You and I are 70%-80% water. Without a wholesome supply, we can die within days. Yet water is so ever-present that we abuse it, regularly. Yes. People dump rubbish into streams and rivers; they poop and pee into water reckoned to be of drinkable quality; water authorities fire in Chlorine, Aluminium sulphate and Sodium flouride – all, especially the last, dangerously poisonous substances; the same authorities allow hazardous parasites to slide into the water supply from agricultural excesses – as has happened to the supply for Galway City in recent months.

A couple of months ago, Fintan O’Toole, writing for the Irish Times, extolled the virtues of the Chinese Government for their stated intention to introduce flush toilets to a number of Chinese cities. This is madness, especially in a country which brought the collection, composting and distribution of Humanure (thank you, Joseph Jenkins!), as agricultural fertiliser to a fine art. If the Chinese can use compost toilets for centuries, we can begin now!

I can imagine the turned up noses at this unfamiliar idea. – but, think about it. Your fruit and veg. are fertilised by microbe crap, worm crap, slug crap, bird crap, cat shit, even when you don’t use farmyard manure, (usually cow shit), on your plot. And, when you buy these foods, the same applies to the farm-grown food that has been chemically fertilised, because Nature wastes nothing and the excreta of all creatures becomes food for others, directly, or indirectly.

There is one area where the waste of water is so gross, it has been totally overlooked by the authorities. This is the loss of rain water to the ground, or, worse, in cities, to the sewage system, which is where ‘storm-water’, as it is called, flows. Every new house, apartment block, office block and factory should have a plumbed method to harvest roof water. If it can be allowed to flow into the sewer, it can be plumbed into retention tanks. Tanks can serve individual dwellings, or multiple dwellings and can be installed underground with pumps and filtration systems built in. The technology exists, but the public and political will hasn’t got round to thinking about it. Expensive facilities are planned for desalinating sea-water, or bringing water in tanker ships to dry countries, but not the simple expedient of home harvesting and storage. For all domestic use, other than drinking and cooking, most rain-water is good, without filtration, beyond the removal of leaves and grit.

All these practical, solvable issues about the availability of water apply in both areas where water is freely available and where it is controlled by a company who ‘owns’ it, through privatisation. In Kerala and other Indian states, Pepsi and Coca Cola production was banned in 2006, because those corporations sank wells deeper than those of adjacent villages, so that the villagers’ wells dried up. The corporations then sold bottled water to the local inhabitants. This is privatisation by theft. In conjunction with the pollution caused by the manufacture of Pepsi and Coke, these states decided, courageously, to protect their populations.

But what of the esoteric qualities of water? The structure of water changes when it is exposed, not only to substances, but to ideas! The Japanese researcher, Masaru Emoto has taken thousands of photographs of magnified crystals of frozen water after the water has been exposed to different ideas. He claims that time after experimental time, the most beautiful and complex water crystal is derived from the idea of Love and Gratitude. To return to the beginning of this article: you can change your own sense of well-being by pausing, closing your eyes and sending Love and Gratitude to all the water in your body for the Gift of Life. Try it.

Use the resultant sense of the multiple values inherent in water to protect and conserve and use wisely this vital substance for life. Resist privatisation as an act as stupid and life threatening as the window tax of the eighteenth century.