![]() It is part of the global commons, not “property” but part of our life-support system. You can use it, and abuse it, but it is not yours to own. It might rise on your property, but it just passes through. ![]() I didn’t understand until much later that no one “owns” water. I understood when I was just a child that without water, everything dies. One place pays little attention to the marvel of it-it’s just “there” the other is by necessity obsessed with it. At home you know when you’ve come to a farm, for there are trees.” One place has water in abundance, the other not. “Here,” she said, “you know when you’ve come to a farm, for there’s a clearing. I drove her up from Toronto, taking the back roads through the endless forest, and she spotted at once the fundamental difference. She was a de Villiers, like me, and a Boer to her marrow. Now, here was a wonder-water bubbling into the clear air, all by itself. For a while I thought it made the water, somewhere down there, in its rusting heart. My grandfather had water, but his borehole went down into the center of the earth, drawn to the surface by a clanking windmill, a charmless mechanical thing. It hardly rained there (though when it did, the clouds burst), and for most of the year the rivers were dry, dusty places where thorn bushes grew and weaverbirds made their nests. I grew up in the arid center of the South African plains. It bubbled and seeped and gurgled, and it was cold when I reached down to touch it. ![]() Water was water, and it was everywhere, wasn’t it? I paid no attention, but stared down at the little spring. My Canadian friends thought it a risible thing to do. When we first bought the farm, I used to take a chair outside in the summer sun and watch the water move. It fetches up in the sea, where it lives awhile. Lower down it becomes a creek and, joined by others, a stream, a lake, and then. The water seeps through the grass and trickles into a stone runnel, left there by a farmer long gone, and then forms a pool, ducks underground for a while, resurfaces in a small wetland, and disappears into a ravine. It bubbles sleepily from the ground, and if you’re really quiet and there’s no wind in the trees, you can hear it making little burping noises, like a baby content at the breast. Preface Behind the barn on our farm near Maynooth, in the deciduous forest belt of Ontario, is a small spring. Rosemary Shipton, Earl Green, Ken Hirtle, Tom Gardner-Outlaw, Elisabeth Cherdel and Kay Rolland, Bill Gilkerson, Dominique Henry, Tom Tait, Gregory Grammer, Helen Marquard, Maurice Strong, Kim Peters, Stephanie Foster, Fraser and Linda Farmer, Professor Ben Dziegielewski, Professor Henry Kendall, and, of course, Bruce Westwood. Mark TwainĪcknowledgments For being helpful-nay, essential-along the way. Turkish businessman, 1998 Whiskey is for drinkin’ water is for fightin’. Levi Eshkol, Israeli prime minister, 1962 Millions have lived without love. Mostafa Tolba of Egypt, former head of the United Nations Environment Program and Grand Old Man of the environmental movement Water is like the blood in our veins. Now we think water will be the critical issue. Ecologists’ motto, adopted by Margaret and Jim Drescher, Windhorse Farm, New Germany, Nova Scotia We used to think that energy and water would be the critical issues for the next century. Army Corps of Engineers We’re all downstream. We have to deal with real things-real dams, real rivers, real demands, real crises. They have no responsibility to manage real resources. the Reverend Mother Darwi Odrade Why repeat mistakes when there are so many new ones to make? -Descartes Frankly, most of the academic studies are irrelevant to practical decision-making. To the memory of JOHANNES JACOBUS DE VILLIERS, who farmed in a hard land and knew water’s true value Water resources development-Political aspects. Includes bibliographical references and index. Originally published: Toronto : Stoddart, 1999. Water: the fate of our most precious resource / Marq de Villiers p. The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: De Villiers, Marq. ![]() ![]() Limited For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016. Solutions and Manifestos Back Matter Bibliography About the Author Connect with HMHįirst Mariner Books edition 2001 Copyright © 2000 by Jacobus Communications Corporation ALL RIGHTS RESERVEDįirst published in Canada in 1999 by Stoddart Publishing Co. Contents Title Page Contents Copyright Dedication Epigraph Acknowledgments Preface Part I 1. ![]()
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