Water Story
Cancer Makes a Very Bad Beginning to a Story
Four years ago, I begged my dentist to do a biopsy on a sore that had been growing on my tongue for several months. He was reluctant, certain that my insurance would not pay for the procedure and just as certain that there was no way the sore on my tongue could be anything but benign. "Just wear your mouth guard; I'm sure you are chewing on your tongue in your sleep," he reassured me as he ushered me toward the exit. I went home, and I wore my mouth guard at night, but the sore got worse, not better. I started to lose weight because it hurt so bad to eat. I went back to the dentist and demanded that he give me a referral to an oral surgeon. The oral surgeon gave me the same run around when I saw her and asked her to perform the biopsy. I told her I would pay out of pocket, that I really needed the peace of mind of knowing that the sore was benign. She did the biopsy. She took a large chunk out of my tongue. She put in three stitches. She told me to set up an appointment for two weeks out; we would go over the results then.
Two days later, I received a message from the oral surgeon's office to come in immediately. The message said that the doctor wanted to go over my results sooner because she needed to go out of town. I knew in my gut that this was all just a ruse. I went in to the doctor. She cried as she told me that the results came back showing that the sore was cancerous. She could not stop apologizing. The receptionists cried and apologized on my way out the door. I cried on the sidewalk just outside the oral surgeon's office. I sat down on the curb of busy Mass Ave, and I cried. My dentist called. He left a sobbing message on my voicemail, several minutes long, apologizing.
From that point on, all of the medical professionals that I dealt with wanted to know what I had done to trigger the cancer. I fielded so many questions from them and from concerned family members and friends about what risky behavior I had engaged in to make myself susceptible to oral cancer. My cancer was not caused by HPV (they test for that), but surely I must have chewed tobacco? Or consumed vats of hard liquor? I was a yoga teacher; had I developed a betel-nut chewing habit while on retreat somewhere? People are scared of cancer - understandably so - and I think there's an instinct to ward it off by assuring ourselves that we are safe from it if we live a certain way, steer clear from known carcinogens, that we can ward it off by our good deeds and rituals.
Not knowing made folks - including me - nervous. Not knowing what caused the cancer still makes it hard to assure myself that it won't come back. If there was a trigger that I could avoid, I would avoid it.
When I was diagnosed more recently with Hashimoto's thyroiditis, there was a similar search for the trigger. With autoimmune issues like Hashimoto's, the current thinking is that there is some sort of genetic predisposition and that is triggered by some environmental factor - a pollutant, virus/bacterium, or perhaps even stress.
But here's the thing: I've been sick, off and on, since 1980, and no one has ever been able to figure out why.
When the Erin Brockovich movie came out, I started to hope that, someday, someone would "Erin Brockovich" my home county and start connecting the dots. In that movie, Erin Brokovich figures out that the water was making the people of Hinkley, California sick, and she takes down the big polluter responsible. Could our water have made us sick, too?
Well Water
If you drove to where I grew up, you would likely drive from Tampa, and, from Tampa, you would drive down an old highway til you got to Mulberry. You would know when you got to Mulberry, because, from land flat from horizon to horizon, you suddenly would be greeted by giant mountains, rising up out of nowhere, flanking the road. They were nonsensical, hilarious, outrageous. And, if you had the windows down, you'd notice the change in the smell. The entire area had a scent, different from the rest of the state, sort of tangy, a bit salty, a hint of sulfur.
I grew up in Polk County, Florida on land that had been in my family since the state was opened up to anyone brave enough to relocate and settle what was, at the time, inhospitable territory. There were lots of people who had been displaced by the Civil War who were willing and able to take a chance on it, though, and my great grandfather's parents did just that. They settled on a land grant near the Peace River, and that's where my folks put a mobile home in the seventies. We drew water from a well, like a lot of folks in Polk County did at the time. The well tapped in to the aquifer - caverns filled with water that percolates down through the ground. Florida as we know it basically floats on this stuff.
