I am a primatologist who spends twelve hours most days in the company of a thirteen year old chimpanzee named Bow. I am also an editor with Inverted-A Press.
Yesterday it rained all day, and today does not look to be very different. While flooding has occurred in the nearest large metropolis, on my property the most that has happened is that the ditch running alongside my internal road has turned into a peaceful babbling brook.
For Bow, however, all this rain has led to a certain amount of boredom. He enjoys going outside every day, but when it is raining, even very slightly, he will not venture out.
You can lead a chimpanzee to water, but you cannot make him cross the threshold.
There he sits, with a bemused expression, seeing the rain fall, but refusing to budge.
Set him free! the heckling animal rights people often say, when they post comments on my videos. But where would he go? How would he find shelter from the rain?
The rain is good for the flowers and the trees, By extension, this is good for the butterflies and the bees.
But none of them seem to like it when it actually rains. If they had direct control over the weather, it might never rain, they dislike it that much. You don't see them outside when it rains.
I regret that I did not excavate the perimeter of my pasture this year, because this would be a good year to fill the moat that would create Bow's island. Other years there will be much less rainfall. We have experienced droughts before. We will have droughts again. Variability is built into the weather. People find reasons to complain, no matter what the weather brings.
The question is: Once he has that island of his own, how will Bow keep from ever getting wet?
It rained a lot yesterday. Even more than the day before, and the day before that.
I like watching the rain accumulate in a puddle in the stone garden in front of my house.
This is my puddle. This is my water. I am rich! I have water to spare. I can even put on my big rubber boots and jump up and down in that puddle. If I lived in the desert, I could not do that.
Right now there is flooding in some parts of my state, and I know that in other states there is a drought. And there are some people saying we should take all the water from the flooded states and ship it to the drought stricken states. I'm not sure that would be a good idea. It smacks of redistribution. How would they fund this? How would local landowners be paid for the water they give up? I want to keep my water. I like it here, just the way it is. And to the extent that I want to change things, I want to be able to dig a moat around the pasture and let natural rain water fill it and make an island for Bow.
Bow indoors during the rain watching music videos on my computer
"We all share the same world, and we breathe the same air,
"And the water we drink must be cycled with care."
I wrote that! It's a very important song in The Debt Collector, a musical I collaborated on with composer Daniel Carter. I do know about the water cycle. I also know that something that belongs to everybody belongs to nobody. The best way to conserve water is to allow each person to own the puddles on his land, his drinking water from the well, and all the water of which his own body is composed. Any attempt to nationalize water will ultimately mean that we do not even have the right to control the body of water that is ourselves.
We have been told a lot of myths about water. We've been told that every person, no matter his size or sex or body type, should drink eight glasses of water per day -- in the form of pure, unadulterated water. In fact, almost everything we eat or drink -- fruit, vegetables, meat, soup, milk and any number of brewed, boiled or carbonated beverages -- contains water. We do need water to live, but we can take it in in many forms, and for a dehydrated person to try to drink pure water can be dangerous, because of the possibility of electrolyte depletion.
We have been told that our bodies are composed of 70% water -- as if every person were exactly the same as every other person. In fact, the average adult male human contains 58 ±8% water, and the average human female is composed of only48 ±6%. It turns out that this also plays into fluctuations between and among adult individuals of the same sex, because the higher the fat content of your body, the lower the water content. One size does not fit all. Unless you are a newborn, chances are your water content is not anywhere near 70%.
The idea that bodies of water, and even their banks or edges, should belong to the public in the United States may have begun with Thomas Jefferson's grudge against Edward Livingston for supporting Aaron Burr. Jefferson confiscated from Livingston a piece of property in Louisiana called the Batture of Sainte Marie. You can read Livingston's response to Jefferson's justification of the confiscation here:
It is precisely because we all depend on water for our existence that we should be allowed to own property and all the water on it and beneath it. There can be no other kind of freedom -- of speech, of action, of life and limb -- without the ability to control one's own water. Some people say that access to water is a fundamental human right. But it's the right to own water that gives us our freedom.
So I rejoice in every puddle, and I look forward to the day when I can have an even bigger puddle on my land, one that will help to contain Bow within its borders, but will give him much more freedom of movement than he currently has.
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