Most of the living tissue of every human being is composed of water, constituting about 92 percent of blood plasma, 80 percent of muscle tissue, and 60 percent of red blood cells and over half of most other tissues. Water is an important component of the tissues of most living things. This (in its unpolluted, natural state) odorless, tasteless, transparent substance is the world’s most familiar and abundant liquid, covering about 70 percent of the surface of the earth, some of it in solid form (ice). In varying amounts it exists as well in the atmosphere. Water is the lifeblood of planet earth.
Put another way: as goes water, so goes life on earth. Water is the ultimate indicator.
Forty five years ago all indications were that the water of the U.S. wasn’t doing too well. Some people knew that, but many more were too busy or detached to know it, or, perhaps, too invested in the status quo of industrial pollution to want to know. It took something dramatic to get the country’s attention. On June 22, 1969, a train on a bridge above the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio dropped a few sparks into the waters of that river which were so polluted with industrial wastes that these sparks caught them on fire. Flames roared fifty feet into the air from these waters, and the images from this event were covered in the national media. Even the busy, the detached and the overly invested could not ignore the wrongness of the waters of life on fire. Rivers are supposed to nurture life, not burn it. Water is for putting out fires, not fueling them.
The public indignation over the Cuyahoga River fire eventually led to legislation known as the Clean Water Act, one of the most successful environmental laws in American history. It was enacted in October 1972 in a sadly rare example of the U.S. Congress exhibiting more courage than callowness by overriding Richard Nixon’s veto. At the time only 30 to 40 percent of America’s rivers, lakes and coastal waters were considered safe for fishing or swimming. Thanks to the Clean Water Act of 1972, today nearly 60 percent of the country’s waters are considered safe.
While having 60 percent of the waters of life safe to swim in and fish from is better than 30 percent, it still means that at least 40 percent of the waters of America are dangerously polluted. 40 percent of our country’s lifeblood is toxic. Whether this number is acceptable can be viewed, I suppose, as a personal decision except for those persons adversely affected by other people’s decisions; but with the energy industry’s assault on environmental regulations in full swing and escalating every day that percentage will climb. We are in the process of reverting back to the water quality standards of 50 years ago, and each of us is mostly composed of water. The implications are obvious.
Water is the ultimate indicator.
Industry is the largest polluter, but not the only one. Many communities discharge untreated or only partially treated sewage into waterways, threatening themselves and their neighbors and all life downstream. Thorough treatment of sewage destroys most disease-causing bacteria, but does not take care of viruses and viral illnesses. Most sewage treatment does not remove phosphorus compounds from detergents which cause eutrophication of lakes of ponds. That is, it kills them.
Other contributors to the mix of undrinkable, unfishable, unusable waters include runoff from highways with oil and lead from automobile exhausts, construction site sediments, acids and radioactive wastes from mining operations, pesticide and fertilizer residues and animal wastes from farms, feedlots, dairies and hog factories. Almost all water pollutants are hazardous to all life forms, including humans. Sodium is implicated in cardiovascular disease, nitrates in blood disorders. Mercury and lead are known to cause nervous disorders. Many contaminants are carcinogens. Polychlorinated biphenyl compounds (PCBs), used in lubricants and many kinds of plastics and adhesives, cause liver and nerve damage, skin eruptions, vomiting, fever, diarrhea and fetal abnormalities. PCBs and DDT, banned in the U.S. since the same year the Clean Water Act was enacted but still manufactured in several other countries, are widespread in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Dysentery, salmonella and hepatitis are just three of the maladies transmitted by sewage in drinking and bathing water.
Once pollutants reach underground water tables it is somewhere between very difficult to impossible to correct, and it spreads over wide areas.
In western America we have historically tended to take water for granted since we had an abundance of it nearby that was safe for drinking, bathing and fishing. And if water wasn’t handy we could always build a few dams, dig a few canals, buy a few water rights and politicians from the next state over and get on with business as usual which is often confused or conflated with progress.
But that dynamic and reality has changed, even if human expectations have not.
If history is any indication, it will take another Cuyahoga River fire type of incident to shake the citizenry out of its lethargy about the state of its waters. In the meantime, and, in fact, in all times, each and all of us affect the state of our rivers and streams and lakes and oceans, and we are responsible for them. That’s because we are responsible for the lifestyles we lead, the cars we drive, the products we buy, the companies and industries we support, the food we eat and our knowledge of where it comes from, and, of course, for the people we elect to manage our government according to the dictates of the industries that pay for their campaigns. These things affect the quality of the waters of life, and water is the ultimate indicator.
And what water indicates is a big, big, fracking problem, brothers and sister, fellow inhabitants of planet earth. What are we going to do about it?