permaculture

[Patrick <forgeadams@yahoo.com>]

http://takeourjobs.org/
TAKE OUR JOBS
                  There are  two issues facing our 
nation--high unemployment and undocumented people in the  
workforce--that many Americans believe are related.
                   Missing from the debate on both 
issues  is an honest recognition that the food we all eat - at home, in 
restaurants and  workplace cafeterias (including those in the Capitol) -
 comes to us from the  labor of undocumented farm workers.
                  Agriculture in
 the United States is dependent on an   immigrant workforce. 
Three-quarters of all crop workers working in   American agriculture 
were born outside the United States. According to   government 
statistics, since the late 1990s, at least 50% of the crop   workers 
have not been authorized to work legally in the United States. 
                  We are a nation in denial about our
 food  supply. As a result the UFW  has initiated the "Take Our Jobs"  
campaign.
                  Farm workers are ready to welcome 
citizens and legal residents who wish to   replace them in the field. We
 will use our knowledge and staff to help connect   the unemployed with 
farm employers. Just fill out the form to the right and   continue on to
 the request for job application.


                    

                  
                  
                    




      
>From raincascadia@yahoo.com  Sat Jul 10 23:53:44 2010
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From: Rain Tenaqiya <raincascadia@yahoo.com>
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Subject: [permaculture] California land and house available
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We live on 800 acres of collectively-owned land with nine other shareholder=
s, each having a ten acre lease, about six miles outside of Ukiah, Californ=
ia, in Zone 9.=A0 One of these shares is for sale and has a four bedroom, p=
assive solar, off-grid house with a garden and fruit trees, plus a pond.=A0=
 It is going for around $300,000.=A0 We are a loose community based on stew=
ardship for the land, and there is another permaculture-oriented household =
in addition to ours, with others at various points along the way.=A0 We are=
 looking for younger (not Boomers) folks to buy the share, as most everyone=
 else is exactly 58.=A0 Please send me an email if you are interested.
=A0
Rain=0A=0A=0A      
>From lakinroe@silcom.com  Sun Jul 11 11:30:33 2010
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Subject: [permaculture] Water Negotiator Aaron Wolf Spreads Liquid
 Hope/Jordan River and its dual role as "a flashpoint and a vehicle for
 dialogue
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hi everyone
    here is a great article on water in the middle east, I have 
provided to version an excerpt and full article below ,
wes
Water Negotiator Aaron Wolf Spreads Liquid Hope
Water-more than money, oil, or guns-is the one resource that could 
finally get bitter enemies to broker peace
July-August 2009
by Tom Jacobs, from Miller-McCune 

http://www.utne.com/Politics/Water-War-Peace-Conflict-Negotiations-Hope.aspx


In the early '90s, as Aaron Wolf was finishing his doctoral 
dissertation, the Madrid Middle East peace process was just getting 
under way. The two sides decided to tackle five sets of regional 
issues, including the equitable division of water resources. As a 
budding expert on the subject-his research focused on the Jordan 
River and its dual role as "a flashpoint and a vehicle for 
dialogue"-Wolf agreed to advise the U.S. team designing the talks.


Fifteen years later, one remnant of that failed attempt at 
Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking remains: the water negotiations. 
"They still go on," Wolf says. "The two sides have cooperative 
projects. In the second intifada, when they realized how much 
violence there was going to be, they took out a joint advertisement 
asking both sides to try to protect the water infrastructure."

The lessons of that enduring success have stayed with Wolf as he has 
pursued a remarkable dual career as an Oregon State University (OSU) 
scholar studying water-resource issues and a hands-on mediator of 
water disputes around the world. Water, he has come to understand, is 
so central to the human experience that it can help even bitter 
enemies find common purpose.

"That's what's so heartening about this," the gentle geoscientist 
says. "Water can be used as a means for people of different 
ideological backgrounds to talk about a shared vision of the future."

Wolf's calling takes him all over the world, wherever bodies of 
water-usually rivers-are shared by two or more countries. A dam built 
upstream, on one side of the border, will affect the flow of water on 
the other side. Whose needs are more important? Is generating 
electricity the priority? What about pollution?
"Everywhere you find real tension," he says, "you'll also find shared rivers."