Growing up in the orange grove, I drank straight from hoses that drew from our well. We harvested and ate berries from the train tracks that carried industrial waste from one coast to the other. I chewed on "pepper weed" that grew along those same tracks. I ate vegetables harvested from my great grandfather's field sandwiched between those tracks and the trailer that my family and I lived in. The oranges and the vegetables were irrigated by the well water.
My grandfather was sad that he had no easy access to the well water anymore. He had moved off of the family land to a small house within the town limits, and so he was on the municipal water supply. He was certain that the fluoride and other things that the town added to the water were going to make him sick. Whenever he visited, he drank a big glass of our well water and shared his thoughts on government control of the water.
Wells are supposed to be inspected yearly to make sure that they are safe. I'm not sure if our well got tested, but, even with a yearly test, you don't see the natural daily ebb and flow of the stuff in the water. Our water always tasted so good, clean and fresh, but sometimes it ran orange or brown. And sometimes it smelled, which folks would tell us was the nature of well water.
In 1980, I got sick, and a weird sort of sick that no one could figure out. My lymph nodes in my armpits were the size of golf balls, and I developed a rash that really never went away. The doctors thought it might be leukemia, so they ran a lot of tests. Then they thought it was nerves, so they put me on a sedative that made me very tired but did not take away the rash. I had headaches every day. We did allergy tests. We did little experiments at home - the rash went away, briefly, with a change in laundry detergent. Looked like I was allergic to phosphorus. Maybe that was all it had been?
Industry & Pollutants
There were three big industries in central Florida when I lived there: mining, cattle, and oranges. All three are mega-polluters, adding their particularly noxious byproducts to the groundwater that we all drank. And please know: we all drank it, whether it was provided by the city or via private wells. With city water, there's a record of what folks were drinking. With private wells, we can only guess. But as the water all came from the same aquifer, filtered through the same land and into the same caverns and caves, we were all drinking the same stuff.
The cattle industry creates pollution a number of ways. Ranching itself has an effect, and then the processing of the animals into usable products creates additional concerns. Runoff from ranching operations can include manure, antibiotics, hormones, fertilizers and pesticides. Orange groves were responsible for pesticide, herbicide, and fungicide runoff. And phosphate mining. Where to start? I could - and should - write a whole article about the process. It is a destroyer of worlds. Even as a child, witnessing the destruction of the mines broke my heart. My parents would remind me that our food was put on the table by the phosphate industry. Bumper stickers on every other car in my home town read: "I DIG PHOSPHATE". The phosphate industry was the largest employer - by far - in our area when I was a child. If you want to know more, this article does a good job briefly describing the damage. More information is available from The Sierra Club website. They are currently fighting to keep the mining from spreading into North Florida.
Phosphate mining is a strip mining process. They take off the land and then they leave behind sediment ponds and gypsum stacks - the towering mountains flanking the highway in Mulberry. They "reclaim" the land after it has settled for some time, but it is never taken back to its natural state. Most often, it is flattened out and turned into subdivisions or suburban sprawl. There is surprisingly little research into the short and long-term effects of the phosphate mining industry. At least that's true here in the States. A quick search reveals dozens of articles about the effects of phosphate mining in other countries (it's not good). Why are we not running research into this industry here in the States?
Another source of pollution at the time was wide-spread use of insecticides. Trucks would roll through town in the evenings spraying a thick cloud of chemicals to kill the mosquitoes. Crop dusters flew overhead at times. We sprayed our houses for roaches and other pests. But that's not all: the state even allowed testing of Agent Orange for a time. All of that stuff can find its way down through the ground and into the water.
When I was a child, there were dozens and dozens of sinkholes in the area. Local news stations loved broadcasting footage of entire used car lots getting swallowed up by sinkholes. They made quite a story. Sinkholes happen because the water caverns beneath the ground fall in. Often this is due to overloading on the surface. Reports show that this happens underneath those towering mountains of industrial waste at phosphate facilities, underneath orange groves when they use flowing water to keep them from freezing, or even underneath roads or buildings. When the water caverns fall in and make an opening to the surface, everything that gets swallowed by the sinkhole has the potential to get into the drinking water.
