A simple formula – two hydrogen atoms and one of oxygen – is the name for water.
Something that is tasteless, odorless, virtually colorless and with no caloric or nutritional value, yet it is found in all living organisms. To paraphrase Jacques Yves Cousteau, “the water cycle and the life cycle are one.”
In a desert, water is literally the difference between life and death. Whether ice age water deposited deep underground in a “bank” of broken rock and pumped to the surface to make our morning coffee, a threatened “ribbon of green” dependent on treated effluent to maintain its wildlife-rich gallery of cottonwood and willow or the much-anticipated monsoon rains that bless the desert each summer, water is currency, water is political, water is indispensable, water is everything.
