Water protectors, fossil fuel pipelines, the rights of nature, facts, conflicts of interest, water sprites & deities and the mystery & magic of our world
The harbinger of all life, water cycles from our seas and estuaries to become the clouds that shade us and are the bringers of the rain. The rains captured in our oceans, seas, rivers, lakes and ponds – our containers for the primal life force we call water – feed our plants and quench our thirst nourishing all life on Earth. With its fluid nature, it assumes many forms, and given the opportunity, will expand and flow outside its limitations. It will evaporate, disappearing from our view.
Everchanging and flowing it sustains life physically and spiritually.
Natural springs and wells have been imbued with magical properties. Rivers have been the dividing line between worlds in ancient mythologies. Waterways and water itself have been the source of both spiritual and physical transformation like the womb to the world – your mother broke water before you were born. Bodies of water from ponds to oceans are believed to be the dwelling spaces of deities and other supernatural beings in various traditions. This is water, and it is entitled to your reverence and respect.
Oshun is an Orisha – an important river deity that reflects one of the manifestations of the Yorùbá Supreme Being in the Ifá oral tradition and Yoruba-based religions of West Africa. She is the patron saint of the Osun River in Nigeria, bearing her name. Devotees perform ceremonies and leave offerings to her at freshwater streams, rivers and canals. Painting by artist: Bar Davi
Water is entitled to your reverence.
Soft and quiet, water is entitled to reverence. Not because it has been used by our ancestors in rituals of purification or mythology or worship throughout the world, but instead, because it is the fluid that moves life through us and other beings on this planet. In the past, cultures across the globe venerated water. Still today, some do. Many Indigenous people recognize the spirit and life of water. They dance in it and make offerings to it, and stand up to those who would poison it.
Water Protectors
We have seen again and again, how including in the first two decades of the 21st century, settlers would attempt to take away land and destroy the environment. Water itself was used against protesters by police in their fight for the human right to clean water, in the case of the Indigenous people, to their land and in the case of water to its own health and wellbeing.
Floris White Bull, Brave Heart Woman, Standing Rock Hunkpapa Lakota Floris Ptesáŋ Huŋká was held in one of the cages used to confine water protectors and the number 151 was marked on her forearm in permanent marker. Shane Balkowitsch says that when she came to his studio for this project, she thought it was important to have that number written on her arm again even though it would not appear in the portrait. It was her way of remembering her ordeal and to never forget how she was treated. [Photo Credit: Shane Balkowitsch]
Fossil fuel pipelines
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe fought the controversial Keystone pipeline as water protectors. Thousands of water protectors from around the world came in peace to Stand with Standing Rock against the Energy Transfer Partners Company to defend their land and to protect the aquifers and the water of the Missouri River from the oil pipeline. Some people called it a protest, but it was a defence of their rights guaranteed through treaties. This was the single largest gathering of Indigenous Americans in 100 years. This project would potentially pollute groundwater that feeds the whole – the forests and people. Economic interests were fighting hard against the people – not just indigenous people but everyone who wants clean water and recognizes that we must make radical changes in how we live.
Photo Credit: Shane Balkowitch
210,000 gallons of oil leaked from the Keystone Pipeline in South Dakota in 2017, and the Keystone 1 Pipeline leaked about 383,040 gallons of oil impacting almost 5 acres in North Dakota in 2019. Only recently, the company that underwent name changes would finally lay down their arms in 2021. One battle fought and won, but that is not the end of the opposition to pipelines and the damage they cause.
Pipeline-3
Instead, Pipeline-3, as it has become known, continues on another path, in another location. Pipeline-3 is pumping tar sands oil through North America and polluting the Earth right now. This year an aquifer near the Clearbrook terminal ruptured during construction. The DNR fined Enbridge a $3.3 million fine. Other sites along the pipeline are under investigation, thirty in total, two potentially punctured aquifers and twenty-eight spills caused by drilling.
The project encompassed rebuilding it and abandoning some of the older parts of the pipeline. The current administration at the federal level in the US supports this project, even though it claims to want to make changes that support solutions to slow climate change. This carbon-producing fossil fuel project risks polluting and contaminating land in Anishinaabe territories and the Riverhead of the Mississippi River.
Like other pipeline projects, this project violates treaties with indigenous peoples. Building it required illegal access to lands and, making it functional jeopardizes water and land. Several state agencies raised environmental concerns or opposed the plan. Nevertheless, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission decided to grant the certificate of need to Enbridge for their proposed Line 3 project. For the most part, Enbridge’s controversial Line 3 replacement pipeline is complete now and is actively transporting Canadian tar sands crude oil across northern Minnesota to Superior, Wisconsin.
Rights of Nature
Although operational, Pipeline-3 opposition remains. One of several lawsuits opposing its operation is worth noting. A lawsuit by the White Earth Band of Ojibwe against the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources names a sacred water plant – manoomin, the Ojibwes’ name for a wild rice plant, as one of the plaintiffs.
Here nature is asserting its rights beyond that as human property and its right to clean water. The complaint against Minnesota’s DNR calls to task the failure of the organization to protect the state’s freshwater supply – it allowed Calgary-based Enbridge to pump up to 5 billion gallons of groundwater from construction trenches during a drought violating the rights of the manoomin plant to thrive in its natural habitat.
