One morning, I biked up the hill from the Trondheim apartment, following one of the bike paths that crisscross the city and its roads. A fine morning. Eventually the path gave out onto a narrow winding but well paved road. The road led up to a large lake, Jonsvannet (John's lake), which I remembered from a map. I stopped biking and sat for a while on a beach by an old boat house.
In Norway one is always close to water...the sea, fjords, lakes, streams, ponds...reflecting, when the waves are not breaking or when the sun is gone, the sky above. An constant reminder that I live in a desert where we call our small stream, the Poudre, a "river." Yet some of my cousins expressed surprise on how much water we use in the United States to shower, for example, or to flush the toilet. In hotels and many homes, for example, there is a large and a small setting for flushing the toilet...using one or the other depending upon whether you just urinated or dumped a load. In the case below from a hotel in Drammen, there is a big circle and a little circle which lets you decide each time. Excuse my reflection as I am not used to photographing toilet fixtures.
I guess the point is that the value of conservation is not related to how much of some resource you have but rather conservation has its own intrinsic value in and of itself. At least in some societies.
