a jolt of privilege

Thursday we hauled down I-5 and 99 through the Central Valley into Fresno, and Friday we drove on into Visalia. We had wonderful hosts at the UU Fellowship of Visalia who served us a yummy potluck meal, provided home hospitality, and let some of us sleep peacefully in their church nestled among walnut orchards.

Before going to sleep and eating dinner last night, we had an opportunity to visit local organizers in small towns near Visalia. At the helm was Susanna, an amazing woman leader at the Community Water Center (CWC) in Visalia who is working like crazy to bring the water issues to the political forefront.

As we started our gathering with CWC, they asked us to introduce ourselves and say whether or not we ever buy bottled water. Yours truly got really puffed up because guess what? I made a commitment a couple of years ago to not buy bottled water. And I'm pretty proud that I drink tap water.

But guess what else? Drinking tap water is a *privilege* because there are people in California (poor with brown skin) who cannot drink the water that comes out of the tap.

Let me repeat - there are people in California who own their own homes, who work, who have families, who have children in school, who cannot drink or cook with the water that comes out of their own kitchen sink. They pay around $70.00 month for public water they cannot drink, and spend an additional $40-80.00 a month for bottled water.

Why? One reason is the groundwater used for their water (in East Orosi and Tooleville) is contaminated with harmful levels of nitrates. The cause? Likely it's seeping in from the 1600 dairies located in the Central Valley, from old septic tanks, and fertilizer from agriculture.

What is the responsibility of the rest of us who never have to think about nitrates when we turn on the tap?

What does it mean that clean water traveling in aqueducts, fed by mountain snow packs, passes right by these communities but they cannot tap into it because it is already allocated for agriculture use?

And for those 22 million people living in southern California, what does it mean that a huge amount of our water travels down to us, via canals and aqueducts, over 600 miles?

Water - it's so beautiful, so vital, so essential, and oh so complicated.

radical hospitality with Chico UU Fellowship

The Chico UU Fellowship embodied radical hospitality all day yesterday, they are a truly amazing bunch of people.

We'll be in Chico learning about groundwater for 24 hours, and in that time they will feed us three meals, give us home hospitality, teach us what they know about groundwater (which is a lot!), tour us around Chico State which is in the top 10 of sustainable campuses in US, and let us help them monitor stream health in Big Chico Creek.

Yesterday morning we rolled into Chico around 10:30, and Barbara (active at Chico UU Fellowship and with League of Women Voters) gave us a crash course in groundwater issues. We learned about the two kinds of water law (surface and ground), three types of water (surface, ground, and paper), and talked about the different costs of water.

California Department of Water Resources (DWR) has a water plan 2009 - google it, check it out. This will affect all of us. Let's learn together!

What do all of us Californians need to do in terms of water? We must:
- live within our means - the supply of water that 'naturally' flows to them
- tell legislators and DWR to fund 'water projects' that enhance the natural systems and protect the source
- conserve
- recycle
- reuse

We also got a chance to go down to the river and pray yesterday. Bob and Margaret took us out to Big Chico Creek, which is incredibly beautiful - I highly recommend jumping into it! We helped them do a healthy stream check, which involved taking stream measurements - depth of water, temperature, and calculating the velocity of stream flow (done with a lemon). I'll try to upload pictures from this.

After that, the Chico folks treated us to a lovely BBQ at the local park, and Bob Hennigan (an orchardist, and husband of Barbara from LWV) talked to us about Integrated Pest Management, which sounds a bit like a hybrid of organic and some pesticides. Basically, what he's doing is figuring out which pests like to eat the pests that are eating up his crops, and he does whatever he can to encourage the 'predator pests.' When and if the crop-eating pests get too out of control, he uses a small amount of pesticide to get rid of some, but not all, of those, so the predator pests can regain control. I'm an organic advocate myself, but I think his method might be more appealing to some kinds of farmers.

We're getting lots of scientific information, but we are tending to the spirit as well. Glenn, Sonya, and Samantha are doing an awesome job of keeping us centered in our UU values. We have spirituality bags (very fun idea! each person brought a brown paper bag filled with three items that inform their spirituality. each day at a meal someone draws out a bag, opens it, and based on what is in there the group tries to guess whose it is), worship every day, and grace at meals. Plus, being out in nature, purifying our spirits with water, deepening our community - it's a beautiful thing.