Blog Action Day 2010: Water from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.

Any time I have heard statistics about how much water the average American uses a daily or some such thing about how much we waste I’ve never had anyway for those numbers to mean anything to me. I know compared to the rest of the world it’s some crazy amount but it’s just a number. There’s no meaning way for me to grasp the problem. Well, up until this past month there wasn’t a way.

This is a picture of the tank of one of the three toilets in my house. I’m lucky to have a place where I have three toilets, even if there’s only me in the house. So, some time ago the downstairs bathroom seemed to continue to run after every flush. It was annoying but didn’t seem to be a big deal. I’d remove the top of the tank and lift the float a little to stop the flow and that seemed to “work.” I knew that I could adjust the two screws on the top of the float valve but I didn’t want to bother. Then the other two bathrooms started acting up. No fun. Then I got a visit from the local water utility saying that they think that there’s a leak because of the change in the reading. Damn. I got out my screwdriver and started messing with the screws to see if I could reset the valves. I got it so that the tank doesn’t fill nearly as much so that the water doesn’t go into the overflow tube. Then I got the bill for the water running in three toilets… over $200. And I can still hear the water slowly flowing. Damn. Water waste is expensive.

CNN.com

Beck continued, “We had at least three major world governments as active participants in this year’s event. United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown posted the first Blog Action Day entry in Britain at the stroke of midnight on the 15th, which was followed by Foreign Minister David Milliband and many others from the UK stationed around the world. The PSOE governing party of Spain hosted a bloggers event focused on climate change and transformed their website for the day to promote Blog Action Day. And late in the day, President Barack Obama’s White House blog joined in become part of the global movement of bloggers shaking the web.” So, in all Beck felt like it was a great success in that it sparked conversations about climate change.

Sources:

Image & article “Bloggers unite on climate change” By Matthew Knight/CNN, http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/10/14/blog.action.day.climate/ retrieved on 10/16/2009

So, let’s be entirely clear about what might contribute to this person’s state of doubt. We in the “Developed West” believe that the most important entity is the individual and we darn near worship the independent individual. Government, community, family, culture, they have some importance, but the most important thing in all of the universe is the individual. I before thee or we. Period. Somewhere in there is a twisted interpretation of the commission in the book of Genesis that man should go forth and conquer the world and do with it what he pleases. Man, individual, conquer, seems pretty clear.

Of course, up until this last century very very few individuals could even hope to survive a single year without the intervention or assistance of others. Forget that part. What we have here is the result of decades of individual-worship and the inability to recognize that we are, in fact, inter-connected and that everything we do has some ripple-effect across the world. The fact that we don’t “see” this, like watching dominoes knocking one another over on a table, only reveals the gross limitations to our powers of perception. Add to this that our lifespans are so pathetically short, too short for an individual to experience the changes wrought by ones actions. So, because we don’t see the changes very easily we assume that we can do whatever we please with no concern for the results of our behaviors. To me this shows how little we understand of this world we would presume to conquer. The scariest part is that those who have the need to lead and grasp at the reins of power may be most susceptible to the delusion that they as individual leaders are more important than those they represent or lead, and take no responsibility for their actions. So whether you are a five-year-old secretly coloring on the walls in your bedroom or a governor of a bankrupt state, or the former president of a religious denomination, every choice, no matter how small will effect us all on some level. We are all connected.

“Wherefore whatsoever ye have said in the darkness shall be heard in the light; and what ye have spoken in the ear in the inner chambers shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.” Luke 12: 3 (ASV)

How about we do something good with all of this power.

Sources:

image: “the heat is on” by jenny downing, http://www.flickr.com/photos/jenny-pics/3800586843/ retrieved on 10/14/2009.