The flow of water has shaped much of human history. Where our cities are built, where our crops are grown, how information spreads. The interconnectedness of our water ways is something that can so clearly be seen as a pivotal factor in human evolution. Before trains, planes, and automobiles water was the way we traveled. Most major civilizations are still located on coasts to profit from trade.
Water was and always has been the purveyor of life. Because it is not just our lives that flowing water dictates. Salmon travel from sea to natal stream every year, traveling thousands of miles of lakes, rivers, and creeks. Turtles, sharks, rays, whales; most charismatic marine life you can think of travels across vast bodies of water. They follow the seasons, the breeding grounds, the resources, but for whatever reason they operate by, they follow the flow of water.
The fundamental chemical properties of water also make it the best conveyor of minerals, ions, and nutrients. Anyone who has had any experience in chemistry knows the saying “water is the universal solvent” because, well, it dissolves everything. Water is responsible for carrying vital compounds between environments from mountain streams to the deepest points of the ocean. It is the great connector of environments, sharing wealth around the globe. The ability of water to carry these compounds is a requirement for so much of the life around us. The distribution of nutrients sustains a balanced and thriving ecosystem. However, water’s greatest strength has become its greatest weakness.
Water’s capacity to dissolve natural compounds extends to other not-so natural compounds. As rain falls from the sky and travels downstream collecting its gifts of natural minerals and nutrients, it picks up other things along the way. It collects the sediments off eroding banks, the runoff from construction sites, the fertilizer and pesticides from the megafarm, the manure from the cattle, it absorbs the pollution in the atmosphere from factories and cars, the sewage and waste from our cities. The water flows relentlessly downstream, oblivious to the contaminated load that it delivers.
As water slows, it releases the packages it carries into the bottom of the watersheds. Sediments pile up, making thick soups of mud and chemicals that suck in the waders of conservation students and bury alive the critters living on their banks and floors. The chemicals seep into the soils of the riparian zones, working their way into the bodies of plants and animals that live on its edge.
The fertilizer that the water carries triggers mass algal blooms. We’ve all seen the stagnant road-side ponds and streams that are covered in such a layer of algae that you cannot tell whether it is solid or liquid underneath it. Brown, green, orange or red, the water triggers an inherent disgust in our animalistic brains. They bloom because the nitrogen and phosphorus that make up the majority of fertilizers are limiting nutrients in the environment – all plants need them, but it is not readily available. These nutrients act as a control mechanism on unrestrained plant growth.
When these nutrients flood the system, fast growing algae explodes, dominating the environment, blocking sun to any life below the waters’ surface, blocking oxygen from reaching the watery depths. As the algae dies and falls to the bottom, anaerobic bacteria populations explode in turn, sucking all the oxygen out of the water, making it uninhabitable for any life still trying to survive. As more fertilizer flows into the waterway, the process continues to exacerbate itself. This is how we get dead-zones, hypoxic aquatic areas in which there is no oxygen, no life. The largest one in the world is in our very own Gulf of Mexico measuring 2,116 square miles.
These types of pollution are all around us. You can see it everywhere. The one of the best known examples is when Ohio’s Cuyahoga River burned in 1969. The oil slick and chemicals in the water caused the surface to catch on fire and burn for thirty minutes. And this had occurred several times before the fires gained international attention.
The Onondaga Lake of New York, a sacred site for the Haudenosaunee Nation, was once pristine and one of the most ecologically diverse sites in New England. With the rise of industrialization, factory waste was dumped into the Onondaga Lake by the millions of tons. For decades, salty chemical sludge was spilled into the clear waters of the sacred lake 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, turning the water the color of white paste. Today, the lake is a superfund site. It no longer has natural lakebeds, but wastebeds comprised entirely of toxic chemical sediments. There is little life left in the lake, none of it fit for human consumption with the staggering levels of mercury in the food chain. No amount of cleanup will likely ever make it safe for swimming.
The standard solution in western environmentalism is “the solution to pollution is dilution”. Basically, the idea is if you water pollution down enough, it will go away (pun intended). If you can lower the concentration beyond its ability to be detectable, then it is gone; out of sight out of mind. But as you can guess it is a lot more complicated than this.
Adding more water to dilute chemical pollution can work in the short term and give us better results on water quality tests, sure. But we really just end up polluting a larger quantity of water, albeit with lower concentrations. The pollution is still in the environment, it still has the ability to bioaccumulate up the food chain and get into other aquatic and terrestrial systems. And when we get to the point that the extent of dilution required is so intense, like it would be in the case of Onondaga Lake, then we are just wantonly contaminating more water, making the issue worse. Believing that we solve pollution by dilution gives us a false sense of security that we have solved a problem when we are just pushing off to a later date.
Our reliance on clean water sources at every stop in water’s long journey is not to be underestimated. We cannot survive without clean water. And that goes beyond the obvious need for hydration. Everything we know about how the world works, every basic thing we demand as humans is dependent on water’s ability to flow and carry out its natural duties. Without clean water we have no plants, no crops, no agriculture. We are the only planet in our solar system with free-flowing surface water. Otherwise, we would be a desert, we would be Mars. You don’t see a lot of trees, birds, bugs, or humans on Mars.