Singing in the Shower
The shower at our place takes a while to warm up, so I now catch the cold water in a pot and use it for plants. If the orchids in the house don’t need it I walk down to the garden and pour it on stringbeans or basil or geraniums. This little diversion takes only a few minutes, and it makes me feel good. Such a simple action won’t help the fish in the Klamath River or drought-stricken farmers, but it connects me with water in an intimate way.
We may all be helpless in the face of changing wind patterns and ocean currents. We can’t stop the glaciers from melting or save the drowning polar bears. Yet
in that simple act of holding up a pot to capture drinking water that was about to run down the drain and into the sewage system, I feel that I am helping to bring about a change. I sense a connection with ancients who made clay pots to hold rainwater for the dry season and the farmers in southern California who did not plant this year because there would be no water for their crops.
Global warming will continue even if we all give up our cars and shut down the world’s coal plants tomorrow. It’s too late to reverse it. But that does not mean we can’t do anything positive. We have the choice of either skulking around gloomily and closing our eyes to what alarms us, or moving in our own varied ways in a sensible direction. My little shower ritual makes me feel good, and I don’t apologize for that.
Myriad such personal actions, together, play a role similar to that of micronutrients that work in the soil to make new plant life possible. They prepare the way for essential larger-scale improvements. It does appear that alarm about the fast pace of global warming and recent devastating natural events has opened the way.
When small creative acts by a few individuals can set the ball rolling, a bigger change may come about with surprising ease. Just a few years ago my grandson and some of his college buddies were rebuilding old school buses to drive across the country fueled by grease collected from fast-food restaurants. Really, I said. Really? What an adventuresome thing to try. Who knew that by now restaurant grease would be a prized commodity and at some restaurants would be secured with padlocks to guard it against thieves.
Or take plastic bags. You practically had to fight to keep sales clerks from packing everything into them. Now in San Francisco large grocery stores are no longer permitted to use them, so I find I sometimes have to ask for one. I save them and reuse them because they’re scarce. Like Europeans, we are beginning to carry string bags in our backpacks and purses.
A great example of the power of small individual actions combining to major effect is Mono Lake. It’s alive and well today because about 30 years ago a young biologist, David Gaines, and a few allies pointed out that if every toilet in Los Angeles had a brick in its tank, the city would have no need to draw water from the creek feeding the lake.
Now, of course, ultra-low toilets are not only available, they’re required and also economical.
In this magazine we report on many creative and satisfying ways people are working to restore broken links between us and other creatures. At Mori Point in San Mateo County, an endangered red-legged frog, an endangered snake, and a lot of hikers and bicyclists are enjoying a coastal park without interfering with one another (except, of course, that the frog is food for the snake). Los Angeles, taking a cue from Portland, Oregon, is replacing some impervious concrete with paving that lets water be absorbed into the ground rather than pour into storm sewers (see next issue). In Orange County, treated wastewater is being recycled into drinking water.
In the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, Captain Ronn Patterson steers his yacht Delphinus into a wilderness few have ever seen and talks about it as the greatest habitat in California--because of water. Some people who take his trip talk about “our water, their water,” he says. “What I try to get across is it’s our water. . . . For me it all starts with water. It all starts with a drop.” The drop in the shower that flows to the sewer or the geranium pots, and to the bays, our Delta, the ocean. As air is indivisible, so, essentially, is water. Its power can tear apart, and it also can bring everything together.