Like a stream meandering from the mountains to the marshlands, Wolf's 
work also courses through a wide variety of disciplines. Facilitating 
water-resource disputes requires a strong working knowledge of 
geography, geology, ecology, politics, diplomacy, and-at least the 
way Wolf handles disputes-spirituality.
"Aaron has shifted the way the whole world thinks about water," says 
Anthony Turton, a political scientist and expert on transboundary 
water resources management. Wolf, a professor at OSU's department of 
geosciences, founded and directs a postgraduate program in which 
economists, engineers, and ecologists add water-conflict resolution 
to their skill sets. He developed and coordinates the Transboundary 
Freshwater Dispute Database, a compilation of more than 400 
water-related treaties accompanied by maps, negotiating notes, 
background materials, and related news stories.

The database demonstrates that while violent conflicts over water are 
rare, peaceful interactions abound. "We are finding that water, 
rather than being the driver of conflict, is the one resource that 
unites people. It is simply too important to fight over," Turton says.

Wolf also cofounded and directs the Universities Partnership for 
Transboundary Waters, a consortium of colleagues at 17 educational 
institutions located around the world. Its goal is to develop a new 
generation of water-conflict experts based on every continent who can 
provide one another with a community of support.



"Aaron's work addresses what is probably going to be the biggest 
recurring policy issue for the next 50 years," says Sherman Bloomer, 
dean of the OSU College of Science. "It's one of the very best things 
that has happened at Oregon State at the time I've been here."

Wolf grew up in a desert-two deserts, actually. Born in 
prerevolutionary Iran, where his father taught English literature, he 
spent part of his childhood in California and part in Israel, where 
his family relocated to honor what he calls their "Zionist ideals."

Moving from the Middle East halfway across the world and then back 
again must have been jarring, but what ultimately impressed Wolf most 
were the similarities of his two homelands. Both California and 
Israel were, and are, arid places. Water-where to get it, how to 
conserve it, and what parties are challenging one another for it-was 
an urgent topic of discussion in each of the societies.
As he absorbed a love of learning and a sense of spiritual mission 
from his family, Wolf developed an awareness of water as a 
life-giving commodity. His interest in natural resources and how they 
are used was refined at San Francisco State University, where he 
earned a bachelor's degree in geography and resource management.

Wolf was drafted into the Israeli army (he holds both American and 
Israeli citizenship), serving in Lebanon and on the front lines of 
the first Palestinian uprising. "That's when I got really interested 
in conflict resolution," he says. "When you're in uniform, you 
realize there's got to be a better way." After completing his 
military obligation, he moved back to the United States, earning a 
master's degree in water resources management and a doctorate in land 
resources.
After finishing his work with the State Department for the Madrid 
peace conference, Wolf began his academic career at the University of 
Alabama. "They get 60 or 70 inches of rain a year," he says, "but 
there is still tension [over water] between Alabama, Florida, and 
Georgia. I did a lot of thinking conceptually about what happens 
within a watershed. What are the dynamics?"
His attempts to apply scientific knowledge to political and 
diplomatic disputes were noticed by Oregon State officials, who hired 
him to join the faculty in 1998. "Doing effective science requires 
finding partners in places other than your own discipline, if you 
want that science to have any effect," Bloomer says. "A great deal of 
the point of doing the science is to provide input that will lead to 
sound policy decisions."

As Wolf tells it, his transition from academic observer to 
participant in negotiations occurred gradually: "You'd have a 
conference that would turn into a workshop that would turn into a 
facilitation." The first international dispute he formally mediated 
involved the Salween River, a body of water shared by China, Burma, 
and Thailand.


"All three countries have development plans, and no two sets of plans 
are compatible," Wolf explains. "There is lots of political tension. 
China has huge plans for dams all through the southern part of the 
country, which are the headwaters of a lot of Asia's rivers. There 
won't be enough water for everybody's needs, that's for sure."

He has also facilitated talks among the former Soviet nations of 
Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia-no small feat, given that the latter 
two are mortal enemies. "[We] were able to craft a way where 
Azerbaijan and Georgia talked to each other and Armenia and Georgia 
talked to each other," he says. "They were able to develop a process 
where they coordinated when they couldn't collaborate."

Wolf was searching for better catalysts for compromise when, in 2002, 
he realized what he was missing.
"I was having a conversation with someone at the World Bank who is 
involved in water conflicts and also has a deep spiritual life," he 
says. "We were talking about a set of images I use in negotiations. I 
have a visual of the watershed with the political boundaries on it 
and one with the political boundaries taken off. [When you remove the 
boundaries] suddenly everything looks very different. He told me, 
'That looks like an analog for spiritual transformation.'

