Intimacy with Nature is a mystery whose enterprise, like moving water, is to flow past boundaries and to invite connectivity. I do not know exactly when it happened: perhaps while on an adventure when I was ten years old, discovering an arrowhead along the banks of Big River and imagining the flint knapper who walked this water course before me, or maybe during a summer swim as I weightlessly flew underwater, dreaming of curious sea lions who glided upstream with me from their ocean home. It might have been years later as I canoed miles upriver to catch a glimpse of a fledgling osprey or while listening to the invisible Old Ones whose whispered bardic tales are carried on the river’s ripples only after dark. Somewhere in these events, my body became a part of the Big River Watershed. The waters’ spirit cracked open my heart, bidding me to always remember that this natural beauty is not only a luxury to revere, but also an indispensable key to our collective coherence as a species.

The blue-green flowing course reminds me that we cannot live without water. The simple and profound equation is this: water is life. Yet, the startling reality is that today, more than one billion people worldwide do not have access to safe drinking water, resulting in nearly two million fatalities a year due to waterborne diseases. Most of these deaths are among children. With water scarcity increasing due to human population growth, pollution, and climate change, clearly our relationship to water must change.

First and foremost, we must secure access to clean and safe water as a basic human right for everyone in every country. This will require not only changing our detrimental use of wat...