Jordan River Chilly and Cold
Chills the Body not the Soul
The Jordan River has done much more for Israel ever since its people settled on its bank. It was then, and now, the primary source of water for the nation. In new Testament times Jerusalem was golden with milk and honey blest. Today it has exhausted every technique for optimum utilization of the resource and is turning to the reclaiming of sewage, desalination of sea water, and conservation. Proposed projects and facilities are contested by the Palestinians who claim a right to the Jordan and such new water as may be reclaimed. The prognosis for the future is bleak and foreboding.
Israel problem is the problem for every city in the world that has relied on a river as its water supply. In the first half of the 19th century my great grandfather the Reverend Elijah Richardson Craven produced three sons who in his view were predestined by God. Charles Edmiston Craven was to a greatpreacher who would revise and modernize the Presbyterian Psalter. John Craven was predestined to be a Naval Officer during the Spanish American War and to be the commanding officer of the Battleship New Jersey of Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet. The third son Alfred Wingate Craven was destined to be an Engineer and the Chief Engineer of the Great Croton Aqueduct that supplied all of the water for the City of New York.
In the 1840’s the cities of America were the among the most well planned and beautiful cities in the world. There was no electricity, no steam and transportation was by horse and carriage, by river boat and sail. We all know this world through the novels of Jane Austin and the movies derived there from. In 1844 New York City pioneered in the construction of the first Croton aqueduct carrying from upstate in parallel with the Hudson River. Then came the industrial revolution with its demand for freshwater to cool the engines driven by steam.
1877 the Croton Aqueduct was reconstructed and Chief Engineer Craven designed it to last one hundred years to the day in 1977. It carried 36 million gallons of water per day.
In the fall of 1944 I was a student at Cornell and took a course in Sanitary Engineering. I learned that the Rivers and Lakes and Reservoirs of New York State were adequate for the population as long as water usage was 30 gallons per capita per day. That meant that Croton could still serve one million citizens of New York City per day.
In 1977 true to his design the Croton aqueduct began to crumble and decay. The population of New York City had more than doubled. Machines of every kind appeared together with subways and skyscrapers and elevators and most of all and worst of all (as this congregation knows) universal air conditioning. Water consumption in New York City alone has risen to more than 200 gallons per capita per day. The current design practice is to assume 300 gallons per capita per day.
Today our Nation faces the same problem as Israel and is exploring the same solution. The prognosis for the future is bleak and foreboding.
What fools we mortals be. Ours is the water planet. The earth is a thermodynamic machine. The hot source is the hot water created at the equator at the surface of the ocean. The cold source is the arctic and antarctic deep ocean water which was created at the poles and flows back down to the equator. When the hot water mixes with the cold coherent energy is generated in the form of the wind the waves the rain the monsoons the hurricanes the clouds all sorts and all quantities of fresh water utilized in natural waves to produce the plants and the animals of this earth.
We have a shortage of wise leaders but we have some. In 1974 Governor Burns said let us build a laboratory and bring up some of this Deep Ocean Water and let us see what we can do with it. So a laboratory was built and Governor Burns died and it was not until 1982 that Deep Ocean Water was brought to the surface. I was President of NELH until 1992 and by that time we had learned all sorts of things you could do with deep ocean water and so I was fired. I came back the next day with a new Corporation (and permission from the ethics commission) called the Common Heritage Corporation with the goal of managing innovation for the benefit of the common heritage. We started out with the idea that we would create mini habitats that would be environmentally sustainable utilizing only the sun, the deep ocean water and the lava of a coastal desert where there was no rain
. Central Union is no stranger to this facility. It has been blessed many timees by the ministers of this church and it has been visited many times by the young people under the leadership of George Scott. Many members of Central Union are (or were) officers or Board Members of the Corporation. When the young people visit our demonstration facility we ask them “What are the requirements for a habitat? The have been schooled to reply – Water, Food, Clothing and Shelter. We tell them that is the requirement for a jail. I tell them that I was a battleship sailor at sea in World War II for more than three months and I had Spam for breakfast, lunch and dinner but I wanted the Liberty to eat what I wanted to eat and I wanted shore leave as another form of Liberty. So if our habitat has all the emoluments of life and Liberty it must also have pursuits of happiness. They students are then ready to visit the facility. They first encounter our Skywater facility which extracts fresh water from the atmosphere in a manner that produces the exact equivalent of two inches of rain per day over the area that it serves. This makes it the wettest spot on earth.
They next see the hurricane tower which simulates a real hurricane that produces freshwater from water vapor extracted from the sea. They are then exposed to aquaculture and air conditioning and enough electricity to operate electronic devices in a thermoelectric device with no moving parts. The shelter of the habitat is a tent but our greatest miracle is cold water agriculture in which crops are grown on the coastal desert without irrigation water. Plastic pipes embedded at the root zone carry cold deep ocean sea water through the garden without the water touching the soil. Thus all of the water for agriculture is produced by condensation. We have bread makers to make bread with the herbs and vegetables of the garden . Then there is eco turf and croquet courts, the mini soccer field, the PGA standard golf tee and green. All the emoluments of life liberty and the pursuits of happiness but to what end.
To feed the hungry and the thirsty. So we went to Ebye. An island in the Marshals that should be well known to this congregation. 18,000 souls are there, one half of them children. Nearly all are members of the Congregational church. Their fathers work for the United States Government but are not allowed to use the post exchanges for the economic purchase of the needs of life. The stores in Ebye are run by the leaders of the Marshallese Society and the cost of everything is higher than costs in Hawaii. The children are malnourished and their primary food is Coca Cola and Popcorn. We presented the Common Heritage concept to President Note and he authorized us to put in a facility at Ebye and at Majuro. To date we have been unable to raise the smallest amount of the money needed to carry the mission out.
So what ? So why did Jesus turn the water into wine. Did he recognize the need for the people to pursue happiness for as the good book says wine makes glad the heart of man. Or did he foresee the last supper –Likewise after supper he took the cup saying “Drink ye all of this, for this is my Blood which is shed for you and for many.”
Can the sacrament be administered in the Common Heritage Corp. facility? Isn’t it a necessity. Was it for this reason that we were led to use the coldwater agriculture process to grow grape vines that produce three crops of grapes per year. Perhaps So. Our first wine (made with oceanic water) was to appear in a few months. But our facility got lots of praise but absolutely no support. Therefore the facility has been dismantled. Nobody knows if the vineyard has died
But the Board of Directors of CHC will not surrender. We know that our facility can be the seed for facilities throughout the world which will enable the world to evolve into an environmentally sustainable habitat for all its people. We`know what Christ meant when he asked if we had ever seen the hungry? We know that he turned the water into wine to feed those who “hunger and thirst for righteousness.” Sooner or later humanity will respond with more than token response. Then and only then we shall sing
Deep Ocean Water Chilly and cold Chills the body and not the soul.