"For me, that was an 'aha' moment. People in an academic or 
scientific context often are reluctant to think about something as 
ephemeral as spirituality. [In the Western world] we separated out 
rationality from spirituality during the Enlightenment. In a lot of 
the world where I work, there is no distinction between the two. 
They're one integrated whole."

Wolf realized that the standard Western model of conflict resolution 
he was using was inadequate, if not irrelevant. "Whenever there are 
attempts to resolve real conflict, where there is deep pain or anger, 
there are transformative moments-profound shifts in thinking," Wolf 
says. "You know it when it happens, and it isn't about rationality at 
all. . . . I started asking, 'How can you focus in on that moment of 
transformation?'

"Well, who thinks about transformation in a systematic way? The 
spiritual community does. There are people who have spent a lot of 
time thinking about conflict and anger and how to transform them into 
more peaceful ways of thinking. We've never tapped into that 
knowledge in the conflict-resolution world."
Excited by the revelation, Wolf arranged a 2004 meeting in Vatican 
City between spiritual leaders and water-conflict negotiators. It was 
not a success; the disconnect between participants was all too 
evident. "I started to understand that there was room for dialogue, 
but it would take a lot more time," he says. "Fortunately, being an 
academic, I had a sabbatical immediately afterward, so I got to spend 
the following year studying spiritual transformation in the Middle 
East and Southeast Asia and specifically think about how it might 
apply to conflict management.

"I was in Israel; I spent time traveling to Jordan and Egypt. I 
studied the Jewish Kabbalah and a bit on Sufism and Christian 
[mystical] traditions. I then spent a summer in Thailand learning 
from a Buddhist monk who conducts negotiations over timber issues. 
That's where it really came together for me. I had a chance to look 
deeply at these models and think about how you can do conflict 
resolution better with these understandings."

Among the tools Wolf has incorporated in his conflict-management 
training is an understanding of the hierarchy of human needs as 
articulated by the psychologist Abraham Maslow. "The idea is that 
there are four categories of needs-physical, emotional, intellectual, 
and spiritual-and they are best achieved in some kind of sequence," 
Wolf says. "Maslow popularized this concept in the West, but it can 
be found in all spiritual traditions. My training workshops in 
conflict resolution are now structured to go through those different 
levels."

The importance of doing so is illustrated in the ongoing Middle 
Eastern talks, which Wolf still helps facilitate from time to time. 
"When Israelis and Palestinians are talking to each other about water 
resources, Palestinians are talking about the need for water on a 
physical level," he says. "In the Gaza Strip, people literally don't 
have enough water for their basic human needs. Water is also an 
emotional issue for them; it's a representation of the Israeli 
occupation. It's controlled by somebody else.

"In Israel, nobody is dying of thirst. What's more, they're largely 
in control of their own aquatic destiny. With their physical and 
emotional needs met, they think of water in intellectual terms. How 
much do we use in agriculture as opposed to for residential use? How 
much do we desalinate, and at what price?
Wolf has tried to emphasize "that everybody's basic human needs must 
be taken care of, and whatever emotional scars they have about the 
past need to be addressed. Then you can move it onto an intellectual 
level."

Wolf starts negotiations by asking everyone to tell stories that 
describe their relationship to the source of water in question-what 
it means to them. "At the end of the introductions, instead of having 
established a hierarchy, the people notice their commonalities with 
the others in the room," he says. He also stresses the need for 
adversaries to genuinely listen to one another. "Deep listening is in 
every spiritual tradition, but we in the West do it so badly," he 
says. "I was told this joke: In America, what's the opposite of 
speaking? Waiting to speak!"

Wolf can't talk in specifics about the negotiations he has overseen 
in recent years; most are ongoing, and coming to terms on a water 
treaty can take 10, even 20 years. He expects he will be returning to 
the Middle East and Southeast Asia, where he's been working a lot 
recently. "There's a lot of demand on resources in that area. You 
want to encourage development for poverty alleviation, but you don't 
want to make the same mistakes we've made with some of our big dams," 
he says.

With the world's population growing and rainfall patterns shifting 
due to climate change, Wolf's general glass-half-full attitude surely 
will be tested in coming decades. "Two and one-half million to five 
million people die every year because of a lack of access to safe, 
clean water," he says. "That's on the same level of magnitude as AIDS 
or malaria. It's a huge catastrophe now, and climate change will 
beget more variability in the hydrologic cycle, including longer 
droughts and bigger floods."

