February 2024 Networker: Clean Water for Future Generations |
| Volume 29 (2), February 2024 |
Executive Director’s Note |
| When I began working on the law of future generations, there were several arguments that naysayers made to counter the idea that we had a sacred responsibility to leave a healthy and thriving Earth to generations to come. They would say future generations would be richer than we are—because That’s The Way It Has Always Been—so we should leave the problems for them to solve. Or they would describe how technology is getting better and better and would address the problems our generation created so we were off the hook for cleaning up our own messes. But the most irritating thing I heard was that we couldn’t possibly know what future generations would need so we actually owed it to them to not worry about our legacy of destruction. We actually do know what future generations need, starting with clean water: a stable hydrologic cycle, reservoirs of groundwater, an Ocean that has not been acidified, unpolluted amniotic fluid, rivers that run free and full of fish. Ten years ago, we gathered together several hundred people at the Women’s Congress for Future Generations to draft a bill of rights for water and to assert our responsibilities as humans to protect water for present and future generations. After the bill of rights of water we said this: As Humans We have Responsibilities To honor, love, respect, and acknowledge all water bodies as wild, free, powerful, essential components of an interconnected water cycle that is living and the source and sanctuary of ALL LIFE To have empathy, compassion, and reverence for the integral boundaries and relationships of these water bodies To learn from these water bodies by heeding the warnings from beings and systems under duress, and to act with urgency to repair and restore these water bodies To take active responsibility to educate ourselves, children, and decision-makers to better understand the interconnectedness of the water cycle. Part of this responsibility is to revive traditional wisdom from communities that hold intimate and long-term knowledge of the interconnectedness of these water bodies, and to act on and learn from their wisdom To uphold existing laws and policies to protect these water bodies, and to create new laws and policies and new institutions to safeguard these waters, such as to create Guardians and to elect people who will defend the aforementioned rights To protect these water bodies by not damaging their ecosystem or the ecosystems from above and below which feed them To treat other humans with justice and fairness, giving and sharing water with respect for the needs of each person and our mutual dependence on water. Each commoner has an equal right to share in the Commons To withdraw our consent from practices that do not fulfill our responsibilities to uphold the rights of all waters and to give our free, prior and informed consent to practices that repair, restore and protect the waters To cultivate relationships with the waters, shared across all cultures, of partnership rather than domination In this issue of The Networker, we tell the story of water and the myriad threats to it from misguided uses, climate change, and contamination by industry. As important, we are telling how people are rising up to protect water from those scourges. They are fulfilling the responsibilities our generation holds to leave water—clean water—to future generations. We hope you are enriched by these four pieces by our staff. Carolyn Raffensperger
Executive Director, SEHN |
Stormy Southern California: What will continue washing out of the infamous Santa Susana Field Lab? |
| By Carmi Orenstein, Editor, the Networker, and Program Director, Concerned Health Professionals of New York |
| Small victories. As an activist and public health researcher within the environmental and climate movements, I celebrate these, and—momentarily—suspend my sharp focus on the full ecological, health, and justice implications of the problems they touch. I am not an incrementalist, but I am committed to honoring the successes of collective, steadfast work. The celebration has special resonance when an unlikely win happens in the place where I grew up—on the western edge of Los Angeles County, California where secretive, Cold War-era nuclear reactors and rocket-testing operations have spread chemical and radioactive contamination. In its October 19, 2023 public meeting, the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board—one of nine regional governmental California boards tasked with protecting water—shocked environmental and health advocates in the room. After years of unsatisfactory activity, the Board voted unanimously to restore several previous effluent limits and to add new ones in its renewal of the five-year National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit for runoff from the highly contaminated Santa Susana Field Lab (SSFL). These permits are issued to the Boeing Corporation, which now owns 80 percent of this site that from 1949 to 2006 variously ran research, development, and testing of rocket engines, nuclear reactors, and liquid metals. The permits apply to the allowable discharge of 187 million gallons per day of stormwater runoff and treated groundwater from the 2,800-acre site. In other words, the Board agreed, after listening to the community, to tighten up what is allowed to flow off the site in the stormwater. This outcome felt unprecedented in the context of a madly frustrating, decades-long chronicle of regulatory delay, outsized industry influence, and abject absence of a comprehensive cleanup of the heavily contaminated site, around which 700,000 people live now live within ten miles. For many decades, leaks, egregious accidents, and deliberate releases just kept happening. Following a partial nuclear meltdown in 1959, uncontained nuclear reactors spewed radioactivity, radioactive and toxic wastes were burned in open pits, and countless hazardous chemicals leached into soil, groundwater, and surface water on and around the site. (See our previous articles on SSFL here and here.) Climate change-fueled fire and torrential rainstorms—along with a lack of regulations that could have anticipated them—spread the contamination further, and further complicate the story. Continue Reading |
Competing for Water, Driving Climate Change |
| By Ted Schettler, Science Director, SEHN |
