The following is excerpted from Son of a Farmer, Child of the Earth, available
from Dream
River Press.
Draining the Fountain of Life
Here in America, we take water for
granted…for now. Turn on a faucet in our homes and there it flows. It's easy
to convince ourselves it is in abundance. Whether for baths, showers, cooking,
gardening, and landscaping or livestock and crop irrigation, water flows from
underneath the soil to the surface with a little electricity and a simple
turning of a valve. As we continue to exhaust below-ground aquifers, streams,
and lakes, we will soon be faced with a need for other means to draw our
water.
We now know that less than 3% of the world
water supply is fresh water, since 97% is salt water. Much of that is frozen or
out of our reach. Scientists claim our drinking water supply is closer to 1% of
the entire water on the planet.
Today, the Nile, Colorado,
and Yellow Rivers no longer flow to the ocean. The
longest river in the world (the Nile) can no
longer find its way to the ocean! And yet, we continue as if all is well with
our water supply. Where creeks and streams once ran full of life, there are now
only dried veins stitched into the Earth's flesh.
Yes,
we are feeding and clothing the world, but as irrigation systems continue to
pump and pump and pump, we are depleting our future water supply. If
agriculture truly consumes 80-85% of this nation's fresh water for crops and
livestock, and the Ogallala aquifer (stretching from South Dakota to Texas)
really is being depleted at a rate 160% greater than its recharge rate, we are
heading irrevocably into a natural disaster.1 We are creating the unthinkable — complete
destruction of our fresh water supply.
How much water is enough to
irrigate cotton, corn, wheat, or any other crop? How much money is enough to
stuff in our pockets? This isn't robbing Peter to pay Paul, but rather killing
our children so we might live in luxury. By maximizing per acre profits with
excessive irrigation we are sucking dry the blood within our own bodies, draining
our children's futures. In the case of water usage, excess does not lead to the
palace of wisdom. It leads to a derelict world of decay.
Some experts have already suggested we
abandon irrigation altogether in areas with little rainfall in order to
preserve the water supply. I disagree with this principle. Moderation is the
only answer, for now. If farmers cannot comply with that, then regulation is
inevitable. I detest excessive amounts of laws and regulations, but when it
comes to protecting our dwindling water supply, I'm all for them — particularly
when it is overwhelmingly evident that man is looking no farther than his own
pocketbook. The U.S. government shut off irrigation
to parts of the California Central Valley, destroying crops in this desert
region. This water prohibition was advertised as being imposed to save
protected fish. Not much was mentioned of California's receding water supply. The
farming towns involved will vanish over the next few years. Where will the
people go? What will they do for work? And how will we replace this vast source
of food? This area grew almost 10% of America's entire food supply with
over 250 different crops. It also represented over 16% of the country's irrigated
land relying on the second largest aquifer.
In 1949, about 4,300 wells irrigated
550,000 acres in Texas.
Fifty years later, as many as 8 million acres rely on irrigation systems in Texas. The southern High
Plains (my neighborhood) accounts for roughly 68% of all irrigation in Texas. Why? Because it
has the driest climate in the state. To the west of Lubbock
lies Gaines County. This is some of the most
desert-like territory in the state, yet it produces more peanuts and cotton
than anywhere in the country due to an excessive number of irrigation circles.
More than 400,000 acres of irrigated farmland is found here with less than
15,000 residents.2
It is not only farmers abusing our water
supply. Living in urban areas such as Lubbock,
Texas, I've witnessed extremely
wasteful practices of water usage. Businesses irrigating huge grass lawns with
sprinkler systems in the heat of the day during summer; the flooding of
streets by opening fire hydrants (why?); and inefficient rain drainage/runoff
along streets and sidewalks are classic examples. Many urban areas simply drain
the rainwater from several blocks into one large area commonly designated as
one of the city parks, which then serves as nothing more than a huge bowl to
absorb the quasi-floods caused by miles of concrete and pavement.
City planners give little to no thought
concerning Mother Nature when laying down miles and miles of hardened earth.
To feed a deranged sense of comfort in modern suburbia, humanity has instead
focused on building as many over-sized cookie-cutter houses as possible per
block with as little grass (backyard) area as possible. I get hot flashes,
breaking into a sweat, every time I drive around these neighborhoods. Where
does the rainwater go? It is wasted in low intersections and flattened streets.
Why is there not more civic planning to widen streets with grass areas to catch
the runoff or create slopes to run water into people's yards or onto trees
along hot summer sidewalks? And somewhere Joni Mitchell is singing, "They paved
paradise, and put up a parking lot."
But the depletion of our water supply from
agricultural and urban methods of abuse has nothing on that from corporate America.
Bottled water companies are taking full advantage of a $400 billion industry in
today's tinfoil economy. Despite the fact that the water of 33% of bottled
water brands is no safer than tap water, we continue to purchase tiny plastic
bottles of water priced more than three times higher than gasoline (December
2009: gasoline less than $3 per gallon, while bottled water equated to $10 per
gallon). Incidentally, it takes two to seven barrels of water to produce one
barrel of oil. Corporations have yet again figured out a way to profit from us
on a daily basis from the most essential element for our lives, and we continue
to overpay them rather than spend the money to secure our own supply of "safe"
drinking water.