On the other hand, Wolf notes that "all spiritual traditions-not just 
[those] in the religions that come out of the desert-seem to tap into 
water as healing, soothing, and cleansing." This shared sense of 
sacredness gives him hope, as does the resilience of many water 
agreements. "India and Pakistan have a water treaty that has survived 
since 1960-through two wars," he says. "In the middle of one of the 
wars, India made payments to Pakistan as part of its treaty 
obligations."
"Water hits us at a profoundly different level than other resources," 
he says. "People are willing to do horrible things to each other. 
What they seem not willing to do is turn off each other's water."

Excerpted from Miller-McCune (Jan.-Feb. 2009), a solutions-minded 
magazine published by the Miller-McCune Center for Research, Media, 
and Public Policy

FULL ARTICLE
WONKING CLASS HERO
December 29, 2008
The Man Who Bridges Troubled Waters
Aaron Wolf mediates disputes, helping enemies realize that no one 
deserves to have the water shut off.
By Tom Jacobs
http://www.miller-mccune.com/politics/the-man-who-bridges-troubled-waters-4031/

Comments (2) | PRINT | E-MAIL

Oregon State University's Aaron Wolf, a mediator of water disputes, 
standing in Foster Lake in Foster, Ore. (Daniel Root)

In 1991, as Aaron Wolf was finishing his doctoral dissertation, the 
Madrid Middle East peace process was just getting under way. The two 
sides decided to tackle five sets of regional issues, including the 
equitable division of water resources. As a budding expert on the 
subject - his research focused on the Jordan River and its dual role 
as "a flashpoint and a vehicle for dialogue" - Wolf agreed to advise 
the U.S. team designing the talks.
Fifteen years later, one remnant of that failed attempt at 
Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking remains: the water negotiations. 
"They still go on," Wolf says. "The two sides have cooperative 
projects. In the second intifada, when they realized how much 
violence there was going to be, they took out a joint advertisement 
asking both sides to try to protect the water infrastructure."
The lessons of that enduring success have stayed with Wolf as he has 
pursued his remarkable dual career, as

an Oregon State University scholar studying water-resource issues and 
a hands-on mediator of water disputes around the world. Water, he has 
come to understand, is so central to the human experience that it can 
help even bitter enemies find common purpose.
"That's what's so heartening about this," the gentle geoscientist 
says. "Water can be used as a means for people of different 
ideological backgrounds to talk about a shared vision of the future."
Wolf's calling takes him all over the world, wherever bodies of water 
- usually rivers - are shared by two or more countries. A dam built 
upstream, on one side of the border, will affect the flow of water 
downstream on the other side; whose needs are more important? Is 
generating electricity the priority? What about pollution?
"Everywhere you find real tension," he says, "you'll also find shared rivers."
"Aaron has shifted the way the whole world thinks about water," says 
Anthony Turton, an expert on water management at South Africa's 
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. "His database at OSU 
is highly cited and is regarded as being the most authoritative. That 
database shows that violent conflict over water is rare but peaceful 
interactions are many.

"We are finding that water, rather than being the driver of conflict, 
is the one resource that unites people. It is simply too important to 
fight over."
Like a stream meandering from the mountains to the marshlands, Wolf's 
work courses through a wide variety of disciplines. Facilitating 
water-resource disputes requires a strong working knowledge of 
geography, geology, ecology, politics, diplomacy and - at least the 
way Wolf handles the disputes - spirituality.

A professor at OSU's Department of Geosciences, Wolf founded and 
directs a postgraduate program in which budding economists, engineers 
and ecologists add water-conflict resolution to their skill sets. He 
developed and coordinates the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute 
Database, a massive compilation of more than 400 water-related 
treaties accompanied by maps, negotiating notes, background materials 
and related news stories.
In addition, he co-founded and directs the Universities Partnership 
for Transboundary Waters, a consortium of like-minded colleagues at 
10 educational institutions located around the world. Its goal is to 
develop a new generation of water-conflict experts based on every 
continent who can provide one another with "a community of support as 
they work in these difficult settings."