There was a great report, accessible here, about the water quality around the time I was getting sick. This excerpt is from that report:
"In May 1974, water pumped from several wells near Bartow became cloudy. It was suspected that a sinkhole had developed in the bed of a nearby slime pond that contained clay waste from a phosphate processing plant. The source of the clay and its movement were not verified; however, it is feasible for such material to have been transported through highly developed solution cavities into the aquifer that is tapped by the contaminated wells. In April 1975, a sinkhole about 75 ft in diameter collapsed beneath a gypsum stack near Mulberry. Gypsum stacks are repositories for phosphate process water that is known to be highly acidic and contains dissolved solids, ions, and radioisotopes that are higher in concentration than ground water of central Florida (Miller and Sutcliffe, 1984). Water was observed flowing from the stack into the underlying limestone at about 100 to 150 gal/mm. Although no wells were reportedly contaminated, the introduction of contaminated water into the underlying aquifer system presented a potential health hazard to nearby and possibly distant consumers of water. In April 1981, flow in the Peace River about 3 mi south of Bartow was totally captured by two sinkholes that opened in the riverbed. The mean discharge estimated from the U.S. Geological Survey gage at Bartow was 17 ftVs. Flow into the sinkholes consisted almost entirely of treated wastewater from various Polk County cities, phosphate operations, and other industries. The sinkholes functioned as a source of contamination to the ground water because natural filtration through overlying sands was bypassed. Eventually, the sinkholes became clogged with sand and the river stage returned to normal. In early 1982, several residents of the Orange Hill residential community (fig. 1) suffered an unknown illness. The Polk County Water Resources Department indicated that either septic-tank effluent or citrus-processing wastes had contaminated the community's water supply. Although water-quality tests failed to verify the cause of the illness, it is possible that a slug of contaminated water could have moved through the Upper Floridan limestone aquifer to the Orange Hill supply well."
I highly recommend reading this report to anyone still living in the area, as I don't imagine the situation has changed at all for the better in the intervening decades.
Visiting the area recently with my children, my spouse (also from the area) and I were thrilled to get a chance to go hiking on a nature preserve. We wanted to show the kids what Florida used to look like before all of the development. This preserve is a gorgeous piece of land, and the story of how it was saved from mining is worth a deeper dive at some point. We were only able to walk for a few minutes, though, before the children were all overcome by the "chemical smell" of the area. The wind was blowing up from the phosphate-processing plants that afternoon, and, while the spouse and I were used to the smell, the children were not.
The phosphate industry hasn't received the scrutiny that other large-scale mining operations have faced. We all know about the damage that coal mining can do on a body, on a community, on the environment. Ever heard about the damage that the phosphate industry has done? They had a nasty situation that leaked to the press a little while ago, when 215 million gallons of polluted water got into the aquifer from a processing facility. It affected some privately-owned wells, like the one that I drank from as a kid, but it was kept largely hush hush. Phosphate spends a lot of money in Florida.
Flint, the Navajos, and You
Our water system is failing us - all of us - from folks on privately-owned wells like the one I used as a child, to the people of Flint and the people relying on water delivered through many different municipal sources (including many towns in the greater Boston area, where I live currently), to the nearly 2 million folks in the United States who still have no access to running water. Even if the source of your water is still clean, crumbling infrastructure means that the water pipes leading to your home could be affecting your water. Lead makes up some of those pipes and often makes up the solder that connects the pipes. Our water in the town where I currently reside was recently shown to contain 19 contaminants. bromodichloromethane (flame retardant), dibromochloromethane (pesticide, spray-can repellant), chloroform (famous for its use as anesthesia but used more widely industrially as a solvent and refrigerant), dichloroacetic acid (fungicide and used in the synthesis of pharmaceuticals and other organic compounds), radium, and trihalomethanes (a product of a reaction between the chlorine put in the water to treat it and the organic matter in the water), all of which are known carcinogens. You can find out about your own water supply at ewg.org.
