Connecting with Gaia
I’m suspended in space speedily, yet in slow motion, orbiting the earth. Six times in 24 hours I will complete the circumnavigation. Sometimes the passage is in darkness, sometimes a red and yellow disc highlights Gaia’s curved surface. But on other occasions all her beauty is displayed for me; all her tragedies; all her pain and all her joy. I see her snow capped peaks; her multicoloured deserts in pristine clarity. Her natural, not man made, hues are brush strokes on a massive canvas; her work sometimes applied with a pallet knife. Water is sometimes black and sometimes yellow depending on available light. Clouds sometimes hover sometimes rise as mountains and sometimes pattern the oceans with dapples light or dark shadows.
Lake Har Us Nuur in Western Mongolia is created with a light touch, navy blue at the centre and a cool pale green where waters lap the pink and beige coast. There is the Euphrates River meandering darkly through the land of Turkey which presents as angular blocks of yellow ochre and orange. Now I’m looking down on the snow covered peaks in China where receding glaciers leave trails of silt. From the book Gaia.
I have a love reaction of awe. I come down to earth in the Distillery Historic District of Toronto where an exhibition of photographs, taken from the International Space Station by Guy Laliberté, is on display. Proceeds from the sale of photographs and books at the Thompson Landry Gallery, go to finance his One Drop inituative.
The man who brought us the magic of Cirque du Soleil is now trying to irradicate poverty by providing Gaia’s people with safe drinking water. On October 29, 2007, Guy Laliberté announced the official launch of the One Drop Foundation to fight poverty in the world by giving everyone access to water.
My feet walk her concrete coated earth, but for a few moments I transcended time and space and saw the abundance of Gaia, my home. But I also saw how my actions and those of others who through ignorance or greed are destroying her greatest property, her life giving force – water.
There are two water cycles on our planet:
The first moves water from clouds to rain to oceans and back again. The second affects communities without access to water as this drags them deeper into poverty and poor health, which, in turn, makes it more difficult for them to access water.
While the first rests in the hands of nature, the second rests in ours. Water is an inherent right, yet almost a billion people do not have access to safe drinking water and 2.5 billion live in areas without sanitation. Worldwide solidarity is the best defense against the monopolization of this invaluable resource. Water is life, but we continue to pollute and over exploit it, thus threatening the world’s diverse ecosystems and, therefore, access to water today and in the future…
For more information click the
water crisis
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