"Aaron's work addresses what is probably going to be the biggest 
recurring policy issue for the next 50 years," says Sherman Bloomer, 
dean of the OSU College of Science. "It's one of the very best things 
that has happened at Oregon State at the time I've been here."
Wolf grew up in a desert. Two deserts, actually. Born in 
pre-revolutionary Iran, where his father taught English literature, 
he spent part of his childhood in California and part in Israel, 
where his family relocated to honor what he calls their "Zionist 
ideals."
Moving from the Middle East halfway across the world and back again 
must have been jarring, but what ultimately impressed Wolf were the 
commonalities of his two homelands. Both California and Israel were, 
and are, arid places. Water - where to get it, how to conserve it and 
who is challenging one another for it - was an urgent topic of 
discussion in both societies.

As he absorbed a love of learning and sense of spiritual mission from 
his family, Wolf developed an awareness of water as a life-giving 
commodity. His interest in natural resources and how they are used 
was refined at San Francisco State University, where he earned a 
bachelor's degree in geography.
Wolf was drafted into the Israeli army (he holds both American and 
Israeli citizenship), serving in Lebanon and on the front lines of 
the first Palestinian uprising. "That's when I got really interested 
in conflict resolution," he says. "When you're

in uniform, you realize there's got to be a better way." After 
completing his military obligation, he moved back to the U.S., 
earning a master's degree in water resource management and a 
doctorate in land resources from the University of Wisconsin.
After finishing his work with the State Department for the Madrid 
peace conference, Wolf began his academic career at the University of 
Alabama. "They get 60 or 70 inches of rain a year," he notes, "but 
there is still tension between Alabama, Florida and Georgia (over 
water). I did a lot of thinking conceptually about what happens 
within a watershed. What are the dynamics?"
His attempts to apply scientific knowledge to political and 
diplomatic disputes were noticed by officials at Oregon State, who 
hired him to join the faculty in 1998. "Doing effective science 
requires finding partners in places other than your own discipline, 
if you want that science to have any effect," OSU science dean 
Bloomer says. "You've got to have people who understand how to take 
science and introduce it into the policy arena. That is particularly 
true of water. A great deal of the point of doing the science is to 
provide input that will lead to sound policy decisions."
As Wolf tells it, his transition from academic observer to 
participant in negotiations occurred gradually: "You'd have a 
conference that would turn into a workshop that would turn into a 
facilitation." The first dispute he formally mediated involved the 
Salween River, a body of water shared by China, Burma and Thailand.
"All three countries have development plans, and no two sets of plans 
are compatible," he explains. "There is lots of political tension. 
China has huge plans for dams all through the southern part of the 
country, which are the headwaters of a lot of Asia's rivers. There 
won't be enough water for everybody's needs, that's for sure."
He has also facilitated talks between the former Soviet nations of 
Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia - no small feat, given that the 
latter two nations are mortal enemies. "I and some other folks were 
able to craft a way where Azerbaijan and Georgia talked to each other 
and Armenia and Georgia talked to each other," he says. "They were 
able to develop a process where they coordinated when they couldn't 
collaborate."
Wolf was searching for better catalysts for compromise when, in 2002, 
he realized what he was missing.

"I was having a conversation with someone at the World Bank who is 
involved in water conflicts and also has a deep spiritual life," he 
says. "We were talking about a set of images I use in negotiations. I 
have a visual of the watershed with the political boundaries on it 
and one with the political boundaries taken off. (When you remove the 
boundaries) suddenly everything looks very different. He told me, 
'That looks like an analog for spiritual trans

formation.'
"For me, that was an 'aha' moment. People

in an academic or scientific context often have a reluctance to think 
about something as ephemeral as spirituality. We in (the Western 
world) separated out rationality from spirituality during the 
Enlightenment. In a lot of the world where I work, there is no 
distinction between the two. They're one integrated whole."
Suddenly, Wolf realized the standard Western model of conflict 
resolution he was using was inadequate, if not irrelevant.
"Whenever there are attempts to resolve real conflict, where there is 
deep pain or anger, there are transformative moments -profound

shifts in thinking," Wolf says. "You know it when it happens, and it 
isn't about rationality at all. It's about sudden transformation. I 
would see this over and over again, where everybody was suddenly 
thinking profoundly differently. I started asking, 'How can you focus 
in on that moment of transformation?'
"Well, who thinks about transformation in a systematic way? The 
spiritual community does. There are people who have spent a lot of 
time thinking about conflict and anger and how to transform them into 
more peaceful ways of thinking. We've never tapped into that 
knowledge in the conflict-resolution world."
Excited by the revelation, Wolf arranged a 2004 meeting in Vatican 
City between spiritual leaders and water-conflict negotiators. It was 
not, in his mind, a success; the disconnect between the participants 
was all too evident. "From that meeting, I started to understand 
there was room for dialogue, but it would take a lot more time," he 
says. "Fortunately, being an academic, I had a sabbatical immediately 
afterwards, so I got to spend the following year studying spiritual 
transformation in the Middle East and Southeast Asia and specifically 
think about how it might apply to conflict management.
"I was in Israel; I spent time traveling to

