Clean water, like clean air, should be an inalienable right for all human beings. And yes, it should be free.
Come on, let’s bite the bullet now and decide that we don’t want our children and our children’s children killing each other over clean water. Hell, they still might have to regardless of what we do given the amount of residual toxic material out there, PCBs included.
Set the level of pollutants allowed into any water source, anywhere, at ZERO and let the world of commerce figure it out. And they will. You know it and I know it. Profits may only be 76 million per quarter and not 123 million but we will perhaps, as a species, finally be heading towards the correct fork in the road.
The technology is not an impossible hurdle. Companies – and the individuals behind them – would just have to stop seeing the Earth as a wide open sewer and dumping ground. Set a policy of zero tolerance as well – a company’s board of directors gets canned the first time a guy or gal on night shift pulls the ‘secret lever’ to release a plume into the river under the radar. Reward whistleblowers instead of allowing them to be fired. Etc, etc.
Half-assed, half-baked and half-hearted attempts at preserving our planet while keeping the major focus on ensuring the corporate world’s profits are constantly on the increase is not the way forward. Short-sighted does not begin to describe it. Allow our democratic system of governance the opportunity to finally overshadow the capitalist economic system that has sadly led / driven / facilitated our journey to the brink of something profoundly bad. And, of course, hope that it is not already too late. - Hudson
The following text is from “Coming Together For Clean Water” courtesy of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Although tremendous strides have been made in the supply of safe water in the last 40 years, new challenges are also arising. Nutrients, sediments, and novel synthetic pollutants, such as endocrine disruptors and nano pollutants, are posing new challenges for the scientific and management community alike. Human health measures for contaminants are exceeded in one fifth of stream samples, and one third of groundwater wells collected by USGS watershed studies. Human health benchmarks for pesticides and nitrogen are exceeded in 7 percent of urban stream samples. Mercury and PCBs were detected in all fish tissue samples and nearly 50 percent of the nation’s lakes have mercury fish tissue concentrations above EPA recommended limits. PCBs exceeded EPA recommended limits in 71 percent of lakes.
The amount of nitrogen and phosphorus pollution entering our waters has escalated dramatically. Nutrient pollution is now one of the costliest and most challenging environmental problems we face. The degradation of groundwater and surface water, including drinking water supplies, due to excess levels of nitrogen and phosphorus in our nation’s water has been studied and documented extensively.4 Streams and lakes with high levels of nitrogen or phosphorus are more than twice as likely to have degraded biology.5 Following current U.S. population growth estimates, nutrient pollution—from urban storm-water runoff from existing and new development, municipal wastewater discharges, air deposition, agricultural livestock activities and row-crop run-off—is expected to grow as well.
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