Regenerate the social & natural fabric in Oaxaca

A peculiar event took place in the old building that houses the Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca, founded by Francisco Toledo, the enormous painter and highly respected cultural and social activist who died a few years ago. The rare event began with a ceremony typical of the native peoples of Oaxaca asking for permission from the water and Mother Earth. What was it all about? In the midst of the worst water crisis in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca, about 30 organizations had gathered to sign the constitutive act of the Citizen and Community Observatory of Water and Environment.

This act was followed by many people and organizations and covered by the local and national press.  INSO promoted this initiative from its project to regenerate the social and natural fabric of the region in the GlobalGiving platform.

One of the participants said: «Who is to held responsible the climate crisis? Ii is not holy Peter or God, it is not sun spots or nature gone crazy. It is us, our consumerism, the patriarchal and capitalist world view. We better listen to original peoples, we better let women lead, we better work together».

Links:

• Press release on the citizens observatory

In 1986, as a resistance action to the establishment of a McDonald's in Rome, Carlo Petrini and a group of activists gave rise to the Slow Food movement, which opposes the standardization of taste in gastronomy and seeks to recover the leisure time we have lost in modern industrial society. Today this philosophy has spread to the whole world, proposes to recover the role of food as an element of family and community unity and joy, support for regional and traditional cuisine, small scale production without agrochemicals, and regeneration.

Due to the focus of our work at the Institute of Nature and Society of Oaxaca, we feel great affinity with the movement of slow food, since we agree to promote the practice of a different quality of life, based on respect for natural rhythms. In our project we have been working for years in the Central Valleys to achieve a paradigm shift that evokes the sacred meaning of water and its quality as a fragile and precious element, with the goal of regenerating the natural and social fabric of the basin. We realized that the metaphor of fast food could be applied very well to water: the industrial society has not only accelerated work, production and distribution of food, but has produced drastic changes in the water cycle or hydrological cycle.

We have thus been able to refine the comprehension of the water crisis in the region: instead of understanding it as a result of scarcity, we see it as an excess of fast water, which arrives and goes quickly during the rainy season, and what we lack is slow water, water that was once an integral part of healthy ecosystems, was maintained in them and could be used throughout the year in varying forms and quantities.

As a metaphor, Slow Water, original creation of  INSO, captures the technical and social dimensions of the solutions for the water crisis that affects us in Oaxaca, but also billions of people around the world, because it tells us what we have to do and with whom we should do it: on the one hand we must promote land use techniques and practices that transform fast water into slow; on the other, it requires the participation of all social actors, especially the communities in the upper part of the watershed, which is where we should start to slow water.

The central idea of good practices of slow water is regeneration, an effort to repair ecological systems in favor of natural processes and not against them. We also assume that people are an integral part of those systems. This is key: only if we perceive ourselves as an integral part of the delicate weave of life will we be able to heal their processes, because we will understand that we are healing ourselves.

Thank you for being part of this regeneration and slow water efforts!