Jordan and Egypt. I studied the Jewish Kabbalah and a bit on Sufism 
and Christian (mystical) traditions. I then spent a summer in 
Thailand learning from a Buddhist monk who conducts negotiations over 
timber issues. That's where it really came together for me. I had a 
chance to look deeply at these models and think about how you can do 
conflict resolution better with these understandings."
Among the tools Wolf has incorporated in his conflict-management 
training kit is an understanding of the hierarchy of human needs, as 
articulated by psychologist Abraham Maslow. "The idea is there are 
four categories of needs - physical, emotional, intellectual and 
spiritual - and they are best achieved in some kind of sequence," 
Wolf says. "Maslow popularized this concept in the West, but it can 
be found in all spiritual traditions. My training workshops in 
conflict resolution are now structured to go through those different 
levels."
The importance of doing so is illustrated in the ongoing Middle 
Eastern talks, which Wolf still helps facilitate from time to time. 
"When Israelis and Palestinians are talking to each other about water 
resources, Palestinians are talking about the need for water on a 
physical level," he notes. "In the Gaza Strip, people literally don't 
have enough water for their basic human needs.

Water is also an emotional issue for them; it's a representation of 
the Israeli occupation. It's controlled by somebody else.

"In Israel, nobody is dying of thirst. What's more, they're largely 
in control of their own aquatic destiny. With their physical and 
emotional needs met, they think of water in intellectual terms. How 
much do we use in agriculture as opposed to for residential use? How 
much do we desalinate, and at what price?"

This Israeli attitude, Wolf says, leads to "a profound disconnect" 
with the Palestinians. "If you literally don't have enough to meet 
your basic human needs," he says, "you can't remove yourself enough 
to think about whether drip irrigation is the most economically 
efficient use of water.

"So (I have tried to emphasize the fact) that everybody's basic human 
needs must be taken care of, and whatever emotional scars they have 
about the past need to be addressed. Then you can move it onto an 
intellectual level."
Wolf has gotten into the habit of starting negotiations by asking 
everyone involved to tell stories that

describe their relationship to the source of water in question - what 
it means to them. "At the end of the introductions, instead of having 
established a hierarchy, the people notice their commonalities with 
the others in the room," he says.
Also, he says, he emphasizes the need for adversaries to genuinely 
listen to one another. "The profound spiritual practice of deep 
listening is in every spiritual tradition, but we in the West do it 
so badly!" he says. "I was told this joke: 'In America, what's the 
opposite of speaking?
"'Waiting to speak!'"

Wolf can't talk in specifics about the negotiations he has overseen 
in recent years; most are ongoing, and coming to terms on a water 
treaty can take 10 or even 20 years. In 2009, he expects to be 
returning to the Middle East and Southeast Asia, "where I've been 
working a lot lately. There's a lot of demand on resources in that 
area. You want to encourage development for poverty alleviation, but 
you don't want to make the same mistakes we've made with some of our 
big dams."

With the world's population growing and rainfall patterns shifting 
due to climate change, Wolf's general glass-half-full attitude will 
surely be tested in coming decades. Even today, he says, 
"Two-and-one-half (million) to 5 million people die every year 
because of a lack of access to safe, clean water. That's on the same 
level of magnitude as AIDS or malaria. It's a huge catastrophe now, 
and climate change will beget more variability in the hydrologic 
cycle, including longer droughts and bigger floods."

On the other hand, Wolf notes that "all spiritual traditions - not 
just (those) in the religions that come out of the desert - seem to 
tap into water as healing, soothing and cleansing." This shared sense 
of sacredness gives him hope for the future, as does the resilience 
of many water agreements. "India and Pakistan have a water treaty 
that has survived since 1960 - through two wars," he says. "In the 
middle of one of the wars, India made payments to Pakistan as part of 
their treaty obligations."

"I think water hits us at a profoundly different level than other 
resources," he adds. "People are willing to do horrible things to 
each other. What they seem not willing to do is turn off each other's 
water."