Water is Life, Ruth Rosenhek

Hi my name is Ruth Rosenhek and I work with the Rainforest Information Centre in Lismore and I'm also with Friends of the Earth and the North East Forest Alliance so I wear a number of different hats . I've been in Australia for five years and I came hear from Canada and it was when I came to Australia that I started to do environmental work before that time I was involved in largely in social change work. Today we are going to talk about water is life. I would like to share through some slides some of the work that I'm involved in to protect water and particularly we'll take a little journey into the Amazon in Ecuador where we are working right now and also look at a wet land in central west NSW and some local forests and I would just like to bring our awareness of water, it's the first day of the expo and there's going to be a lot of talk about water and forests. I'd like to share with you just to start off a poem by D.H. Lawrence

I am part of the sun, as my eye is part of me
Than I am part of the Earth my feet know perfectly and my blood is part of the sea
There is nothing of me that is a lone and absolute except my mind
And we shall find that the mind has no existence by it's self
It is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters

While we reflect on water in this session I'd like to start with the broad scope of reflection which is I'd like to share a bit from the scientific story the way that I understand it. That the beginning of the universe began sometime ago somewhere between 12-15 billion years ago and at the time there was enormous heat and a huge flaring forth. Within a short time within our larger frame of time, the element of hydrogen was created, and it's this hydrogen that went on to become people and flowers and everything that has been created came from and through this one element and other elements were formed later but the reason I bring this up is that water is formed of hydrogen, two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, so when we talk about clean water it's not really that the hydrogen gets damaged or the oxygen, it's the life of the water , it's what's in the water and of the water so in fact water becomes me it becomes you, when were born were mostly water and we still are about three quarters made up of water and to connect with that substance of ours selves comes from the beginning of the use, I find that the universe is a very power place to begin our reflection of water and to also take note and that it's not really water that would be devoid of organisms that were worried about, it's water in it's entirety of all the life force that's within it and as the story progresses after the formation of the planet earth some 4 ½ billion years ago that shortly there after when the first organisms were formed on the planet they lived in water so for 2 billion years there was nothing on the land yet it was also just bacteria life ,micro organism that were in water so that our history in the very largest of sense through the scientific story and water is the issue of this century. It's said that right now over a billion people are without access to clean water and in the next 20 years there will be over 3 billion people, that's half of the worlds current population who wouldn't have access to safe water, that's if we keep on at the same rate of destruction and only shortly there after, by the year 2030 that number will about 55%. There was a report by the UN that came out last week that 55 % of the worlds population wont have clean water So we can look at top soil as an issue, there are lot's of different things that we can look at as an issue, but I find myself focusing more and more on water as the element that ties in all the parts of the eco system that we need to retain in order to have healthy living for both us and everything else that we share the planet with.

The Amazon is the largest river in the world it's so large that there's an island in the mouth of the Amazon the size of Switzerland and it has 40% of the planets fresh water goes through the Amazon but at any one time it's said that only 1/5 of the water is in the Amazon itself and the other 4/5 are going through what Aldole Leopold who a naturalist, he called it the round river because it comes into the river and goes through the trees and up and around transpiring and coming back in so that's why he calls it the round river and so the Amazon in many ways is controlling the thermostat of this planet and it controls the climate and the weather and the water source that we have world wide. I got attracted to working down in the Amazon about 4to 5 years ago when I joined the Rainforest Information centre and we had been working there already for about 10 years or so and they stated corresponding with another Canadian down there who wrote me beautiful emails about the Amazon river dolphin that's endangered, it's a pink dolphin it's semi blind and also that in the Amazon there's such large rates of deforestation that ….

I would like to finish up by saying that the topic is water and I've presented on the kind of work that were doing but I feel that the times we are living in right now to often people are over burdened with guilt and a sense of moral responsibility and we find that a lot of people are paralysed or feeling overwhelmed and are unable to engage in the world because of those kinds of feeling and I just like to say that this is what I do cause I love it and it's not like everybody needs to go out and protect water now or protect forests or whatever it is, but if each of us could do the thing that we love to from a place of love and joy and not from a place of guilt. I share this in that spirit that these are the things that I like to work on and do.