The Water Protectors and Next Steps
I was so inspired by the Water Protectors and their work in the Great Lakes area, fighting to keep their water safe. If my folks and others like them had not taken the land grant, displacing the indigenous folk who had lived on the land before they arrived, would there still be water protectors in Polk County? Could we all take up the cause and become a nation of water protectors? It's a huge problem, but if our water is making us sick, we need to fight back. We should have fought back BEFORE our water started making us sick. But, this is where we find ourselves today, so, what steps can we take to become water protectors in our own neighborhoods?
Getting informed is always a good place to start. Where does your water come from? What are the primary polluters in your area? What contaminants are known to be in your water supply (check the reports available online)? Then, once you have some research under your belt, speak out. Contact your local officials to let them know that clean water is one of your priorities. We can all organize within our communities to demand safe water. And we can support the water protectors who are already doing this work around the globe. For those in my home state of Massachusetts, Clean Water Action is a great place to get started. Nationally, the NRDC is a four-star non-profit that "works to safeguard the earth" and has our water supply as one of its primary focuses. Their website lists many ways that you can get involved, from donating money to your time to contacting officials at the local to national level to get your concerns over your water - over our water - heard.
It is easy to get overwhelmed by the feeling that we are very small and helpless, that the times we live in are just too difficult and the struggles so complex that we will never be able to make any real change. It is a challenge to stay tuned in, to keep fighting, to push through the learned helplessness that allows the status quo. This year, I plan to choose a few fronts - only enough that I can count on one hand, and really dig in to battles along those lines. Water is one of mine. What are you working on?
"When the well is dry, they know the worth of water." - Benjamin Franklin
Four years ago, I begged my dentist to do a biopsy on a sore that had been growing on my tongue for several months. He was reluctant, certain that my insurance would not pay for the procedure and just as certain that there was no way the sore on my tongue could be anything but benign. "Just wear your mouth guard; I'm sure you are chewing on your tongue in your sleep," he reassured me as he ushered me toward the exit. I went home, and I wore my mouth guard at night, but the sore got worse, not better. I started to lose weight because it hurt so bad to eat. I went back to the dentist and demanded that he give me a referral to an oral surgeon. The oral surgeon gave me the same run around when I saw her and asked her to perform the biopsy. I told her I would pay out of pocket, that I really needed the peace of mind of knowing that the sore was benign. She did the biopsy. She took a large chunk out of my tongue. She put in three stitches. She told me to set up an appointment for two weeks out; we would go over the results then.
Two days later, I received a message from the oral surgeon's office to come in immediately. The message said that the doctor wanted to go over my results sooner because she needed to go out of town. I knew in my gut that this was all just a ruse. I went in to the doctor. She cried as she told me that the results came back showing that the sore was cancerous. She could not stop apologizing. The receptionists cried and apologized on my way out the door. I cried on the sidewalk just outside the oral surgeon's office. I sat down on the curb of busy Mass Ave, and I cried. My dentist called. He left a sobbing message on my voicemail, several minutes long, apologizing.
From that point on, all of the medical professionals that I dealt with wanted to know what I had done to trigger the cancer. I fielded so many questions from them and from concerned family members and friends about what risky behavior I had engaged in to make myself susceptible to oral cancer. My cancer was not caused by HPV (they test for that), but surely I must have chewed tobacco? Or consumed vats of hard liquor? I was a yoga teacher; had I developed a betel-nut chewing habit while on retreat somewhere? People are scared of cancer - understandably so - and I think there's an instinct to ward it off by assuring ourselves that we are safe from it if we live a certain way, steer clear from known carcinogens, that we can ward it off by our good deeds and rituals.
Not knowing made folks - including me - nervous. Not knowing what caused the cancer still makes it hard to assure myself that it won't come back. If there was a trigger that I could avoid, I would avoid it.
When I was diagnosed more recently with Hashimoto's thyroiditis, there was a similar search for the trigger. With autoimmune issues like Hashimoto's, the current thinking is that there is some sort of genetic predisposition and that is triggered by some environmental factor - a pollutant, virus/bacterium, or perhaps even stress.
But here's the thing: I've been sick, off and on, since 1980, and no one has ever been able to figure out why.
