a sharing of sustainable equanimity with all beings, and not just human beings, because reality is not, just-us. Enough said.