168 hours or 7 days, up to WHO?

The World Health Organization's 7th goal is to "ensure environmental sustainability", and they declare their 7.C target to halve the number of people without access to sanitary and safe drinking water by 2015.

According to the EPA (the US Environmental Protection Agency) the concentrations of benzene, naphthalene, 1-methylnaphthalene, 2-methylnaphthalene, fluorenes, phenanthrenes, aromatics, ethylene glycol and methanol are in exceeding regulatory standards in the hydrolic fracturing process. Benzene, for example, is a known carcinogen, it can contaminate millions of gallons of water, and is more than 62 times more present than the allowed level in drinking water. Actually, the EPA also declares that fracking involves up to 5 millions gallons of water for a single natural gas well in a deep shale formation. How many people does that quench?

"No need to ask, he's a smooth operator"

Yet, Natural Gas drillers are not required to follow the EPA regulations. Because of some obscure reason I could still investigate, but I'm not sure it's really worth my time, since the oil and gas companies are not obliged to reveal any "proprietary information"... and therefore, don't have to disclose of the chemicals they use during hydraulic fracturing.

Sometimes I wonder if the egg or the chicken came first.

If you didn't get that... I meant to ask... did the EPA or the Oil and Gas company come first?

"If you know your history, than you would know where you're coming from, then you wouldn't have to ask me, WHO the hell..."

Hydrolic fracturing is exempted from the Safe Drinking Water Act. The tax US payers are now subsidizing a 1.9 million study to review whether fracking should or should not become under the EPA's oversight.

So, once our water is undrinkable, that's what we'll have left. 168 hours.

The Mine

Australia may just be the canary in the coal mine of the industrialized countries. As it reaches a point where its global ecosystem cannot absorb the effects of ever intensified production, a 2002 water resource audit showed that surface and groundwater sources where over allocated by 26% and 31% respectively (Strang, 2009).

As I'm reading the introductions of two of the books on water crisis I borrowed from the library, I note words I think I should address somewhere, somehow, throughout this research...

health
recreation
rainfall
holistic
temperature
rainfall
national security
pesticides
population growth
culture
illegal
hydrology
responsibility
boundaries
petroleum
evaporation
oil
history
looming
crop
crisis
habitat
rivers
ICIDI
WCED
UN
IMF
IIWW
PCBs
World Bank
chlorine
urban expansion
human rights
climate
salination
ideologies
parasites
common good
aquatic organisms
riparian zones
indigenous/aboriginal
carcinogenic
diversity
lifestyle
civilization
irrigation
neolithic
green revolution
heritage
privatization
conflict
development
viruses
extinction
pathogenic
bacteria
stewardship
democracy
context
species
ethnographic
hydroelectricity
transport
energy
dams

...

Yes! And there is more! Reading this list, (which was randomly written down) I naturally make connections, and perhaps you do too. The study of water in agriculture can easily be too broad a subject, yet the synthesis of a comprehensive world view is also likely to get me closer to understanding the various push&pull components that drive the world system that governs us... by us.

We are interwoven with water, physically, politically, emotionally, mentally... how not to address all the components?

"The deepening water crisis is a result of having treated water as an externality. It was an externality of the Green Revolution, which led to a tenfold increase in water use for the same crop production, thus decreasing water use efficiency by a factor of ten." Dr. Vandana Shiva 2007 (Ray, 2008)

The Mine
Planet Earth, the Blue Planet, is home to 3 to 100 million species (13 million is the most accepted number) of which 34, 000 plants and 5, 200 animal species are now facing extinction.
http://www.cbd.int/2010/biodiversity/?tab=0
That is 5, 201 including Homo sapiens, says James Lovelock (http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2008/mar/01/scienceofclimatechange.climatechange) or the Voluntary Human Extinction Mouvement (http://www.vhemt.org/aboutvhemt.htm#vhemt).

The Art
I also have some words for thought for today:

Perspective entails blind spots (inspired from Chris Aiken, dancer and teacher)
Stage Vulnerability in Affirmation (inspired from Marc Boivin, dancer and teacher)
Collective Coherence (either Chris, Marc or Andrew L. Harwood)

I'm inspired to work with the image of the Container and the Liquid Content as imagery while creating movement. Chris Aiken spoke a bit about it and let us try it out during the AH HA workshop. I find beautiful the image of fluids being the connecting substance... where the convection happens. Also, having the choice of moving the liquid content of a part of the body prior to its container, say the marrow before the bone. It makes the dance quite fascinating to do... or try to :)

References:
Ray, B. 2008. Water; The looming crisis in India. Lanham : Lexington Books. 231 p
Strang, V. 2009. Gardening the World; Agency, Identity, and the ownership of Water. New York : Berghahn Books. 317 p.

The beginning

As I'm about to start this blog, Islands In A Black Sky by Bruce Cockburn is playing, and I feel the beginning.

The beginning in discovering the world through the eye of water movement in agriculture; the study of how water moves in my life, in my body, into atmospheres of far away lands and neighboring streams.

I have set obectives and requirements for myself, my advisor and the university I'm attending, as part of this project process. The course is Special Topics AGRI-482 (3 credits), and i've renamed it Water Mouvements in Agriculture.

I'm setting sails to gain broader understanding of the physical and chemical properties of water, it's cycle through the environment (soil, plants, animals and humans, atmosphere). The objective is also to grasp the political ties of agricultural water use around the world. A third goal is simply setting. I've decided to challenge myself into choreographing a 30 minute performance geared towards the general public, synthesizing the notions of water movements in agriculture. Part of my drive comes from my love of the art of dance and my caring concern of the natural world.

It's a beginning...