When the Erin Brockovich movie came out, I started to hope that, someday, someone would "Erin Brockovich" my home county and start connecting the dots. In that movie, Erin Brokovich figures out that the water was making the people of Hinkley, California sick, and she takes down the big polluter responsible. Could our water have made us sick, too?
Well Water
If you drove to where I grew up, you would likely drive from Tampa, and, from Tampa, you would drive down an old highway til you got to Mulberry. You would know when you got to Mulberry, because, from land flat from horizon to horizon, you suddenly would be greeted by giant mountains, rising up out of nowhere, flanking the road. They were nonsensical, hilarious, outrageous. And, if you had the windows down, you'd notice the change in the smell. The entire area had a scent, different from the rest of the state, sort of tangy, a bit salty, a hint of sulfur.
I grew up in Polk County, Florida on land that had been in my family since the state was opened up to anyone brave enough to relocate and settle what was, at the time, inhospitable territory. There were lots of people who had been displaced by the Civil War who were willing and able to take a chance on it, though, and my great grandfather's parents did just that. They settled on a land grant near the Peace River, and that's where my folks put a mobile home in the seventies. We drew water from a well, like a lot of folks in Polk County did at the time. The well tapped in to the aquifer - caverns filled with water that percolates down through the ground. Florida as we know it basically floats on this stuff.
 |
| [What the land I grew up on used to look like. Now it's a subdivision.] |
Growing up in the orange grove, I drank straight from hoses that drew from our well. We harvested and ate berries from the train tracks that carried industrial waste from one coast to the other. I chewed on "pepper weed" that grew along those same tracks. I ate vegetables harvested from my great grandfather's field sandwiched between those tracks and the trailer that my family and I lived in. The oranges and the vegetables were irrigated by the well water.
 |
| [My other grandfather and I standing in front of the trailer on Easter morning.] |
My grandfather was sad that he had no easy access to the well water anymore. He had moved off of the family land to a small house within the town limits, and so he was on the municipal water supply. He was certain that the fluoride and other things that the town added to the water were going to make him sick. Whenever he visited, he drank a big glass of our well water and shared his thoughts on government control of the water.
 |
| [My sister riding her tricycle along the train tracks. These were industrial tracks that split what was left of the family land into two large parcels. Mile-long trains hauling phosphate products used those tracks with decreasing frequency during my time on the land.] |
Wells are supposed to be inspected yearly to make sure that they are safe. I'm not sure if our well got tested, but, even with a yearly test, you don't see the natural daily ebb and flow of the stuff in the water. Our water always tasted so good, clean and fresh, but sometimes it ran orange or brown. And sometimes it smelled, which folks would tell us was the nature of well water.
In 1980, I got sick, and a weird sort of sick that no one could figure out. My lymph nodes in my armpits were the size of golf balls, and I developed a rash that really never went away. The doctors thought it might be leukemia, so they ran a lot of tests. Then they thought it was nerves, so they put me on a sedative that made me very tired but did not take away the rash. I had headaches every day. We did allergy tests. We did little experiments at home - the rash went away, briefly, with a change in laundry detergent. Looked like I was allergic to phosphorus. Maybe that was all it had been?
Industry & Pollutants
There were three big industries in central Florida when I lived there: mining, cattle, and oranges. All three are mega-polluters, adding their particularly noxious byproducts to the groundwater that we all drank. And please know: we all drank it, whether it was provided by the city or via private wells. With city water, there's a record of what folks were drinking. With private wells, we can only guess. But as the water all came from the same aquifer, filtered through the same land and into the same caverns and caves, we were all drinking the same stuff.
