rüffer&rub visionär / Every Drop Counts

"The world - and especially the water forming the base of its beauty and of life on it - is miraculously beautiful when viewed from space. When seen on earth, close-up, this "blue miracle" is revealed to be so very vulnerable. And this look at water shows what our global civilization has wrought with life and water on it, how unequally this civilization has divided them into the fortunate and unfortunate, the rich and the poor, overabundance and drought, nature preserved and nature desecrated, ownership of water rights and lack of such, and freely-usable waterways and those owned by individuals. These inequalities require of the world their being remedied - and not tomorrow or the day after, but, rather, right now, today.

My dedication to protecting water expresses my philosophy towards life, which is that each living being has a right to it and therefore to water. This maxim may sound banal. It is anything but that. And assuring this right is so very difficult. Making appeals is easy. Turning them into effective action is the true challenge in a world that is an ocean of global needs and of individual interests. This book represents my answer to the question 'what we as individuals can do to improve the world's caring for its precious resource of water."

Preface [by Anne Rüffer]

Prologue
You are naive a passion is born
No blue blood, but a blue miracle
Would I swim in pools, I wouldn t go on swimming expeditions
Why does water need our protection?
Nobody is waiting with bated breath for your project, Ernst

From fresh to salt water the expeditions
Il miracul blau Grischun 2008
Le miracle bleu Suisse 2010
Das blaue Wunder Rhein 2012
Het blauwe wonder Rijn 2014
Il miracolo blu Milano 2015

The ambassador s double standard
The dream of a World Water Center
Let s change the world
Epilogue

Appendix
Annotations
Photographs: credits
Thanks
Biography of the author