The Forest Foundation, Inc.

Last night, was Durham’s public forum on the current drought. During the event some profound ideas surfaced that may be considered core to our global environmental dilemmas. The crowd was large, close to 400, and elite, both the panel, comprised some of our State’s brightest stars in the environmental field, and the audience, which consisted of some of the highly competitive, greener than green progressive community. As beautiful as we are in living our lives, it is apparent we are still learning, and importantly, sharing, which is awesome.

What we learned is that the drought is not the worst drought in recorded history(no comfort in this fact given our fixation on rapid growth coupled with a profound misunderstanding of quality of life and inability to measure important values, like green space), and that the drought was compounded by one of the hottest years in the last century (an important climate change connection as models predict that we will continue to warm and what rain we get will fall quickly in Biblical torrents). We also learned that if and when we do run out, which according to models is of low probability, that the City has determined that railing water in by train is prohibitively expensive, and thus we will be turned over to the vagaries of the free market to buy bottled water from a retailer near you. Boy will that be expensive and you have got to wonder how that fact will affect growth. Plans exist to share water amongst the local municipalities and to increase storage capacity as well as modernize our delivery system. One thing they did miss is that the quality of water is likely to diminish as we approach the bottom of the reservoir and how that would both increase cost and reduce quality of the delivered water. But other than that, all bases were well covered by this highly productive and desperately needed event. Kudos for Duke’s NSOE for hosting it at the beautiful Duke Gardens in its vaulted, wood framed meeting room.

However, what came out of the forum that was most profound was when one of our community members got up and proposed that the folks who use wells, including herself, be placed on meters, correctly believing that wasting groundwater was wasting a public good. The response from the City was that this was a property rights issue, to which I turned to a friend and said “figment of our imagination.”

Concepts of property rights go way back to the Code of Hammurabi, Solon the Great and the Bible, with passages replete with reference to land ownership. Rights to property are the basis of the evolution of democratic ideals and reformation and are captured in our Constitution. Fundamentality, our perception of owning land and God granted rights to do with it as we please, are core to our economic system And being American. But if indeed granted by our Creator, you have got to know “he” is royally pissed off, as we have, through our externalities and greed, reeked havoc on our planet’s bounty, pushing it’s ecological systems to the brink of collapse, and our civilization.

It would seem that our perception and our laws need drastic shifting if we are to save our planet and ourselves. This shift has to be one of flipping the concept of “rights” for “responsibilities.” It is absolute that we are transient beings on this planet, and secondary to the primacy of the Creation. Our lives, as brilliantly evolved and pinnacle as we may think, are mere blinks of the eye in geologic time. Many have used the Biblical metaphor of “stewards,” which contains the wonderful concept of care for future generations, yet still has attached a granted or endowed nature. A more humble approach has been exposed by great writers, like Thomas Berry, Aldo Leopold and Wendell Berry, that more than stewards, we are responsible for the land and must learn its unique character, its position to other pieces of land, it’s connection (interestingly often through the hydrological cycle), and must honor its “sense of place.”

This is much more than a simple stewardship, and from this honoring of the land, we accrue rights, very limited rights. Land must be treated as a trust, and if done so with understanding of this concept, it may fundamentally reverberate to reform our whole economic system, including our run-away corporate culture that is the spearhead of our creative destruction.

It was half way through the question and answer period that a lady from the Southern Environmental Law Center reminded us that water is not just a concern for human consumption, but indeed all the animals, plants and microbes in the watershed and in the streams and that lakes rely on it for their very existence. The best moment was when an African American woman, who stated she had lived in New Orleans and was very familiar with baptism by water, told us that our efforts at conservation would be limited until we learned to respect and honor water. I wondered what the scientists thought of that perspective?