The cattle industry creates pollution a number of ways. Ranching itself has an effect, and then the processing of the animals into usable products creates additional concerns. Runoff from ranching operations can include manure, antibiotics, hormones, fertilizers and pesticides. Orange groves were responsible for pesticide, herbicide, and fungicide runoff. And phosphate mining. Where to start? I could - and should - write a whole article about the process. It is a destroyer of worlds. Even as a child, witnessing the destruction of the mines broke my heart. My parents would remind me that our food was put on the table by the phosphate industry. Bumper stickers on every other car in my home town read: "I DIG PHOSPHATE". The phosphate industry was the largest employer - by far - in our area when I was a child. If you want to know more, this article does a good job briefly describing the damage. More information is available from The Sierra Club website. They are currently fighting to keep the mining from spreading into North Florida.
 |
| [This Sierra Club brochure has a lot of good information about phosphate mining as they try to fight the mining industry from moving north.] |
 |
| [Area wetlands that have been protected from the ravages of mining.] |
Phosphate mining is a strip mining process. They take off the land and then they leave behind sediment ponds and gypsum stacks - the towering mountains flanking the highway in Mulberry. They "reclaim" the land after it has settled for some time, but it is never taken back to its natural state. Most often, it is flattened out and turned into subdivisions or suburban sprawl. There is surprisingly little research into the short and long-term effects of the phosphate mining industry. At least that's true here in the States. A quick search reveals dozens of articles about the effects of phosphate mining in other countries (it's not good). Why are we not running research into this industry here in the States?
Another source of pollution at the time was wide-spread use of insecticides. Trucks would roll through town in the evenings spraying a thick cloud of chemicals to kill the mosquitoes. Crop dusters flew overhead at times. We sprayed our houses for roaches and other pests. But that's not all: the state even allowed testing of Agent Orange for a time. All of that stuff can find its way down through the ground and into the water.
When I was a child, there were dozens and dozens of sinkholes in the area. Local news stations loved broadcasting footage of entire used car lots getting swallowed up by sinkholes. They made quite a story. Sinkholes happen because the water caverns beneath the ground fall in. Often this is due to overloading on the surface. Reports show that this happens underneath those towering mountains of industrial waste at phosphate facilities, underneath orange groves when they use flowing water to keep them from freezing, or even underneath roads or buildings. When the water caverns fall in and make an opening to the surface, everything that gets swallowed by the sinkhole has the potential to get into the drinking water.
There was a great report, accessible here, about the water quality around the time I was getting sick. This excerpt is from that report:
"In May 1974, water pumped from several wells near Bartow became cloudy. It was suspected that a sinkhole had developed in the bed of a nearby slime pond that contained clay waste from a phosphate processing plant. The source of the clay and its movement were not verified; however, it is feasible for such material to have been transported through highly developed solution cavities into the aquifer that is tapped by the contaminated wells. In April 1975, a sinkhole about 75 ft in diameter collapsed beneath a gypsum stack near Mulberry. Gypsum stacks are repositories for phosphate process water that is known to be highly acidic and contains dissolved solids, ions, and radioisotopes that are higher in concentration than ground water of central Florida (Miller and Sutcliffe, 1984). Water was observed flowing from the stack into the underlying limestone at about 100 to 150 gal/mm. Although no wells were reportedly contaminated, the introduction of contaminated water into the underlying aquifer system presented a potential health hazard to nearby and possibly distant consumers of water. In April 1981, flow in the Peace River about 3 mi south of Bartow was totally captured by two sinkholes that opened in the riverbed. The mean discharge estimated from the U.S. Geological Survey gage at Bartow was 17 ftVs. Flow into the sinkholes consisted almost entirely of treated wastewater from various Polk County cities, phosphate operations, and other industries. The sinkholes functioned as a source of contamination to the ground water because natural filtration through overlying sands was bypassed. Eventually, the sinkholes became clogged with sand and the river stage returned to normal. In early 1982, several residents of the Orange Hill residential community (fig. 1) suffered an unknown illness. The Polk County Water Resources Department indicated that either septic-tank effluent or citrus-processing wastes had contaminated the community's water supply. Although water-quality tests failed to verify the cause of the illness, it is possible that a slug of contaminated water could have moved through the Upper Floridan limestone aquifer to the Orange Hill supply well."
I highly recommend reading this report to anyone still living in the area, as I don't imagine the situation has changed at all for the better in the intervening decades.
