Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

No, I’m not making this up.  Here’s the stuff of a scary Hollywood movie.  Fish have been found in the Potomac River around Washington DC and in its tributaries that have combined male and female traits — male fish bearing eggs.  This one was scary enough to warrant front page coverage, atop the fold, in the Washington Post on Wednesday.

“The fish, smallmouth and largemouth bass, are naturally males but for some reason are developing immature eggs inside their sex organs.”

What?!

Well, read it and weep.  I have a feeling that the Potomac is not an aberration, that one could find this sort of thing happening in rivers throughout the country.  Researchers believe the cause is some kind of toxic contaminant that is wreaking havoc with the hormonal systems of the fish, what are called ‘endocrine disruptors’.

This is our drinking water, folks — source for millions of people in the greater DC area.  The jursidictions that take water for drinking out of the Potomac and its tributaries include DC, Montgomery, Prince Georges and Frederick counties in Maryland, and the northern Virginia suburbs.

Worse yet, despite years of pressure to deal with pollution, no one seems to know the source of the problem nor how it impacts human health.  In this linked article, one of the local water officials comforts us by telling us not to worry because human beings are so much bigger than fish, so it would take large amounts to harm us.  Oh yea, this is comforting.  Thank you for that.

Note that the EPA was given the responsibility by Congress ten years ago to ’identify which chemicals are endocrine disruptors.’  Surprise, surprise — not a single test has been conducted yet!

Now many of us are trying to wean this society off of bottled water, what amounts to privatizing of drinking water.  Plastic bottles are made with oil, and a huge amount of fossil fuel-based energy goes into their production and recycling.  Meanwhile, the vast majority of plastic bottles are NOT recycled, they are discarded, ending up in landfills or incinerators.  Bottled water is not government-tested for quality, either, so we don’t really know exactly what we’re drinking.

Here’s one place you can learn more about the waste and asburdity of bottled water consumption.

So when we turn back to our local waters sources, many of us now using filters, we would like to believe we are not drinking toxic chemicals.

Safe drinking water is not a privilege, and it should certainly not be a commodity for profit-making; it is a right, necessary for life.  It is an obligation of government to enforce safe water standards, to go after the polluters, to make sure that what we put in our bodies every day is not wreaking havoc with our hormonal systems, or causing cancer cells to take off.  The water we drink should not be making us sick, should not be endangering our health.

Instead of putting energy and money into purchasing bottled water, we could turn that energy into fighting politically for access to clean water for everyone.

Water is life, says this web site, and I put here a quote from the linked paper:

Alarming Facts

• If present consumption patterns continue, two out of every three persons on Earth will live in water-stressed conditions by the year 2025. (United Nations Environment Program)
  
• At least 1 billion people must walk three hours or more to obtain drinking water. Nearly 2% of U.S. homes have no running water. In Mexico, 15% of the population must haul or carry water. (National Geographic Society)
  
• In a one-hundred-year period, an average water molecule spends 98 years in the ocean, 20 months as ice, only about two weeks in lakes and rivers, and less than a week in the atmosphere.

• By 2050, per capita water supply is predicted to fall, leaving anywhere from 2 billion to 7 billion people with water scarcity (CBC News)