Petition To Declare Water A Living Entity

We believe there is a spiritual, social, and scientific connection between the survival of human beings and the health of our shared bodies of water above and below. We declare the waters of Earth an essential and endangered living entity to be protected from harm along with all of life on Earth as an integrated living system. 

The signing of this petition demonstrates our compassion for water as a living entity.  The closed system of Earth’s water cycle is unique and undeniably present in all aspects of human and non-human life.  This water has existed for billions of years, passing through each of us in turn.  It is as much a part of our common experience as is our need for breath.  We are born from our mothers’ waters and have each known an intimate relationship to its life giving properties. 

Being simultaneously a living entity and also a part of all of life on Earth, we understand that mystics and theologians alike are capable of feeling what water feels, knowing what water knows, moving, quenching, and transforming like water.  We cannot deny that water carries our poison, our discard, our birth waters, and even our inactive DNA, that it is co-mingled with minerals, food, blood, and medicine.  We know that it carries the power to grow food and to keep our world from either withering or washing away.  Knowing all of this, we conclude that water has the right to be clean, flowing, and equally shared on this living planet. Much like each human has the right to certain life sustaining rights; so does the water.

We share the responsibility to express our common need for equal access to the forms of water essential to sustain the cycles of life on Earth.  We witness to this imbalance by speaking and acting to bring human activity into “right relationship” with Earth’s water cycles as it connects to gasses, liquids, minerals, carbon based life forms and more.  Freedom, for water, refers to the water’s ability to care for itself, to be clean, to be born from the depths of Earth in its own time, and to remain chemically autonomous, as much as humans can firstly do no harm.

When water is denied these basic needs, it affects life on Earth in ways detrimental to the continuation of this great continuum of life that makes up our common experience on Earth. 

In accordance with this compassionate treatment of water, we recognize that violence, neglect, and imprisonment of humanity is also mistreatment of water.  We are of the water and the water is of us. 

Respectfully submitted by people of Earth as representatives of this inseparable living system we call home. 

 by Glynis Lumb 2015 

The author asks,"What would it take to make this petition a reality?"  

Learn More: Read A Declaration of the Rights of All Waters 2014 2nd Gathering of the Women's Congress for Future Generations 

                                     Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

Water Security has been defined as "the reliable availability of an acceptable quantity and quality of water for health, livelihoods and production, coupled with an acceptable level of water-related risks."^[1] Sustainable development will not be achieved without a water secure world. A water secure world integrates a concern for the intrinsic value of water with a concern for its use for human survival and well-being. A water secure world harnesses water's productive power and minimises its destructive force. Water security also means addressing environmental protection and the negative effects of poor management. It is also concerned with ending fragmented responsibility for water and integrating water resources management across all sectors – finance, planning, agriculture, energy, tourism, industry, education and health. A water secure world reduces poverty, advances education, and increases living standards. It is a world where there is an improved quality of life for all, especially for the most vulnerable—usually women and children—who benefit most from good water governance.^{[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_security}

The God of Wet Things

I had a vision in the silence.  There is a sparkling, clear aquifer deep under the earth.  It took hundreds of years to become this way.  Water filtered down through hard rock, clay, roots of trees, grass, and air, even through our own bodies.  It filters through everything in our world and has always existed.  The only way for it to become truly clean is for it to move ever gently through the earth to where it collects in one place, together.  It is a celebration of interconnectedness.  It is evidence that we are all touched in some way by the same substance, by one of the elements that give us life.  It is an ancient idea ever living and changing.  And it is gentle.  It is very gentle.  It takes time.  The water is powerful in its patience and its loyalty to the laws of gravity.   It can do nothing but collect together.  It is powerful in its ability to transform.  It can be caught, but it can escape.  It escapes because we need it.  It will always be needed.  We will always be thirsty.   Life is about satisfying this thirst.  

The pure water is rare anymore.  I grew up drinking, bathing, swimming, and cooking, with water from a huge aquifer under the wetlands of the Sacramento Valley in California.  In the summer, the well would bring the water effortlessly to the surface.  I could feel the aquifer under the red clay dirt of the open fields. 

It was delicious.  It felt good on my body, like it was conducting electricity from one nerve to another making me whole.  I could become new again in the water.  It was a clean that had nothing to do with scrubbing, soap, or heat.