This is the second case brought to any court in the US as a rights of nature case involving wetlands and water. The first was earlier this year in Florida. In November 2020, Orange county voters home to theme parks and to biologically diverse wetlands voted to grant rights to the Econlockhatchee and Wekiva Rivers. This gives the county’s waterways the –
“right to exist, flow, to be protected against pollution, and to maintain a healthy ecosystem.”
The right to clean water is also a part of the amendment to the county charter. It passed with ease with more than 500,000 people voting yes.
In April of 2021, the first enforcement case under the new law was filed against a development company that wanted to eliminate over one hundred acres of wetlands and waterways in the county. Organizers are now trying to get an amendment enacted to the state constitution in Florida to recognize the right to clean water and the rights of nature to all of Florida’s waterways.
Water Facts
[Earth]
The body that is our planet, our Earth, is made mostly of water. Approximately 71 per cent of the Earth’s surface is covered in water, with our oceans holding about 96.5 per cent of it. The average human body is approximately 60 per cent water. Although, it can range between 45 and 75 per cent based on a variety of factors.
[our bodies]
Some known scientific facts are that:
- The brain and heart are composed of 73% water.
- The lungs are about 83% water.
- The skin contains 64% water.
- The muscles and kidneys are 79% water.
- The bones are 31% water.
Earth Facts Citation: H.H. Mitchell, Journal of Biological Chemistry 158
Pipeline and Oil facts:
- Tar sands oil is incredibly difficult to clean up in the event of a spill. The oil transported in the pipeline is thicker and stickier than standard crude oil, requiring it to be combined with hazardous materials to transfer it through the pipeline and making it more difficult to clean up. (CNN)
- The Tar sands oil the pipeline transports are particularly damaging, releasing 17% more carbon dioxide emissions than standard crude oil. (Gizmodo)
Historically, pipelines are unsound with thousands of accidents reported every year with explosions, leaks, environmental damage and people being killed due to them. They are mostly located in the midwest of the US but aren’t limited to that area. A pipeline owned by Plains All American burst near Santa Barbara, California, spilling more than 100,000 gallons of oil with much of it sliding into a storm drain and flowing into the Pacific Ocean killing and injuring hundreds of birds, sea lions and other animals. Real cases are too numerous to list. Pipelines aren’t the only threats around the world. Any means of extracting oil and transporting it poses a great risk to the environment.
This bird, an oil-covered Guillimot shown here as an example of the damage wildlife is suffering at the hands of human beings. This image is from an offshore oil spill in West Wales in 1996. Accidents are happening regularly all over the world.
Conflict of interests and greed
From the Global Witness website, a screenshot from an article on the influx of oil cash to fund police and government agencies.
Police have accepted funding from these special interest corporations all over the country. These corporate funders seek to criminalize the rights to defend territory, to criminalize protest and to silence dissent – all of which are human rights violations. Police have used aggressive techniques against defenders: pepper spray, shooting rubber bullets, using fire hoses to deliver water with much the same force and volume as water cannons, and police attack dogs. In June 2021, a Department of Homeland Security helicopter came dangerously low, threatening defenders and Long Range Acoustic Devices that can damage hearing were used in an attempt to disperse crowds.
Questions
Will human beings transcend their own self-interests to nurture the life-giving force of water? Can a police officer disobey orders on moral grounds? Will human beings stop fighting at the behest of special interests who are using money to coerce others? Can these organizations act for the greater good of the people with the thought of future generations?
Water sprites & deities and the mystery & magic of our world
My intention when I started to write this was to delve into the mystery and story of water sprites and water deities. As a means of connecting to and remembering our true nature – that we are a part of nature and not separate from it. To simply remember the wonder and mystery of nature without having to name it.
In the traditional stories, there is a kind of poetry, a kind of connection to nature either where water is a deity itself or home to them and other supernatural beings. When this connection is in our consciousness daily as a regular part of life, we remember its importance. But what has happened by focusing away from the mystery and unknown aspects of nature – in this case, water – without dissecting it in a laboratory has hurt the body we know as Earth.
Those who feel the need to define and name everything will say that these beings were simply created to help people make sense of the world. Whilst that may or may not be true – the stories, the mythology, and the fantasy of it all persist throughout the ages and in all cultures.
Do water sprites exist? Do water deities exist? Are the waterways themselves deities? Is each molecule a spiritual being? Does it really matter?
Water sprites and deities and the like might exist. We simply don’t know. We don’t have all the tools to measure everything in the realm of existence. We don’t have all the answers, even though we can be so arrogant to think we do. Whether or not they exist is irrelevant. The real need is a shift in paradigm, a way of being and thinking from –
How I can use this or that from nature? to – How can we live in harmony with this or that?
It’s heartbreaking when we recognize how much damage we have done in such a short time on Earth to waterways and other lifeforms. We are nature, we are not separate and it’s time we stopped acting like we are somehow special and unique. The ego is meant for self-protection but we’re more than that. It wasn’t meant to harm the planet.
Water deserves your reverence and respect.
All Water is Holy Water was originally published in Mindful Soul Center magazine on 7 Dec 2021 Amy M Adams
Pollution, Social Issues, Spirituality, Violence, Volume Two, Issue No. 4