The sources, springs, basins or ravines are subject to accelerated extinction, climate and soil changes, floods, droughts and desertification. But human activity is the most drastic: it carries out delusional deforestation, ignores traditional knowledge, particularly that of local indigenous communities, drains water from rivers in a variety of ways, including through engineering structures, dams and diversions.
How will I look at the river that seems to flow out of me?
Sweet Maria Loynaz. The most obvious representation of living things is found in water. The figuration of movement in the constant flow of rivers, accelerating in their rapids; he doubts or becomes obsessed with eddies, with waves and fluctuations he plays with incessant waves; it becomes compulsive and thunderous in leaps, cascades, cataracts. He plays with the light again, offers transparencies and reflections, lets it float on his tracks, makes it sparkle with his friezes.
The states of water symbolize transformation and change: either strange and spooky like fog, new and cheerful like night frost, pungent and stony like hail; generous as rain; winged and distant as a cloud. But also still and hot like snow or ice; elusive as steam.
The ocean patents the abyss, beginning and end, depth and purity. The term mirror or spiritual introspection refers to lagoons, ponds or lakes.
Conception of grace in the elementarity of water. Motherhood of nature, our greatest constitutive element. The most common form of catharsis since ancient times.
Indeed, how symbolic is the mythological conception of water in most different cultures of the world when it is defined as the totality of virtues or, according to Thales, as the beginning of all things by Miletus, the ancestor of Socrates? All the oldest civilizations: the Chinese, the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians were born in the course of one river: the Huang ho, the Nile, the Tigris and the Euphrates. The symbolism is hardly indicated, it is more about logical connections in the structure of life.
The water, so precious and scarce
Only 0.5% of the water on earth is sweet or potable (all seas are undrinkable, even the oceans lost in tears that increase their mass invisibly with constant inflows) and it is renewed only by rain. The sources, springs, basins or ravines are subject to accelerated extinction, climate and soil changes, floods, droughts and desertification.
But human activity is the most drastic: it carries out delusional deforestation, ignores traditional knowledge, particularly that of local indigenous communities, drains water from rivers in a variety of ways, including through engineering structures, dams and diversions.
It wastes and pollutes more than it uses, even threatening groundwater, one of the most important freshwater sources. It is estimated that a person needs an average of 50 liters of water per day for drinking, cooking, washing, for agriculture and for hygiene.
But the right to water, which is fundamental to every living being, is beginning to reach millions of people drop by drop. And that distress call a few years ago (World Water Forum) began to be viewed internationally as a chilling confirmation of the staggering water shortages across the planet, not only due to population growth, but also the shocking human negligence of all the consequences that come with it.
The problem has gone from rumor of a creek to thunder of an avalanche. Although the following figures have been massively disseminated by social organizations and NGOs dedicated to protecting natural resources and the environment, it would be foolish not to cite them again: 1.1 billion people today have no access to water and 2, 4 billion sanitation facilities. 31 countries have no access to clean water sources at all. Every fourth person does not get clean water. Every eight seconds a child dies from drinking contaminated water. Every year more than five million people die from contaminated water.
half promises
The first World Water Forum, held in The Hague in 2000, set the goal of halving the number of people without access to drinking water by 2015. However, it contained no plans to circumvent its monopoly. The conflict over the privatization of water sources was hardly mentioned and is likely to become one of the most serious of the beginning of the century.
Although only 5% of the world’s drinking water is privately owned, the annual profits of these companies are more than double the oil industry’s revenues today. However, no matter how predicted the population growth of the planet of nearly nine billion people may be in 2025, there is no problem imagining the monstrous mechanism at work for this market.
Like natural rights, the most fundamental common heritage is also lost: the right to breathe and the right to water, symbol of the fundamental right to life. Symbolism or proof that the planet is nearing its end? How is the face of dying humanity reflected in the concave mirror of water drops?
Proceeding from the fact that without water there is no future, the demand of the Kyoto Convention of Water Sages is a common, individual and collective, social, institutional and universal action of all orders to protect and strengthen water sources, basins, springs, ditches. Neither more nor less the same as what the world’s indigenous people have been doing since ancient times.
Recognize the right to water and be keen to take part in water care – children, youth, adults. A participation that patents the animate, the fluid, the movement, the transformation, the symbol of water, the only way to imagine the future of the earth.
By Angela Garcia