Once-every-four-days water rationing was perhaps the most unforgettable childhood experience for me in the early sixties.Long queues of empty buckets lined the streets of Hong Kong whose water supply relied on neighboring Guangdong’s DongjianRiver.45 years on, we are still haunted by looming water shortage crisis around us.

Prepared for rainy days?Unfortunately, we are neither prepared, nor have we woken up to the waterless days ahead.The “drought” of the brain is more worrisome.

Watch the daily ritual of car washing in Hong Kong.Clean and precious drinking water is used over-generously to clean sparkling waxed surface of sedans and limousines, which perhaps sit idle most of the day in their expensive garages.An added irony is that Hong Kong spends billions of dollars a year to buy water from drought plagued Guangdong and dumped excess unused portion into the sea.

Money is Water.Water is Money.In money-minded Hong Kong and Chinese culture, water has taken an added symbolic meaning of “fortune”.Little wonder how the global bottled water business is thriving.Little wonder how water source privatization is fetching skyrocket price and tariff.Water is considered as a tradable commodity rather than a finite natural resource and public right.

At the idyllic stilt-house lined Fenghuang township in western Hunan province, I was amazed to watch the local people washing their face, their feet, their clothes, bed linens, shoes, vegetables, meat, fruit and even mops and brooms along the To River that flows right in front of their wooden stilt houses.Nobody is concerned about the river’s limited carrying capacity and self-cleaning capability.

After-use care is nobody’s business.

Toilets are another upstream and downstream blues.In China, public toilets have not caught up with the country’s modernization.Lack of adequate latrine facilities and unsightly makeshift toilets befoul rivers, lakes and underground water.Just close your eyes and smell your way to China’s infamous “watering hole”?

Shaanxi Green Mother Volunteers are leading the way for a toilet revolution.Empowering village women to turn pig-human-wastes-into-biogas by retrofitting pigsties, toilets and kitchen stoves, the Shaanxi green heroines are preventing defecate waste befouling watercourses and discouraging logging for firewood.

Beijing students monitored car washing in the CapitalCity and lobbied their Mayor to ban vehicle washing with drinking water.They succeeded.

Tears of the Dragon and fear of empty wells are here to stay unless there is a mentality change to recognize the fact that water does not come with a lifetime guarantee.

Cure “brain drought” to decode stress signals of our planet.Reclaim the indigenous wisdom of living in harmony with Nature.

The Chinese Almanac always portrays a picture of a cowherd in the field.If he is wearing shoes, the coming year will be wet.If he is without shoes, there will be drought.By observing astronomical, meteorological, climatic and agricultural changes, farmers, growers and herders have learnt to decode Nature.

Water-wise is about Nature-wise.

 

End

www.cuncaoxin.org.cn

Dragon Tears and Brain Drought

Mrs. Mei Ng UN Global 500 Laureate Friends of the Earth (HK) Board Member China national green committees Board Member

November 12, 2006