Another time, a God's eye stared at me from a pool in a Maine rock, scraped out by a glacier 10,000 years ago. Ponds, lakes, rivers, swamps, aquifers, clouds, air . Our planet is truly the water planet. But not all the water is for drinking. And less than 3 percent is fresh water, mainly locked up deep underground and as ice at the poles and in glaciers .
Fresh water is everywhere.
Listen to its many voices . . . Listen to a church bell clanging . T hrough our long history, humans have flourished on fresh water. From the ages of rock caves and mud huts, through the ages of copper, of bronze, of iron . . . Egyptian slaves building pyramids needed fresh water, as did cathedral sculptors, and sailors discovering new rivers.