| In the world there
is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking
that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.
- Lao Tzu
You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places,
to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally, the
river floods these places. 'Floods' is the word they use, but
in fact it is not flooding, it is remembering. Remembering where
it used to be. All water has perfect memory and is forever trying
to get back where it was.
- Toni Morrison, quoted in Heirloom
Seeds and Their Keepers
I've had my life planned by the Rio Grande.
- Tish
Hinojosa
Who knows, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion?
- Jack Kerouac
Although we have successfully apportioned the two major rivers
that we (the United
States and Mexico)
share in common, we have not reached agreement on groundwater.
We have no treaty allocating the use of water from trans boundary
aquifers. Consequently, no one knows what their share of these
waters is. No one has certainty of water supply nor security
of water right. Groundwater has been out of sight and out of
mind.
- Albert Utton
The Rio Conchos in Mexico has nine dams, strung along the river
above Carmago as the Mexican government developed irrigation
schemes to induce people to migrate to the north from the more
crowded southern states. By 1975, 60 percent of the river's
native fish species had vanished.
- Peter Steinhart, Two
Eagles/Dos Aguilas: The Natural World of the United States -
Mexico Borderlands
Summer weather in the Sonoran
Desert is extreme. Rarely does a gentle rainfall soak the
ground over hours or days. Instead, storms crash in, cool the
earth, and disperse.
Winston Erickson - Sharing
the Desert: the Tohono O'odham in History
At its broadest, the Amazon
is forty miles wide, so that from a boat in midstream it becomes
impossible to make out either bank, and the illusion of a boundless
river-sea is complete.
- Jonathan Kandell, Passage through El Dorado
And then, as never on land, he knows the truth that his world
is a water world, a planet dominated by its covering mantle
of ocean, in which the continents are but transient intrusions
of land above the surface of the all-encircling sea.
- Rachel Carson, The Sea around Us
More than 150 villages line the shores of Lake Titicaca. No
two have identical landscapes.
- Ben Orlove, Lines
in the Water (review)
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