by Eva van Loon

“Water is best,” goes the ancient Greek proverb. As a teen, I thought it a dumb saying. The best as compared to what?

It stuck in memory as I learned that water covers 71% of the planet, that 97% of the water is ocean (not counting polar ice!) and people consist mostly of water, 55% to 78%.

An alarming discovery was the short time it takes for a human being to die of thirst as opposed to hunger: only three or four increasingly painful days, while we can last for weeks without food. Drinking seawater or urine only makes things worse. Where drought is marching across the land, as in Somalia, people are already dying of thirst every day, while on the Sunshine Coast we go about our lives, swilling down coffee, soda and juices as if there’s no tomorrow, forgetful that each human life depends utterly on ingesting two to three litres of water every single day.

Put so starkly, that fact sends me straight to the cold-water tap with a “Thank you, Dr. Suzuki,” for pointing out recently that our tap water is a wonderful healthy blessing and that, while we can still call this treasure our own, we neither need nor want bottled water trucked in.

ClimateWizard is a new online toy that will predict changes in temperature and precipitation—precious water—in a given area for 2050 and 2100. For now, it’s mostly good for the US, but even so, the expected desertification is mind-boggling. Not that I didn’t know that places like Australia, Maui, and California are already burning up, or that there are predictions out there that the West Coast will lose 30% of its annual precipitation, but it was a shock to see that big red knob of heat and dryness on the map, right up to the Canadian border. We’re fools if we think nobody’s going to be panting after our water.

I pour myself another glass of today’s vintage of agua pura and wonder if the will of the people will prove strong enough to keep our fresh water out of dry, grasping corporate claws and uncontaminated by the globalist claptrap economy. Maybe it’s too late—certainly it’s late in the day. Few now question the fact of global warming—global heating, as it’s more accurately called—certainly not James Lovelock in his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia:

“There is no tipping point, just a slope that gets ever steeper. Because of the rapidity of the Earth’s change, we will need to respond more like the inhabitants of a city threatened by a flood. When they see the unstoppable rise of water, their only option is to escape to higher ground. We have to make our lifeboats seaworthy now [and] stop pretending there is any way back to that lush, comfortable, and beautiful Earth we left behind sometime in the 20th century.”

On a true-blue warm day in Powell River in 2009, plates of local prawns, cherries, berries and greens set before us, none of us wants to agree with Lovelock. Isn’t our Earth the same as ever? Okay, spring was late and the mason bees too early—stuff happens. All right, the economic downturn is pounding us into the ground, financially. But we can eat. We meet. We contemplate our famous sunsets over the wine-dark sea, and we plan futures for our community and ourselves, beyond mere survival.

Lovelock would call us lucky. He’d think Powell River is one of the lifeboats that can conceivably carry humankind through the next century. If we get smart, of course. If we go beyond sustainability and think deeply about where we are, who we are, and what we want for the children. If we pick our battles. If the water fight is part of that future, it is a battle we shirk at our children’s peril.

Water is best when it belongs to the earth. The same goes for humanity. Without water or belonging, we’re history.