What if the lakes and streams and aquifers were holy, and had legal standing in their own right that came first in our planning?
Why first in our planning? Globally, fresh water is scarce. Locally in Iowa, water is increasingly degraded because it is outside our planning--not even tertiary.
Water is life; life is water.
In late summer, I would swim and stream-walk a small section of the Raccoon River. While sedimented for decades now, the water was clear in the shallows. For a few years now, the water is pea-green from edge-to-edge. For decades and worse now, this water has strongly contributed to a vast hypoxia zone in the Gulf.
In the 1980s, I wrote about the wisdom of the river, focusing on the Des Moines River as a living, very open metaphor for the essential streaming dynamic of the universe that is within us as well in the streaming of our body metabolism and thought.
