““The sage who would change the world begins with water.””
By Stan Gibson
Co-founder of Ecologos Environmental Organization
Conservator at The Buffalo Farm Eco-Wilderness Retreat
Where the Amable du Fond River flows from the northern edge of Algonquin Park, just before it starts zigzagging across our farm, there is a cataract with an unusual shape. It’s not big like the nearby Eau Claire Gorge, maybe it drops 35 feet altogether, but not all in one go. Step-by-step, its water falls down and across a misshapen staircase of big stone shelves. I go to this place often.
The day before yesterday I sat by its edge. The snow-melt from many Algonquin lakes multiplies the river’s flow a dozen times. You should hear it roar! It’s wild, primal… it mesmerizes me into a different-from-normal awareness: This river is alive. I am alive. We are alive together.
We all have powerful experiences of water. We all have places where our memories revisit those special experiences. What are those special places for you? What have been your most powerful experiences of water? What do they reveal to you?
Everyone asks when ‘it’ will end? Everyone asks when will we get to the ‘new normal’? I think the more important question is “What will that ‘new normal’ be?” But that’s the question, isn’t it? What do we leave behind and what do we invent anew? The whole world has stopped in its tracks. In this Global Pause, amazing creative reflection is going on. Maybe that’s what is really unprecedented. So many mulling over where in the world we go from here. It seems that now is the time to envision a new future while this worldwide pause lasts.
We better start figuring this out soon because there are those with great power in our world, readying massive sums of money and political influence to charge back to the ‘old normal’, full-throttle. I confess I do not have any special insight into that new we could create, but my experience at the Amable du Fond cataract recommends, to me at least, two essential touchstones to keep our consideration of the future on a meaningful track.
Two touchstones
First, water is a conjurer of spirit. It matters immensely the spirit in which the new is created. To me, experiences like the one I just described, and similar ones from your own experience, affirm the spirit that’s necessary – humility before life’s sacredness. The world is not some clump of stuff for us to manipulate however we like... just look where that has gotten us. If a spirit of sacredness were to guide our creation of the new, undoubtedly justice would emerge. Justice in our relationship with Earth, with each other and all people, and with the poor creatures of land, sky and water to which we humans feel entitled to treat with unspeakable cruelty. Is COVID-19 finally enough to shake us from our hubris, our obsession with control?
The inseparable meshing of humans and nature makes our lives possible. Despite vast accumulated knowledge, this ‘interbeing’ of all life is so infinitely entangled that our understanding only touches the surface. That is why seers throughout time have acknowledged our relationship within nature ultimately as an unfathomable mystery – and sacred. Forceful experiences of water have awakened this awareness in us from the beginning of time. This spirit is simply the beginning.
Second, water is the keystone of renewal. Just as water is the keystone of our health and vitality, so it is with the social and geophysical networks that sustain us. We call these networks ecosystems, or eco-realms as I prefer. Each is an interweaving of water, land and soil, of forest, air, of humans and fellow creatures. But the keystone, the life’s blood so-to-speak, of this interweaving is water.
We humans have compromised and gutted hundreds of thousands of eco-realms worldwide. We clear cut vast tracks of forests, even ancient, old-growth forests. We destroy coral reefs and pollute waterways with everything from plastic to pharmaceuticals. We shred mangrove swamps and sea grass thickets and pave over marshlands and estuaries. We leave an inch of topsoil where once there were many feet.
Oops! Have we missed something here? This gutting has distorted the very hydrological rhythms on which our lives depend. These eco-realms are the regulators, the governors, the sustainers of the very life of the Earth. We can reduce carbon emissions to zero - BUT if the health of ecosystems, one by one, is not protected and restored, we are toast. In envisioning and creating the new, this must be our starting point.
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