Today, March 22, 2015, is World Water Day, a day designated by the United Nations in 1993 to celebrate Water.
Being in our fourth year of drought, there never has been a time that Californians are more aware of water. Many of us may be joining the 780 million people of the world who do not have access to safe drinking water, NASA projections saying California has one year of water storage left.
In commemoration of this day, I offer links to two articles coming out this month in Jung Journal, Culture and Psyche. The first is my interview of Charlie Toledo, The Water Crisis in California: an Interview with Charlie Toledo. Charlie worked on the formation of the Watershed Development plan for Napa County in its seminal years, 1992–1995, and more recently serves on a state advisory board that functions as a consumer oversight of the California Public Utilities Commission. She brings indigenous wisdom and knowledge as she discusses current water legislation in California and what is needed to meet the crisis, viewing Water as alive and sacred. The second article, On Water—and Fire, is a meditation on a reflective approach suggested by one of Jung’s favorite stories, The Rainmaker. In this article I consider the question, Is it hubris to think that shifting our consciousness can have an impact on the outer world?
But there are the practicalities, too, that all of us on earth are going to have to consciously consider for here on out. We are running out of high quality water. The World Health Organization suggests that each of us on earth needs only about 2-5 gallons a day to meet our needs. This is far less than the 150 gallons a day Californians have been using.
Earth will always have the last say, and never more so than with that which unites us all: Water.