Hustle and Flow: New Threats to Water
Like so many stories of modern life, this one begins with World War II. By the end of the war, the U.S. had a lot of nitrogen factories on its hands for producing TNT. American ingenuity converted them to peacetime use, making synthetic fertilizer with the nitrogen, an essential nutrient for growing food.
A revolution was born. Farmers could now work fields without the painstaking necessity of applying livestock manure. The new fertilizer created a higher-yield crop bonanza, reinventing agriculture on a major scale, Corn, wheat, soybean could become epic industries, monocrops that would feed an overpopulated world.
An Age of Depletion
The nature of modern agriculture was transformed. It also began a new and disturbing story for water, a story of depletion and poison, a complicated story. Big agriculture depended on vast water extraction or irrigation. This has caused depletion of surface water and aquifers. And fertilizer has created runoff – often poisonous nitrates and phosphorous – that go into waterways and lakes. So does toxic runoff from lawns, golf courses, highways, and sewer treatment plants.
Today some 40 percent of our surveyed lakes, rivers, and estuaries are too dirty for fishing or swimming. A main reason is “nonpoint source pollution” that goes into the waterways – diffuse pollutants and pesticides carried by rain, irrigation, and runoff across thousands of square miles upstream.
In food debates, issues of allergens, farm subsidies, junk food, or industry lobbying power have inspired an expanding galaxy of grassroots political defiance and consumer movements for healthier eating. The story of water, so far, breaks differently.
Alternative water initiatives don’t sprout up in the same way. We can’t grow or create water. It is always startling to be reminded how small is the amount of fresh water on earth (just 2.5 percent of earth’s water is fresh, and 70 percent of that is frozen in icecaps). Once it is spoiled by toxins, groundwater is difficult to clean up. Ensuring clean water requires larger, coordinated public solutions, public utilities and laws. Whole populations can suddenly be at risk. Whole populations have to work together.
For a few days in August, an entire city, Toledo, Ohio, had to shut down its municipal water supply. The irony was too big to miss. Toledo sits near the world’s largest surface fresh-water system on earth, the Great Lakes. Yet 500,000 people had to go without water because of a Lake Erie toxic algae bloom caused by runoff poisons and other sources.
Such emergencies have been predicted for years. In 2009, the EPA warned that the impact of nitrogen and phosphorus pollution will only accelerate. The culprits include urban stormwater runoff, city wastewater discharges, livestock manure, row-crop runoff, and nitrogen oxides in the air that land in the water. As the U.S. population increases, all these are expected to intensify.1
A few weeks later, the Toledo debacle was no longer news. Media interest moved on. Was it a freak event? Was anything learned? Commentators hoped Toledo would be a tipping point for a stronger national push against runoff poisons after years of limited government authority and resistance from industries. A new bill called the Safe and Secure Drinking Water Act started gaining momentum. It would order the EPA to better monitor toxins in the drinking water.
Perhaps bottled water, an icon of contemporary convenience and freedom, serves as a symbol of false security. The easy availability of bottled water can leave the impression that we don’t need public solutions to water problems: Everybody can just buy their own. It’s an illusion, of course. Bottled water doesn’t come from a magic aquifer. But ideas like watershed management and infrastructure upgrades sound too tedious and time-consuming in this extended libertarian moment. Regulation is on the defensive.
On the Case
Nevertheless, various groups are on the case, organizations that keep the human right to water in view on various fronts – including the Soil and Water Conservation Society, Food and Water Watch, the Global Interfaith Initiative to Promote Safe Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH). Some oppose fracking because of the impact of such oil and gas drilling on the water table. Others want to enhance safe water for children’s health. Others work for better cover crop and soil health management, helping farmers reduce runoff. The 2009 EPA “Urgent Call to Action” recommends national coordination of accountability procedures and corporate stewardship.
Healing the waters will require a broader horizon than tougher regulation of nonpoint source pollution. We must also look to the denizens of the natural world itself, says author Alice Outwater – bison, prairie dogs, beavers, alligators, and other creatures, nature’s environmental engineers who are under siege by human industrialization. When they are allowed to, they help do nature’s work of cleansing and filtering, she says.
“Without beavers, water makes its way too quickly to the sea; without prairie dogs, water runs over the surface instead of sinking into the aquifer; without bison, there are no groundwater-recharge ponds in the grasslands and the riparian zone is trampled; without alligators, the edge between the water and land is simplified,” she writes.2
The work of vigilance of healthy water extends across the states, across generations, across species, and world religions too. The future story of correcting environmental abuses will require partners from sea to shining sea.
