It’s a cleshay but true, water touches everything and everyone.
To elaborate on that simple idea, is to delve into the total collective organizational behavior of humans. How we collect and share our knowledge and experiences and what the processes are that make water a touchstone for human existence.
Water is a guide for greater understanding of human existence on this planet. Where we are presently today, in history of course and how the future plays out.
What composes knowledge and experiences, how does it come together, day in and day out? There are many aspects to this and water flows through all of them. The economic systems where water is a commons for everyone, but for a few, a commodity to be bought and sold for profit and wealth.
At the global scale it’s part of the environmental process, the bedrock of that process, because without it nothing else exists. Understanding the implications of how the ecosystem depends on water is just beginning to emerge from our collective unconscious to the conscious in many of our world’s cultures. Some cultures have known its importance, for every.
Without an abundant supply of water the vast expansion of human population would not be possible. The various social structures that exist throughout the world would come crashing down, overnight without the gift of water – many have vanished, never to been seen again because water just vanished.
Political systems and institutions sip from the cup of water. Water is used as a political weapon, a tool for good, and a weapon for bad. Concentrations of humanity in cities and countries must have water to exist. The politics of water, how it is moved, storied, used and saved is again the only reason such concentrations of humanity can exist.
Humans create technologies to move, store and even create fresh water from oceans. Some of the energy human’s use comes from water, technology cleans the water humans dirty and defile. Technology makes it possible to use and reuse it, store it behind massive structures, spray it over vast parts of deserts to grow food – but also to create massive problems, for how that use effects the ecosystem.
This is all a process of creating preferences and expectations that come from these various parts of human existences. One drives another that in turn drives another in an ever-ending cycle of loops. It churns endlessly tell something goes wrong and things brake down – could be the economy, production, the environment, political structures, population and of course a technology fix that proves misguided.
All this cycle of human experience contributes to the every increasing fund of knowledge and experience that we are now beginning to share on a global scale. From that experience humans reset the gages of the various worlds that make up the human experience, recalibrate, fiddling with the dials of change, trying to keep the human experience going in one form or another.
