My water story.
The inspiration for this project has come over the last several years from a few different sources. The first, was meeting one of San Francisco’s forgotten rivers, Islais Creek, several years ago. My anthropology professor and friend, Thor Anderson, and I were on one of our many adventures taking a tour through the Bayview and Visitacion Valley neighborhoods of San Francisco, when we ended up at a tiny urban park in the middle of an industrial wasteland- Islais Creek. I was reading the placard that told the story of the creek when I saw a map- a simple, tiny map- of the major rivers and wetlands of San Francisco. That map sparked my imagination and a million questions. Where are the rivers now? How do you put a river underground? Why don’t we value these bodies of water? It changed my whole view of San Francisco. Where I had only seen what was on the surface, now I pictured the layers of miner rubble and earthquake debris that sat on top of our aquatic inheritance- our rivers.
Leaving that to percolate for the next while, the event that finally sparked the Sweetwater Project came from an article in National Geographic. It was about an organization called the Watershed Organization Trust in India. Using a mixture of community organizing, technology, and water-saving techniques, the organization assists villages in arid parts of India to use and catch water more efficiently. And its working. After a few years of hard work, towns that went thirsty during the dry season, have enough water for themselves and their crops. Villages emptied of young people who had traveled to urban areas for jobs because the land would not produce food anymore, have an abundance of food and a way to support themselves, a livelihood.
After studying a lot about environmental issues and agriculture, it clicked. We always hear about lack of water and lack of food. But is a lot the problem the way we are using and collecting it? Is there a way we can utilize water in a smarter way, so that we don’t have to move it hundreds of miles to places where it doesn’t naturally fall? It is a powerful thing to be able to turn a desert into an abundant and fertile garden. Can we do that in a way that doesn’t monumentally screw up the environment? Hmmmm….
And so this project was born. To understand how water in California is, was, and could be.
– Carly