How to value water!

For several years we've been reading about Native American perspectives on the relationships among humans and nature. Much of those perspectives are referred to as Original Instructions. We think we're slowly learning and want to share a brief illustration of how the values of different cultures can radically affect human perspectives.

how would you value this Minnesota stream?

Photo by J. Harrington

Water is one of Minnesota's most valuable, used, and abused resources. Actually, the nature of the hydrologic cycle means that water is not really Minnesota's resource, we just borrow it from Mother Nature and our downstream neighbors. A recent issue of Orion magazine has an insightful piece, with an introduction by Layli Long Soldier, on Women and Standing Rock. Since this is Women's History Month, let's take a look at a wonderful quotation from that piece on the "value" of water.

People from around the world, from the Pacific Islands to the Middle East to Europe, called out in the Lakota language, “Mni Wiconi!” It’s this sensibility that is important to the present: water is not a “resource,” it’s not a “utility,” it’s not negotiable. Rather, “it is sacred.” I have heard these words many times. Without water, there is no life. Simple. True. Resonant, down to our very cells.

This prospect resonates strongly with us because we do not believe that everything is fungible. We have deep and strong concerns about growing efforts to "value" ecosystem services. Those concerns made us wary about the Natural Capital Project's efforts to identify The True Value of Water, although we recognize that:

Without explicit valuation of the benefits of water protection or the costs of inaction, market values, such as agriculture, development, timber and mining will drive land and water decisions.

We're troubled by what reads to us as an entirely anthropocentric view of the value of water and corresponding efforts to add structure to competing but often mutually exclusive human uses of water. In essence, earth's water is a closed system that keeps recycling its contents. In the current Anthropocene Age, we need to create newer and better ethics to enable all of us to recognize the value of both a no cost but priceless monarch butterfly and a unique, multi-million dollar Picasso painting. A welcome sign of our progress would be the extent to which we replace hubris with humility. We are one among many species living on this planet. We depend on other species for our very existence. Plants create both oxygen and nutrition and did so before we learned to cultivate them. We do we provide to the plants that's of comparable value to them?

With water, there is no life. Without water there are no plants. Without plants there are no humans. Is that so hard to grasp? Take a look at what we're doing to water in the Anthropocene.

                     Water

By Ralph Waldo Emerson

The water understands

Civilization well;

It wets my foot, but prettily,

It chills my life, but wittily,

It is not disconcerted,

It is not broken-hearted:

Well used, it decketh joy,

Adorneth, doubleth joy:

Ill used, it will destroy,

In perfect time and measure

With a face of golden pleasure

Elegantly destroy.

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