Water has been in the news lately. The great tsunami after the December 26 earthquake devastated the coastal area of Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and other countries, taking 175,000 lives in a single day. Nature can slap us in the face every so often, putting us in our place and making us humble that we are a part of forces greater than ourselves. The same was true with the floods in Minnesota of 1997, when our largest rivers rose up against the land.

Maybe it’s that sheer force of water that makes people throughout the world respect it. It’s a death force, but it’s also a life force, as the readings highlight. Peering into a hole in the ice on Walden pond, more than 150 years ago, Thoreau marveled: “Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.”

And if we do direct our attention to the heavens over our heads, what’s the first question we ask as space exploration vehicles land on Mars and on the moons of Saturn: Are there any signs of water there? Could there have been life? Could there be life? 75 percent of the surface of our planet is water. 66% of our bodies are water. We lived in water in utero for nine months before birth. Maybe those connections give us a deep instinctual drive to be drawn to water.

Herman Melville, in the very first chapter of Moby Dick—talks about the lure of the sea and the crowds of “water gazers” in New York that you can always find leaning against piers, or sitting on docks, or looking out past the anchored ships to the ocean. “Posted like silent sentinels all around town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries,” he writes. They are not sailors awaiting their next voyage, he writes, but landsmen drawn irrestibly to water. “Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded forever.”

Peoples around the globe to celebrate water and respect it, often in spiritual ways. My wife, who teaches art to elementary students in public school, came home one day and was talking about different cultural traditions that she presents to different grade levels with related projects, one of which comes from Thailand. There, at the end of monsoon season in November, people use paper or banana leaves to make bowls in the shape of lotus blossoms. These bowls are called krathongs (gra-tongs) and people fill them with incense, flowers and a lighted candle and float them on lakes, canals and rivers. The ceremony is to thank Buddha and a water goddess for the water they have and use, which is critical for the two main sources of food in villages: fish and rice. In addition to thanksgiving, some also see the ceremony as a way to ask forgiveness for using and dirtying water during the year.

American Indian tribes have water ceremonies that recognize their spiritual connections to water, honor water as a life-giver, and remind people of its sacredness and our responsibility to keep it pure.

Water is part of baptisms and christenings and membership ceremonies in many faiths. It is part of every mass. Even entering a place of worship has included water for cleansing...symbolically with holy water for Catholics, and more directly in faiths such as Islam where those entering mosques to pray must wash their hands, forearms, faces and feet...you can see people sitting on benches doing that throughout Islamic countries.

Part 2. Some Water Issues.

During three presidential debates, only one question was asked about the environment. I know, we’re not supposed to obsess about the election...and I won’t. Certainly our international troubles and health care costs and quality of education and all the rest need to be high-profile issues. But it also says something that so little was said about air and water quality issues. Whatever your politics, major environmental issues have not been on the table. They should have been, and water quality should have been at the top of the list. What are some of them?

What about the fact that last August, the Environmental Protection Agency announced 35 percent of the total lake acres and 24 percent of the river miles in the nation are under advisories related to chemicals in fish that may be too polluted to eat?

What about the 450,000 e-mails and letters that the Environmental Protection Agency received last year when it proposed to relax mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants?

What about the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that last year was the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, caused by too much fertilizer running off farm fields?

What about the pesticides, pharmaceuticals, antibiotics and synthetic hormones that have been detected in rivers throughout the country? What about San Francisco Bay, the Great Lakes, and other water bodies where invasive alien species are taking over the aquatic ecosystems from native species?

What about all the science that has focused traditionally on whether chemicals in water cause cancer, and not whether they cause birth defects, immune system disorders, autism or behavioral problems?

What about all the standards for safe levels of pollutants that have been based traditionally on what adult males could tolerate, not pregnant females or young children who are much more vulnerable?

What about the millions of Americans, most of them poor and many of them minorities, who live in the shadows and plumes of refineries, coal-burning power plants, chemical production plants, foundries, smelters, and hard-rock mining operations?

Part 3. What to do.

These issues are out there and people can get involved by learning about them, choosing proposals they favor or oppose, and making themselves heard. You can act on your own or join groups, and there are environmental, conservation, hunting, and citizens groups of every flavor or political stripe. Legislators get overwhelmed with letters about stadiums, gay marriage and abortion, but when it comes to other issues, they tell me that receiving just 8 or 10 or 12 heartfelt letters on something is enough to get it on their radar screens.

When we think about what to do, one thing to remember is that the quality of water is a direct reflection of how we treat the land. You don’t just magically clean up water by filtering it or something...you prevent it from becoming polluted in the first place.

Another thing to remember is that this is a legacy issue. It may seem a little weird, but when I sit in the congregation and see babies in parents’ arms and toddlers holding their grandparents’ hands, I realize that these young people could live to see the year 2100. The legacy we leave is to a generation already with us. If we can think long-term about Social Security, I don’t know why we can’t also do the same for natural resources, our nation’s natural capital.

What to do about international environmental problems is not so easy. Like you, I’m an individual who finds it hard to conceive of the fact that 1.2 billion people--1 in 5 people living on the planet today, do not have clean drinking water. And twice that number don’t have adequate sanitation...and those are conservative numbers from the United Nations.

What I’ve done, since it seems impossible to do anything on a macro level, is to think of it in terms of a micro level. Find and contribute to a group that works on clean water projects in poor nations. It might be a large U.S. or international organization--religiously affiliated or otherwise--or it might be a much smaller grassroots group.

There are lots of such organizations. One that’s local and that I’ve worked with as a volunteer board member is the Cottonwood Foundation, based in White Bear Lake, and founded by a couple of state employees in the early 1990s and known pretty much by word of mouth. It provides $1,000 grants to small grassroots organizations around the world...and in some of these places, $1,000 will really do something. It can build a dozen houses or provide a new room for a schoolhouse and pay a teacher’s salary for a year.

One application that I saw recently relating to water---and many of them do---described a colony in northern India in which 42 families, including 200 people, lived on government land outside a village. The people aren’t allowed in the village because they’re the lowest caste, and make their living by filling the lowest pay jobs in factories, workshops, construction...and even scavenging. They couldn’t live in the village, but they could draw water from the village well, which meant a 3 to 4 hour roundtrip hike each day for women to get it. So the letter was asking for $1,000 to dig their own well. They had a site, they’d raised $80, they had volunteer labor ready to work on it, but they needed $1000 to have it drilled, and to buy the steel casings, hand pumps and other equipment.

The foundation awarded them a grant, and the work is nearing completion. I’ll never go there, but that little speck on the planet now has a better life. It’s something. It has to count for something, that the 1.2 billion people without clean water has now been reduced by 200. In closing, let me say that water and air and land are not our largest environmental problem. The largest environmental problems are Poverty and Greed. It’s a moral issue. It’s a political issue. It’s a values issue. It’s a justice issue. It’s something that we can address. We have the power to make things better.