Rooted in Water

Sarah Kelly

Flowing

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• MyStory2009

Growing up listening to waves crashing and loons calling, I discovered and nurtured my bond to the Earth. My connection with land has always been intertwined with water. All of my experiences with it have tapped me into the rhythms of our planet.

Water feeds the vegetables and animals that feed us, it nourishes forests and its cycle acts as the pulse of life on Earth. With the fluidity of its form, water provides many of our connections to the land. It trickles down to replenish groundwater, and percolates up mountains to precipitate into valleys.

When we contaminate water, land becomes poisonous, vegetables toxic, rainwater acidic, and the cycle of life becomes the cycle of death. I coordinate a community media project on confronting water scarcity in the Rio Santiago watershed in Guadalajara, Mexico. The Rio Santiago is one of the most polluted rivers in the word, receiving much of Guadalajara's untreated industrial and human effluent.

I am struck by how a river, providing a green band of life along its path to the sea, can become an instrument of death. In Guadalajara, however, I find hope in the connection of the people to the land and their grassroots effort to protect the water running through it, despite the seeming hopelessness of the situation. They celebrate life by organizing to protect it, to become more numerous and powerful than those who destroy. Movements like these to protect our land have deep and strong roots; eventually, we will prevail.