Ray Waddle is editor of Reflections. He is the author of a new book, Undistorted God (Abingdon Press).
1. State-EPA Nutrient Innovations Task Group, August 2009. For instance, animal agriculture produces one billion tons of manure a year – eight million pounds of nitrogen per day, three million pounds of phosphorus per day. Much of it goes for organic fertilizer, but significant portions ends up in our waters, the report says.
2. Alice Outwater, Water: A Natural History (BasicBooks, 1996), pp. 175-176.
Sidebar: “Water for Life”: A World Ethic Emerging
The reality is stark: 2.5 billion people have no usable, hygienic toilet, and 1.1 billion practice open defecation.
The result: rampant disease and hazard. Women especially are vulnerable when they have to relieve themselves in public. They risk rape and abuse when there’s no access to private sanitation conditions.
Recent United Nations reports sketch a global trauma. Almost half of developing countries suffer from health problems caused by poor water and sanitation. Unhealthy water and poor sanitation, taken together, are the planet’s second biggest killer of children.
The world is waking up to these dire conditions. The moral blueprint of the United Nations’ Millennial Development Goals, first forged in 2000, is seeing progress. MDGs include reducing poverty and child mortality, combatting HIV/AIDS, and promoting gender equality and earth sustainability. Another aim: 75 percent of the world should see improved sanitation by 2015.
By now, some 2.3 billion people have new access to better sources of drinking water. More than half of the world’s population, almost four billion people, can now claim the highest level of water access – a piped water connection in their homes. Open defecation rates have declined to 14 percent.
Nevertheless, some MDG goals are falling short – notably the sanitation target, a lack of toilets and hand-washing access for fighting disease.
Globally, more than 80 percent who practice open defecation live in 10 countries: China, Ethiopia, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Sudan, Niger, Nepal, Indonesia, and Mozambique.
Acknowledging the scale of the crisis, the UN augmented the MDG water goal in 2003 by proclaiming 2005-2015 as the International Decade for Action: “Water for Life.”
One leading advocate says the MDGs have been historic and inspirational but also have a blind spot: Despite their ambitions, they didn’t address ways to reduce brutal inequalities. The most disadvantaged groups, often in rural areas, have fallen behind in access to safe drinking water and sanitation.
“Substantial disparities exist, between rich and poor, between and within countries, and between those living in rural areas and those in formal urban settings,” says Catarina de Albuquerque, UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation.*
Water use is about 200-300 liters a person per day in most European countries, while the average is less than 10 liters a day in Mozambique.
“People lacking access to improved water in developing countries consume far less, partly because they have to carry it over long distances and water is heavy,” a UN report says.**
The ordeal of inequality persists in various regional surveys. In Senegal, a study of 5,000 schools showed there was no water supply at most of them, and no sanitation facilities at almost half of them. Among the schools with sanitation, only half had separate facilities for boys and girls.
The result: “Girls chose not to utilize these facilities, either because they did not want to risk being seen to use the toilet, or because they were warned that these facilities were not private or clean enough. Girls also avoided drinking water at school to avoid urination, thereby becoming dehydrated and unable to concentrate,” the report says.
Such imbalances exact other costs. People living in the slums of Jakarta, Manila, and Nairobi pay five to 10 times more for water than those living in high income areas in those same cities and more than consumers in London or New York, the UN reports. In Manila, the cost of connecting to the utility represents about three months’ wages for the poorest 20 percent of households. In urban Kenya, it is six months’ income.
The UN and other organizations argue for standards that define the right to clean water:
• Between 50-100 liters of water per person per day are needed to meet basic needs, says the World Health Organization.
• The water source should be within about half a mile of home, and collection time should not exceed 30 minutes. Yet the average distance that women in Africa and Asia walk to collect water is nearly four miles.
• Water costs should not exceed 3 percent of household income.
Through 2015, the goal of “Water for Life” is to quicken world commitment to long-term sustainable water management and improved sanitation. Initiatives include international conferences, governmental action, educational outreach, and congregational advocacy.
The process is now underway to give shape to the successor to the MDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals. An international symposium will be held in Sydney, Australia, in November to work out a framework for these goals into the future.