Of all the writing I did for The Challenge Series, a project telling the story of the sustainable community development at Olympic Village in Vancouver, this is perhaps my favourite. Thought I’d post it to share. ———–
CELEBRATING WATER
In an environment as water-rich as the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, it is easy to use water with complete abandon. We don’t save it, we throw it away blithely, we think little about how we use it. Water is taken for granted – as it is in many other industrialized, wealthy, water-rich corners of the world.
We overlook important truths when we are frivolous with water. The first is that water – the treated, drinkable, piped-to-your home commodity used in North America for every household purpose – is energy intensive. Every time we use it we depend upon a vast infrastructure that collects, cleans and delivers it to us, then carries it away, treats it and discharges it far from our homes. Using less water saves energy, and reduces the polluting and warming impacts of energy production. Of course, it is easy to overlook what you do not see. In aiming for all sorts of goals, laudable and otherwise, modern cities have effectively rendered water invisible. To allow for unhindered vehicle movement, public health, dry basements, tall buildings, efficient maintenance and development patterns based on straight lines and hard surfaces, modern cities have paved over streams, drained wetlands, channelled water into culverts and pipes, and forced this precious resource underground, inside walls and out of sight.
This causes us to overlook another important truth. We know, scientifically, that our bodies are made of water. But we have lost our relationship to it. Most of us only know it as a flow from a tap. We are unaware of its cycles, its ecology. We forget that we share it with salmon and eagles, forests and farms. We don’t know where it goes when it disappears down the drain.
Water is perhaps the best place to start the shift towards sustainability because it defies non-holistic thinking. It flows from place to place, adapts to any environment, infiltrates any opening. It is a connective tissue, linking us to our landscape and all the life around us – literally flowing through our bodies as it cycles within our ecosystem. Stopping the flow of water is like ceasing to drink – life withers quickly.
The designers of SEFC were told to bring water back onto the landscape, to make it visible, to “Celebrate the Water.”
Celebrate, indeed. For where we have water, we have life. How we treat water is, then, how we treat life. And where we learn to celebrate life – its perpetual flows and transformations of matter, energy, spirit, and yes, water – we take another critical step towards sustainability.
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Excerpt from The Challenge Series, Chapter 6: Water and Building Landscape. To see great images and read more about how this innovative development handles water, visit http://www.thechallengeseries.ca/chapter-06/