The creeks and rivers were never far away.  They were inviting and clean with deep clear pools filled with gray and white rocks.  Life-abound in the water and by its shores.  It changed the rocks, the sandstone hillsides from year to year.  The water never stopped.  We dove, waded, swam, floated, and splashed.  We made a ritual out of visiting Clear Creek in Happy Valley, where I lived as a small child near Redding, California.  There were mossy, slimy big rocks to climb over and shallow creek beds to navigate. My tiny foot would step on uneven rocks with balance so lightly given that even the flow of the water was accounted for in the strength of my step.  I can still hear the constant tiny bells of the water against rocks and static white noise of rushing water. There was so much to know to stay safe, but the rules were simple, and reliable.  The water was powerful, but it always let me in.  The water was cold.  It forced me to take a deep breath and to cry out with the kind of joy that accompanies a ride on a roller coaster, eyes open wide, mouth in a wide tight circle, body held stiff with anticipation.  Exhilarating!

The ponds were warm on the top and cool underneath.  So misleading.  They were still and responsive.  If there was movement, it was shared like a secret among school children.  Ponds were alive below the surface, where things could hide and multiply.  Frogs, fish, plants, and bugs would fill the water to capacity.  Adding myself to the mix felt warm and alive, but murky.  My only demise would have been to swim out too far and not have the energy to get back.  The air was often swarming with life just waiting to be eaten by the creatures in the pond.  The entire life cycle could be played out around that microcosm of a hole with a trickle of water flowing through. 

I live a new life with water, now.  Time has made demands on our water.  It holds the life that we give it.  In all of its forms, it cleans, cools, transports, powers, quenches, cooks, grows, destroys, and more.  How could humans disrespect something that is so close to our very existence?  We need it.  Like we need love.  Its presence and movement is unpredictable.  So we save it, just in case.  We clean it and recycle it.  We also dirty the water in ways that change its very essence.  Now, why do we do this? 

Stop here. 

We need it like we need love.  We are born out of water.  We float in a warm, loving, dark, pool of water before we are born. We breathe liquid in the womb of our mothers.  Our bodies are formed in amniotic fluid.  Then the water breaks and birth follows.  New life arrives out of water. The air we breathe contains water.  It is easy to stop water from flowing, and then again it is notoriously hard to stop.  You know this if you have ever wet your pants.  It is frightening and dangerous at one moment and life giving at another.  Yet, at other times, it is completely neutral.  It is the particles that make up a rainbow. 

We learn to process water through our bodies by quenching our thirst and then responding to pain with release. To become civilized, we control the way water goes through our bodies.  Liquid is transformed in our systems and a whole new product comes out.  So, it seems natural that we would figure out how to put water into a system and allow it to be used and transformed into something unclean.  Are we just doing something that comes natural to us?  It's not unlike when we run water through the cooling tower of a nuclear power plant.  We are a creative species.  Perhaps thinking up new ways to process things is what we do best. 

A vision of the crystal clear aquifer comes back to me when I get muddled with thoughts of dams, erosion, levees, fracking, and melting glaciers.  I see the strength of the earth holding back the rushing water.  Then rocks and dirt move aside and allow themselves to be deposit in another place, a process held together by gravity.  This movement is fluid, forever changing from soft to hard.  The earth holds the water with gentle support.  Never possessing it against its will.  The water breaks her, softens her, and moves her aside, but never destroys her, for the two are connected.  They are connected like they are with all living things.  Like voluntary and involuntary bodily functions, it is an eternal dance of opening and closing, freedom and force.  Maybe we have something to learn from this relationship.  Sacred bodies, sacred earth.  

Learn More: Things to See and Hear

Help Stop Fracking: Earth Justice

The Woodlands:  The Story of Fracking

Fracking Explained with Animation

Water, Consciousness and Intent 

Wo-Manifestation

I'd be one of those spiritual types
Who shake and holler in adoration,

Oozing over with a gushing enthusiasm
In celebration of her existence.

For once, I'd feel something
That cannot be contained.

Her love would explode inside of me
And I would lay down forever
In the field of spring grass. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

And here I am
Looking out 

Reaching beyond BIG 

Encircling her enormity 
Never-ending. 

Sharing completely in that wordless continuing awe. 

Then I am whole.  

All of my limbs accounted for, 
And stretched wide...

A giggle escapes from my little girl throat
as the world drops out from underneath my feet. 

And there...
Then and there...

Everything is changed.


--Glee  11-17-12

Learn More: The Alphabet Verus The Goddess  by Thomas Shlain