"A Message in a Bottle."

Americans consume 31 billion bottles of water every year.

Water has been considered, since Roman times, a public trust and its sources as accessible to all people.

Water has attributes we need to think of in cubic dimensions.

3 X 3 = 9

3 squared is equal to nine.

By cubic we really mean that

three things about water coexist with

three examples of each particular quality water possesses:

1. Exists in three states: solid, liquid and vapor-gas phases.
2. Treated as: sacred, useful, beautiful.
3. Acts biotically as a: buffer, driver and partner of life.



Water is one compound substance, by which all things live.



Water conceived as a cube of relations

solid	liquid	vapor
beautiful	useful	sacred
buffer	driver	partner

phases:

solid,

liquid,

vapor-gas,

biologic roles:

buffer,

driver,

partner,

social attributes:

sacred,

useful,

beautiful,

Sweeping changes in our conceptual understanding of water resources is underway.

The world water crisis involves the commodification, commercialization, and privatization of water to make people pay for the water they consume. The effort is led by four international [Suez, Vivendi, Thames, & Bechtel] and three domestic companies: Nestle, Coca-Cola, and Pepsico.

• The hydrological cycle

• Commonizing costs and privatizing the profits

• the commons

• status of common property resources

• services from natural areas.

• Carbon as a measure of our impacts.

• ecojustice and water.

• A new way fo conceptualize water and wealth.

Shiva, Vandana. Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution and Profit.  Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002.

Jackson, Wes.  Altars of Unhewn Stone: Science and the Earth. San Francisco, California: North Point Press.

Flow-- award winning film by director: Irena Salina.

What can you do?

Prevailing social-economic problems:

five precepts | science | conservation | poverty | justice | commons

Water basics | water centric data | watersheds | aquifers | rivers | water & climate | water ethics