Living in a Watershed

Published January 22nd, 2022

When a new acquaintance asks Cesar Arias de la Canal where he lives, the guest speaker for this online UUFSMA Sunday Service sometimes answers, “I live in a giant cup.” By this he means the watershed that provides the San Miguel region with the precious and endangered liquid that approximately 150,000 people drink every day and use for cleansing, cooking, growing food and a multitude of other life-sustaining purposes.

“Every surface of the Earth is part of a watershed,” Arias says, “even the deserts. We live and work within a watershed. Upon leaving one watershed, we enter another.”

As an advocate for the natural environment, Arias seeks to share his concern for the Earth’s aquatic networks by which all water on the planet drains from mountainous highlands into rivers, reservoirs, lakes, and oceans. In addition to being natural flows shaping Earth’s geography, watersheds libate places where people congregate for life, share cultural traditions, socialize, and work. As Earth’s population has become denser, it has also become unfortunately apparent that conditions in one part of a watershed affect underlying groundwaters known as aquifers and the quality of water downstream.

In talking to the UUFSMA, Arias will discuss society’s urgent watershed issues. Unregulated commercial exploitation of water, deforestation, soil erosion, chemical pollution from agriculture, and the destruction of ecosystems are leading to the pollution and depletion of watersheds and aquifers throughout the world. This endangerment of Earth’s most essential liquid threatens all animal and human life.

A major figure in local cultural and non-profit organizations, Cesar Arias de la Canal is an attorney, human rights activist, and scion of one of San Miguel’s founding families. The author of books and articles addressing social and environmental issues, he currently serves as President of the Botanical Garden El Charco del Ingenio, where he has worked since its inception in 1990. In a recent commentary, he traced last summer’s flash-flooding of San Miguel to the unregulated development of housing northeast of the city and its damage to the natural watershed of the Atascadero and related streams. He is also a founding member of Amnesty International’s Mexican Section and has been a professor at Universidad Metropolitana in Mexico City and the University of Veracruz and a journalist.

To participate in our online Sunday Service, visit www.uufsma.org and click on the Zoom Service button on the home page. If requested, enter password: 294513. Sign-in from anywhere Sunday mornings between 10:15-10:25 am. Because of the sudden surge of the omicron variant of the coronavirus, in-person services by reservation at the Aldea Hotel are being suspended until further notice.

Our Fellowship welcomes people of all ages, races, religions, sexual orientations, and gender identity. UUFSMA donates at least fifty percent of its income to support nonprofit organizations that provide health, educational, and environmental services for underserved communities in the San Miguel region.