Water, Water Everywhere and Ne’er a Drop to Drink
On Saturday a friend and I drove through coastal California, from Santa Barbara to San Francisco. Before we left, she began to fret about water. She wanted it filtered, and we couldn’t find any. Finally I commented that since most of the world’s people have to worry about shit and bugs in their water, I found it hard to worry about ours not being filtered when at least it’s clean.
Not three hours later I found myself eating my own words.
We stopped at a gas station in King City. It was 100 degrees. The sort of heat that makes you crave to stick your head under the tap and gulp, right after you wash your hands. But a hand-made sign over the wash basin read, DO NOT DRINK THE WATER, AS IT IS CONTAMINATED: HIGH NITRATE LEVELS. It seemed that I had been wrong.
In ‘Earth Democracy”, Dr Vandana Shiva tells the story of how, when Coca Cola opened a bottling plant in a rural hamlet in Kerala, India, the women succeeded in shutting it down. Coke extracted so much water (1.5 million litres a day) that they lowered the water table from 100 to 150 feet, threatening the local water supply and ecology as a whole. Coke also dumped contaminants, so that the water became toxic, and small water holes dried up. The women had to walk miles to get water.
The women started a sit-in. Demonstrations happened. Gradually a huge movement evolved, and finally, after only two years of action (though that’s a lot of miles walked and a lot of toxic water drunk) the plant got shut down.
Why don’t we react in this country? Why aren’t we horrified at the fact that our water–in a rural area of one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world–has already become poisonous?
Half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan observed, of television, that the medium–not just its content–is a message. Young people today (and I count everyone under 40) have grown up with computers. If you’re younger than 30, you may have been educated by them. Constant exposure to PCs and Macs insidiously and unequivocally teaches us that choice equates with selecting the option you want from a menu. It educates us to think inside the box. Taught this way, we never learn to wander–or even wonder–outside the grid that has been pre-programmed for us. Is this one reason why we fail, on a massive scale, to make the link between the cheap vegetables and fruit we can buy at supermarkets, with the nitrogen-fertilizer-based, stupid-irrigation, mono-culture agriculture that is poisoning our land?
What do people in King City do? Buy all their water bottled? Install filters?
The survival of our planet is continually sold to us as consumer choice. Buy organic. Buy green. Choose this water, in these bottles. But this is a prime example of how much vaster the issues are. This is not a matter of consumer choice; it’s a matter for government, a matter for vast and sweeping changes of policy on a national and an international scale.
While I waited in line in front of the sink in that gas station, I had a sudden flash vision of a post-apocalyptic America, in which desolated people wander over a dead landscape, where nothing grows in the exhausted, salinated, eroded soil and even the water–surely a gift of god if there ever were one–is unfit to drink. How can we stop that vision from becoming a reality? We now have a president who will respond. What do we want to say to him?
Tags: business, environment, pollution, water
Jul 14, 2009
Being just a little bit older (though still a hiker and backpacker) I remember a time when you could still dip your hand into any wild stream/river in California and drink the water, a time when current circumstances would have been unthinkable. Yes, there would be stories of a water source, here or there, that was – sadly – contaminated; so rare that you could actually feel the grief of an individual spring being poisoned. How circumstances have come to what they are is difficult to deal with. I feel the burden of being a member of a generation that allowed this to happen, but I also acknowledge the reality of the fact that there is only so much an individual can do in the face of wealthy and sprawling and uncaring corporations. Even groups of us, saving this environment, or that one, could not save everything that was needing saving.
However, I still do not despair, totally. I still think there is hope for massive action. But, I don’t know how to get that going either. It is an eyeopener to me to consider that a generation brought up with menu options might not be as fascile to thinking outside the box, or a generation brought up on bottled water might not dream of dipping a hand in a clear, uncontaminated stream. So, I offer my memories and my dreams to help jump-start a process – and a little advice: get out there into nature young’uns, let her wrap her arms of abundance around you and show you what she has to offer. You’ll get dirty, it won’t be quite as comfortable as staying home with a bathroom down the hall, but make the jump. Because, I can almost guarantee you that before the weekend/week is over, you will have fallen in love with this mother that invented giant sequoias and delicate ferns and the tones of a creek running over stones…
Then come home and see if there is someway to join with others and pick a place that needs cleaning and do the work to get that done.
