Who Owns the Sky? What Makes Me, Me? And Other Interesting Questions

Along a great river, there are two villages.

The first one, way up river, is a farming village full of...

well, farmers.

Now, this village isn't a very happy place.

There's never enough water to feed the crops

and the people are very hungry.

Rotten crops, rumbling tums, bad tempers. You get the idea.

However, some way down river,

there's a fishing village full of...

well, fisher-people.

Now, they depend on the river for all their food,

and they have lots of lovely fish to eat.

But one day... Oh no!

They discover that their lovely fish-filled river

has dried up completely.

No water, nothing. No fish at all, not even a goldfish.

With no fish to eat, people start to go hungry.

And so, a fearless fisher-girl from the village sets off

to find out why the river has dried up.

Packing the last of the fish paste sandwiches,

she follows the dry river all the way to the farmers' village.

There, she meets a farmer boy. "Welcome to our village," he says.

"It's a great place.

"We have plenty to eat and our crops have lots of water,

"all thanks to our dam."

The fisher-girl is horrified.

"You've stolen our water," she says.

What do you think?

I think that the reason why the fisher-girl thinks that

the farmer's stolen the water is because she's always had the water.

And the fact that it's gone is really different to her.

And it makes her think someone's took it. So it's not necessarily stealing.

It's just taking more of it. It's hers and the farmers'.

They've taken the water.

They haven't stolen it because it's a resource,

while stealing is you're stealing it. It's a property of somebody's.

I can go and take a rock. I can take natural things.

Nobody owns the sky or the river

because they have both been there forever.

The fisher-girl explains to the farmer boy how the dam has

stopped the river flowing down to their village.

She tells him all about her village going hungry

because they have no more fish. The farmer boy feels bad.

He hadn't thought about how this would affect his neighbours.

And then he has an idea.

"Why don't the fisher-people just come and live with us?"

The fisher-girl isn't sure this will solve the problem.

After all,

the fisher-people have lived in their village for hundreds of years.

Everything they do is based around fish and fishing.

If the fisher-people come and live with the farmers,

they'll have to change their entire way of life.

Not only that, even if the fisher-people come to

the farming village, will the farmers welcome them?

It's an awful lot of new mouths to feed, for a start.

Well, there are a lot of things to consider here.

They are selfish because to have...

just to keep one thing for yourself, it's not right. You should share.

I mean in the sense of natural, you can share. You can share water.

Well, no, because the reason why is

because it wasn't actually for himself, what he did.

It's because for the crops to grow, and the crops don't actually

belong to him because everyone's going to eat it anyway.

So actually, I think he's not being selfish.

If the fisher-people move,

they'll have to spend more money on building houses.

And also, they'll, like... they fish. They don't know how to farm.

So it might not... It might be kind of harder to get jobs there.

And I don't think they would actually like it.

So maybe, the farmer boy should think about it a little bit

because if it was him, I don't think he would move.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd