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"We’ve poisoned
the air, the water, and the land. In our passion to control nature, things have
gone out of control. Progress from now on has to mean something different. We’re
running out of resources and we are running out of time."
~ Robert
Redford |
The
wars of the twenty-first century will be fought over water.
-- Ismail Serageldin,
World Bank Vice President for Environmental Affairs
Clean
water is not an expenditure of Federal funds; clean water is an investment in
the future of our country.
-- Bud Shuster, U.S. Representative
"I
have left almost to the last the magic of water, an element which owing to its
changefulness of form and mood and colour and to the vast range of its effects
is ever the principal source of landscape beauty, and has like music a mysterious
influence over the mind."
-- Sir George Sitwell
"Water
is the most basic of all resources. Civilizations grew or withered depending on
its availability."
-- Dr. Nathan W. Snyder
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"The cleanup costs
of polluting a river, injecting pesticides into the ground water, or putting noxious
gases into the air have not been figured into the cost of the manufacturing or
agribusiness that put them there in the first place. Historically, the economic
incentive has been to pollute."
-- Gloria
Steinem |
I
have always been a big advocate of tap water—not because I think it harmless but
because the idea of purchasing water extracted from some remote watershed and
then hauled halfway round the world bothers me. Drinking bottled water relieves
people of their concern about ecological threats to the river they live by or
to the basins of groundwater they live over. It's the same kind of thinking that
leads some to the complacent conclusion that if things on earth get bad enough,
well, we'll just blast off to a space station somewhere else.
-- Sandra Steingraber
More
than 5,500 large dams impede America's running waters, leaving less than 2 percent
of the country's 3.1 million miles of rivers and streams flowing free. In the
wake of these river alterations trails a record list of endangered aquatic species.
Two of every three freshwater mussel species are heading for extinction, or are
already there; half of all crayfish species are imperiled; more than a third of
the country's freshwater fish are in trouble -- 17 of them missing outright.
-- William Stolzenburg
"Water
is life's mater and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water."
-- Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Hungarian biochemist and Nobel Prize Winner for
Medicine.
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As we watch the sun
go down, evening after evening, through the smog across the poisoned waters of
our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously whether we really wish some
future universal historian on another planet to say about us: "With all their
genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight and air and food and
water and ideas," or, "They went on playing politics until their world collapsed
around them."
~ U Thant
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A lake is the
landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking
into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.
~ Henry
David Thoreau |
We
used to think that energy and water would be the critical issues for the next
century. Now we think water will be the critical issue.
-- Mostafa Tolba,
former head of the United Nations Environment Program
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"Plans to protect air
and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man."
~ Stewart
Udall |  |
Water is fundamental
for life and health. The human right to water is indispensable for leading a healthy
life in human dignity. It is a pre-requisite to the realization of all other human
rights.
-- The United Nations Committee on Economic, Cultural and Social
Rights
I
understood when I was just a child that without water, everything dies. I didn't
understand until much later that no one "owns" water. It might rise on your property,
but it just passes through. You can use it, and abuse it, but it is not yours
to own. It is part of the global commons, not "property" but part of our life
support system.
-- Marq de Villiers
Over
1 billion people have no access to clean drinking water, and more than 2.9 billion
have no access to sanitation services. The reality is that a child dies every
eight seconds from drinking contaminated water, and the sanitation trend is getting
sharply worse, mostly because of the worldwide drift of the rural peasantry to
urban slums.
-- Marq de Villiers
The
trouble with water—and there is trouble with water—is that they're not making
any more of it. They're not making any less, mind, but no more either. There is
the same amount of water in the planet now as there was in prehistoric times.
People, however, they're making more of—many more, far more than is ecologically
sensible—and all those people are utterly dependent on water for their lives (humans
consist mostly of water), for their livelihoods, their food, and increasingly,
their industry. Humans can live for a month without food but will die in less
than a week without water. Humans consume water, discard it, poison it, waste
it, and restlessly change the hydrological cycles, indifferent to the consequences:
too many people, too little water, water in the wrong places and in the wrong
amounts.
-- Marq de Villiers
Wisdom
understands that in a world of ecological interconnectedness there is no such
things as “away.” We don’t throw things “away,” we simply put them someplace where
they defile the land, foul the water, pollute the air or change the earth’s atmosphere.
-- Brian Walsh & Sylvia Keesmaat
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"You cannot have peace
without human rights, democracy, gender equality, and clean water. Look to the
root causes of war and you will find, in their reverse, the root foundations of
peace."
-- Cora Weiss
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"Rain
is a blessing when it falls gently on parched fields, turning the earth green,
causing the birds to sing."
-- Donald Worster