Visiting the area recently with my children, my spouse (also from the area) and I were thrilled to get a chance to go hiking on a nature preserve. We wanted to show the kids what Florida used to look like before all of the development. This preserve is a gorgeous piece of land, and the story of how it was saved from mining is worth a deeper dive at some point. We were only able to walk for a few minutes, though, before the children were all overcome by the "chemical smell" of the area. The wind was blowing up from the phosphate-processing plants that afternoon, and, while the spouse and I were used to the smell, the children were not.
 |
| [Where we took the children hiking. A really glorious local gem.] |
The phosphate industry hasn't received the scrutiny that other large-scale mining operations have faced. We all know about the damage that coal mining can do on a body, on a community, on the environment. Ever heard about the damage that the phosphate industry has done? They had a nasty situation that leaked to the press a little while ago, when 215 million gallons of polluted water got into the aquifer from a processing facility. It affected some privately-owned wells, like the one that I drank from as a kid, but it was kept largely hush hush. Phosphate spends a lot of money in Florida.
Flint, the Navajos, and You
Our water system is failing us - all of us - from folks on privately-owned wells like the one I used as a child, to the people of Flint and the people relying on water delivered through many different municipal sources (including many towns in the greater Boston area, where I live currently), to the nearly 2 million folks in the United States who still have no access to running water. Even if the source of your water is still clean, crumbling infrastructure means that the water pipes leading to your home could be affecting your water. Lead makes up some of those pipes and often makes up the solder that connects the pipes. Our water in the town where I currently reside was recently shown to contain 19 contaminants. bromodichloromethane (flame retardant), dibromochloromethane (pesticide, spray-can repellant), chloroform (famous for its use as anesthesia but used more widely industrially as a solvent and refrigerant), dichloroacetic acid (fungicide and used in the synthesis of pharmaceuticals and other organic compounds), radium, and trihalomethanes (a product of a reaction between the chlorine put in the water to treat it and the organic matter in the water), all of which are known carcinogens. You can find out about your own water supply at ewg.org.
The Water Protectors and Next Steps
I was so inspired by the Water Protectors and their work in the Great Lakes area, fighting to keep their water safe. If my folks and others like them had not taken the land grant, displacing the indigenous folk who had lived on the land before they arrived, would there still be water protectors in Polk County? Could we all take up the cause and become a nation of water protectors? It's a huge problem, but if our water is making us sick, we need to fight back. We should have fought back BEFORE our water started making us sick. But, this is where we find ourselves today, so, what steps can we take to become water protectors in our own neighborhoods?
Getting informed is always a good place to start. Where does your water come from? What are the primary polluters in your area? What contaminants are known to be in your water supply (check the reports available online)? Then, once you have some research under your belt, speak out. Contact your local officials to let them know that clean water is one of your priorities. We can all organize within our communities to demand safe water. And we can support the water protectors who are already doing this work around the globe. For those in my home state of Massachusetts, Clean Water Action is a great place to get started. Nationally, the NRDC is a four-star non-profit that "works to safeguard the earth" and has our water supply as one of its primary focuses. Their website lists many ways that you can get involved, from donating money to your time to contacting officials at the local to national level to get your concerns over your water - over our water - heard.
It is easy to get overwhelmed by the feeling that we are very small and helpless, that the times we live in are just too difficult and the struggles so complex that we will never be able to make any real change. It is a challenge to stay tuned in, to keep fighting, to push through the learned helplessness that allows the status quo. This year, I plan to choose a few fronts - only enough that I can count on one hand, and really dig in to battles along those lines. Water is one of mine. What are you working on?
"When the well is dry, they know the worth of water." - Benjamin Franklin
Thank you, thank you, thank you. More words need to be spoken on this sad story of the destruction of our environment and the effects it has on all of us. Peace.
ReplyDeleteSince moving to Polk County 6 years ago, my health has declined. I have many mysterious illnesses that dr's attribute to age or stress. I'm on a few meds but I dont really see changes. I drink a lot of tap water because I dont like cold water from the frig. I fill my tumbler with water from water fountains, from various schools, throughout the day as Ictravel. This was a very interesting read. I'm going to start filtering my water and being more aggressive with my doctors. Thank you, so much, for sharing!
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