Jul 15, 2009
Hi
Very interesting and educative. That’s all for now. Thanks
Jul 15, 2009
Hi
Not very much to say for now as I am for work. Thanks
Jul 15, 2009
Jessica, I live a bit north of King City but our water is contaminated by both nitrates and arsenic. These are the consequences of corporate ag–not farming, that term is passé.
Corporate ag leases the land, so it has no reason to treat the land or the water supply with care, it ships its money elsewhere, and it leaves when things get tough.
RE Half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan observed, of television, that the medium–not just its content–is a message.
Marshall McLuan book title was “The Medium is the Massage” and by that I think he meant that we are all lulled into complacency and perhaps even apathy by the medium–or that we don’t understand the ‘message’ without understanding the limitations of the medium that delivers it.
So, the 3-minute blips on the nightly news leave out so much information, that we are dis-informed rather than informed by them.
I so appreciate your writing.
You are correct about the barren soils–corporate ag’s heavy use of nitrogen fertilizers has killed the soil microbes necessary for soil life. All we need to do to see what happens next is to look at ancient areas of agriculture–Northern Africa, the Middle East, parts of China–Iraq was the very center of agriculture and now is a desert with the Euphrates River drying up because of corporate ag practices.
We have to educate ourselves about sustainable farming very quickly, or the area of your trip in California will be desert before your children know it.
Jul 15, 2009
The problem among people in my generation (I’m a few years shy of 30), I think, is not that we have grown up with computers. If anything, computers have made many of us more aware of the world, as we get our news from global sources, friends the world over, and other sources much broader than the po-dunk local newspaper.
The problem is that throughout our entire lives, the water in our lives has been contaminated. We have *never* experienced dipping a cup into a lake or a stream and drinking without worry of what might have been dumped into it. My father would tell stories of canoeing in the border waters of Canada, and his stories inspired in me a combination of exotic awe (akin to finding a pure mountain stream like those pictured on the front of bottled water) and concern – how could he be sure it was safe to drink? Polluted water has become the norm to us, and stumbling across clean water that hasn’t been treated and/or filtered to make it that way is as foreign and fantastic as finding a unicorn in the woods. And when we do find it, we treat it with hesitation and doubt.
THAT is a shame.
Jul 15, 2009
An interesting lament on the state of affairs relative to the environment. One big problem with where we are now is that we drink the same water that we use to convey our waste, our urine and feces and whatever else we dump down the sink or toilet, to the ocean eventually. People downstream drink this water and add their waste.
Nor is government capable of cleaning up this water. There are over 5,000 man made compounds, any of which might be present in water. No…we have to step back and rethink our approach. I’m not suggesting we can redesign the system, but any smart consumer will in fact be protecting themself at their home.
Learn more about how to do that by visiting my website: http://www.cleanairpurewater.com
I, for one, do have hope.
Jim
Jul 15, 2009
i couldnt agree more that this is not a “consumer choice”. but i disagree that this is a matter for government. the government is just as responsible as the corporations. obama is a politician and to get that high you have to sell your soul. he is not a savior, there are no saviors. i think it is part of the problem to look for someone to fix the problems, or to look to the govt to fix the problems. all the govt can do and will do is bureaucratize and bureaucracy is a big part of the problem. we need to each take responsibility and take our God-given power to stand up for truth and do what is right. we need to look to ourselves and families and communities as a collective whole. we need to re-evaluate our value systems and worldviews so that we can change the direction we are heading in. right now our value system is material and our worldview is based in falsehood and myths. the myth that america is some great shining knight in armor that brings rights and freedoms to the world. if we wait around for the american govt, even with obama there, then we are in for big trouble.
Dec 15, 2009
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