• Already poorer people in developing countries are paying over  3 times the price of what the wealthy would for domestic water needs.
• The problem affects over a billion people world wide.
• It leads to disease, lack of sanitation and increases regional conflicts. (ie Sudan)
• Every 20 seconds, a child dies from a water-related disease
• Households, not public agencies, often make the largest investment in basic sanitation, with the ratio of household to government investment typically 10 to 1.
• Investment in drinking-water and sanitation would result in 272 million more school attendance days a year. The value of deaths averted, based on discounted future earnings, would amount to US$ 3.6 billion a year.
• Half the worlds fresh water supply is dedicated to agriculture which mostly feeds the western world.

So whats all that telling you?

Poverty is aided by the water crisis. Our future relies on regulating fresh water distribution and making it even, fair and healthy for EVERYONE.

This is more serious than you know…every year the physical effects are witnessed and experienced with harsher consequences across more and more nations. It wont be long before you and your children experience these realities right here in the western world.

I would really like to have showers everyday thanks…so lets start educating ourselves on how we can save and regulate the water!

World Water Crisis – Unregulated distribution today = increased poverty tomorrow!

Elephants are amongst the world’s most intelligent species. With a mass just over 5 kg (11 lb), elephant brains are larger than those of any other land animal, and although the largest whales have body masses twentyfold those of a typicalelephant, whale brains are barely twice the mass of an elephant’s brain. The elephant’s brain is similar to that of humans in terms of structure and complexity – such as the elephant’s cortex having as many neurons as a human brain^[1], suggestingconvergent evolution.^[2] A wide variety of behaviors, including those associated with grief, learning, allomothering, mimicry,art, play, a sense of humor, altruism, use of tools, compassion, self-awareness, memory and possibly language^[3] all point to a highly intelligent species that are thought to be equal with cetaceans^[4][5] and primates^[6][7]. Due to the high intelligence and strong family ties of elephants, some researchers argue it is morally wrong for humans to cull them.^[8]

Aristotle once said that elephants were “The beast which passeth all others in wit and mind”^[9].

Death ritual

Elephants are the only other species upon Earth other than humans and Neanderthals^[31] known to have any recognizable ritual around death. They show a keen interest in the bones of their own kind (even unrelated elephants that have died long ago). They are often seen gently investigating the bones with their trunks and feet, and remaining very quiet. Sometimes elephants that are completely unrelated to the deceased will still visit their graves.^[9] When an elephant is hurt, other elephants (also even if they are unrelated) will aid them.^[19]

Elephant researcher Martin Meredith recalls an occurrence in her book about a typical elephant death ritual that was witnessed by Anthony Martin-Hall, a South African biologist who had studied elephants in Addo, South Africa for over 8 years. The entire family of a dead matriarch, including her young calf were all gently touching her body with their trunks and tried to lift her. The elephant herd were all rumbling loudly. The calf was observed to be weeping and made sounds that sounded like a scream but then the entire herd fell incredibly silent. They then began to throw leaves and dirt over the body and broke off tree branches to cover her. They spent the next 2 days quietly standing over her body. They sometimes had to leave to get water or food, but they would always return.^[32] Occurrences of elephants behaving this way around human beings are common through Africa. On many occasions, they have buried dead or sleeping humans or aided them when they were hurt.^[19] Meredith also recalls an event told to her by George Adamson, a Kenyan Game Warden regarding an old Turkana woman who fell asleep under a tree after losing her way home. When she woke up, there was an elephant standing over her, gently touching her. She kept very still because she was very frightened. As other elephants arrived, they began to scream loudly and buried her under branches. She was found the next morning by the local herdsmen, unharmed.^[32]

George Adamson also recalls when he shot a Bull elephant from a herd that kept breaking into the Government gardens of Northern Kenya. George gave the elephant’s meat to local Turkana Tribesmen and then dragged the rest of the carcass half a mile away. That night, the other elephants found the body and took the shoulder blade and leg bone and returned the bones to the exact spot the elephant was killed.^[33] Scientists often argue the extent that elephants feel emotion. A large variety of animals display what appears to be ‘sorrow’ through body language, posture, movement and actions but seeing elephants standing over a body, burying them, refusing to leave and their trunks being observed hanging limp certainly seems evidence that perhaps much deeper and complex emotions are involved.^[33]

As noted earlier, the concepts of suffering and death (and even what we might refer to as “empathy”) appear to be highly developed in elephants, even regarding unexpectedly witnessed human suffering, leading to a perception by many humans who have lived in close interactivity with them that the animals appear to view humans – and occasionally other highly-developed mammals, such as domestic dogs – as somehow truly similar to themselves in this realm; sympathetic, one could say. More research obviously needs to be done in this area, but the evidence remains persuasive.

WIKIPEDIA SOURCE

Can anyone shed some light on this? ? ?

You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth.

For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons,

and to step out of life’s procession, that marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite.

When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music.

Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison?

Always you have been told that work is a curse and labour a misfortune.

But I say to you that when you work you fulfil a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born,

And in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life,

And to love life through labour is to be intimate with life’s inmost secret.

But if you in your pain call birth an affliction and the support of the flesh a curse written upon your brow, then I answer that naught but the sweat of your brow shall wash away that which is written.

You have been told also that life is darkness, and in your weariness you echo what was said by the weary.

And I say that life is indeed darkness save when there is urge,

And all urge is blind save when there is knowledge,

And all knowledge is vain save when there is work,

And all work is empty save when there is love;

And when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself, and to one another, and to God.

And what is it to work with love?

It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart,

even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.

It is to build a house with affection,

even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.

It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy,

even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit.

It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit,

And to know that all the blessed dead

are standing about you and watching.

Often have I heard you say, as if speaking in sleep, “He who works in marble, and finds the shape of his own soul in the stone, is nobler than he who ploughs the soil.

And he who seizes the rainbow to lay it on a cloth in the likeness of man, is more than he who makes the sandals for our feet.”

But I say, not in sleep but in the overwakefulness of noontide, that the wind speaks not more sweetly to the giant oaks than to the least of all the blades of grass;

And he alone is great who turns the voice of the wind into a song made sweeter by his own loving.

Work is love made visible.

And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.

And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine.

And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.