Water
in the Well
Not long ago, it was easy to believe
our underground water was completely healthy to drink, bathe our bodies in,
wash our faces with, and brush our teeth with. That couldn't now be further
from the truth. According to the March 2009 issue of Acres U.S.A., "over
50% of the nation's drinking water wells contained detectable amounts of
nitrate and 7% have detectable amounts of pesticides." 3
For the past century agriculture has done
more than its share to contaminate our underground water table by combining excessive
usage of pesticides, herbicides, and petroleum fertilizers. In some areas fish
have such high levels of the pesticide atrazine that it is genetically altering
the males, transforming them into females. Atrazine is used on approximately
65% of the U.S.
corn crop and has been sprayed for the past 35 years. Interesting how its use
is still widespread here when it has been banned not only in the European Union
but also the very country (Switzerland)
in which it is made. For some strange reason, the EPA ruled in 2006 that there
are no severe risks or dangers in the usage of atrazine. We use 80 million
pounds of atrazine each year on our corn crops in America.
Syngenta, the company which manufactures
atrazine, hired the University of California at Berkeley
to conduct a study of the potential dangers of their product. The university
discovered that atrazine "demasculates or chemically castrates" male frogs,
other amphibians, and fish. Males (with traces of atrazine) grow ovaries and
lay eggs.4 Could
this affect the human species as well? Are men becoming emasculated via
chemical invasion?
According to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease
Registry's website, atrazine is "the most heavily used
pre- and post-emergence herbicide in the United States." The website also
states that:
In humans, atrazine exposure has been associated with
increased pre-term delivery, miscarriage, and various birth defects. However,
the lack of information on exposure levels and the simultaneous exposure to
other pesticides makes these studies inadequate to assess whether these effects
are attributable to atrazine exposure.
There is evidence that atrazine disrupts
the normal function of the endocrine system. Several animal studies have shown
that atrazine exposure disrupts estrus cyclicity and alters plasma hormone
levels; these effects appear to be mediated by changes in the
gonadal-hypothalamic-pituitary axis (feedback or communication system between
reproductive organs and the brain) and lead to premature reproductive aging.
Developmental effects have been observed
following pre-gestational, gestational, and lactational exposure of rat and
rabbit females or post-weaning exposure of rat pups to atrazine. The observed
effects included post-implantation losses, decreases in fetal body weight,
incomplete bone formation, neurodevelopmental effects, delayed puberty, and
impaired development of the reproductive system.
Epidemiological studies that included
cohorts at triazine manufacturing facilities, case-control studies of farmers,
and ecological studies of populations living in areas with
atrazine-contaminated drinking water, collectively, provide suggestive evidence
of an association between atrazine exposure and several cancers including
non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, prostrate, brain, testicular, breast, and ovarian.
Tests
across the country of our nation's drinking water show an even more disturbing
invasion of our water supply — pharmaceuticals. As the majority of Americans are
entranced by some type of anti-depressant or other chemical, they are flushed
into the water table via sewers and other underground water pipes and enter our
streams and rivers. So they are eventually recycled back into our water supply
once again.
Factory
farms are another key polluter of our water supply. Nitrates from animal waste
seep into the ground, along with the toxic antibiotics pumped into their
bodies. When thousands of animals are confined to a small area in feedlots,
dairies, etc., their waste overwhelms any local water supply whether above or
below ground.
Oil field activity is another destroyer of
well water. Old lines are often not capped properly, and they begin to seep
either salt water or other toxic elements from old gas or oil lines buried and
forgotten. For the past five years, oil activity has increased all around us in
West Texas. Oil well sites are a common place
to find hundreds of thousands of gallons of water being pumped away into a
small pond or lake area to scrape up a few barrels of oil here and there. That
water soon evaporates and is gone.
Whether it is
in urban or rural areas, not enough attention is focused on our water supply.
We can't allow apathy or disbelief to keep us from facing the dire consequences
of our gluttonous habits. Without water, we are nothing. We cease to exist.
Rather than all our focus remaining on energy in the form of oil or electricity,
water should be at the top of the list.
1. Dale Allen Pfeiffer, "Eating Fossil Fuels", From the
Wilderness, http://www. fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html,
October 2003.
2. The
Handbook of Texas
Online.
3. Mike Amaranthus, Ph.D., Jeff
Anderson and John Marler, "Degraded Soils, Food Shortages and Eating Oil:
Restoring Soil Life Through Biological Agriculture", Acres U.S.A.,
March 2009.
4. Robert Sanders, "Pesticide
Atrazine Can Turn Male Frogs into Females", UC Berkeley News,
http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2010/03/01_ frogs.shtml, March 1, 2010.
Image by Nikhil Verma, courtesy of Creative commons license.