| Hydraulic fracturing (fracking) of oil- or gas-laden shale thousands of feet below the surface requires enormous amounts of water, mixed with chemical additives and a proppant to keep the cracks open (usually sand) injected at high pressure to free the fossil fuels and bring them to the surface mixed with contaminated water and brine for processing. The search for oil and gas has become the latest threat to groundwater aquifers that are also essential for crop irrigation, livestock watering, and various other industrial and domestic needs. According to an extensive New York Times investigation, fracking wells have increased their water use seven-fold since 2011 as horizontal drilling techniques deep below ground have been refined and lengthened. Fracking a single oil or gas well commonly requires 4-20 million gallons of water, but newer “monster fracks” can use as much as 40 million gallons. The New York Times report says that, all together, oil and gas operators have used about 1.5 trillion gallons of water in the last twelve years, much of it coming from underground aquifers. The New York Times investigation of national groundwater trends also found that most aquifers are in decline because of over-pumping. Large industrial farms, industrial development, growing cities, and regional droughts exacerbated by climate change are depleting groundwater resources more rapidly than they can be replaced. In most regions, water used for fracking is a relatively small percent of total water use, but in arid, major oil- and gas-producing regions like West Texas and New Mexico, competition for this limited resource is heating up. Although surface and groundwater frequently interconnect, they are regulated in very different ways. For surface water, the 1972 Clean Water Act provides federal oversight for industrial wastewater discharges and consistent water quality criteria for pollutants. Groundwater, by contrast, is almost exclusively regulated by a patchwork of withdrawal or appropriation systems, pollution statutes, and land ownership rights that vary by state. Federal oversight is largely limited to making certain that groundwater used for drinking water in municipalities is protected from fecal contamination. Continue Reading |
Water Scarcity, Human Migration, and a Turn Toward Fascism |
| by Peter Montague, SEHN Fellow |
| Editor’s note: For readability purposes, Peter’s references for the many facts presented are listed at the end of the piece, rather than embedded. Since 1750, the average temperature over land, worldwide, has risen at least 3 degrees Fahrenheit. With a 3 degree F rise, the air over land holds about 12 percent more moisture, making rainstorms more intense, causing more floods. In addition, as the average temperature rises, heat waves grow more extreme—hotter and longer-lasting than two or three decades ago. Now the soil is warmer and therefore drier than it used to be; at the same time, plants are drawing more water out of the soil—a double whammy causing more intense and longer droughts covering larger areas. As the air warms, more mountain snowfall turns into rain and runs off quickly, depriving crops, livestock, rivers, fish and other wildlife of the traditional slow, steady snowmelt of spring and early summer. Glaciers are melting and disappearing, depriving many human communities of their historic supply of fresh water for drinking, domestic use, and farming. Rivers fed by snow-melt and/or glacier-melt run dry, fish disappear, animals suffer, and the land is parched. Water is life Water is essential for all life, and it sustains the global economy, enabling manufacturing, turning energy turbines, nourishing crops and livestock. Water scarcity affects farms, firms, families, communities and nations. “We need to wake up to the looming water crisis.” In October 2021, the Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), professor Petteri Taalas, warned the world: “We need to wake up to the looming water crisis.” Since the year 2000, flood-related disasters have increased by 134 percent compared to the period 1980-2000. During the period 2000-2019, the number and duration of droughts increased 29 percent. The trend is unmistakable. Continue Reading |
Repercussion Section: Thoughts on Groundwater |
| by Sandra Steingraber, SEHN Senior Scientist |
| Groundwater is the part of the hydrologic cycle that we don’t see. It’s the raindrops and snowmelt that have seeped through the soil and slid, out of sight, into the geological world. Figuring what groundwater does down there in the dark—how it moves, what it carries, how it alters the stony layers it touches, how it rises back to the surface as the mother of streams and rivers—is the subject of hydrogeology. Hydrogeologists are quick to correct the misperception that the subterranean world is brimming with underground rivers and buried lakes. Most groundwater, their textbooks emphasize, is held within the tiny pores that exist in between grains of sand and bits of gravel that are bedded between larger rock layers. Groundwater doesn’t move very far or very fast. Aquifers are a humble landscape. Fair enough. But there are some places in the world where it is accurate to say that the water beneath the earth flows, swirls, cascades, and otherwise rushes along. One of these places is Florida. Providing drinking water to ten million people in both rural and urban communities, the Floridan Aquifer underlies the entire peninsula and indeed extends as far north as the bottom tip of South Carolina. In this part of the world, the underground terrain consists of massive shelves of limestone, which represent the dissolved shells and fossilized skeletons of prehistoric marine organisms. Architecturally, the Floridan Aquifer resembles a vast, brittle sponge honeycombed with fissures, joints, and caves. In 2003, researchers injected a dye tracer into the Floridan Aquifer and monitored how long it took to show up at a spot 350 feet away from the injection site. They anticipated a months-long wait. But later that same day, indeed within a few hours, the dyed water had already arrived at the collection site. A river runs under Florida. Continue Reading |
“Climate deniers now have access to vast global audiences through digital platforms…. Allowing them to steadily chip away at public support for climate action—especially among younger viewers—could have devastating consequences for the future of our planet.” SEHN Board member and Greenpeace senior strategist at Greenpeace is quoted on CNN. SEHN senior scientist Sandra Steingraber joined Radio Kingston’s Green Radio Hour host Jon Bowermaster to discuss the new proposal to extract natural gas using carbon dioxide in New York State’s Southern Tier. Dr. Steingraber is also quoted in this Press Connects article (paywall): “According to Steingraber, any form of extraction will require the industrialization of the landscape, leading to habitat destruction, soil erosion, destroyed wildlife and increased car crashes, among other things. Steingraber claimed the proposed method would pose even more problems due to the toxic nature of liquified CO2, which can be deadly if it enters local water supplies or comes into contact with humans.” In Binghamton University’s student newspaper, Pipe Dream: “According to Sandra Steingraber, a senior scientist with Science and Environmental Health Network, a nonprofit, any form of extraction requires industrializing the landscape, resulting in numerous environmental problems, including habitat destruction, soil erosion and destroyed wildlife. Steingraber also said that CO2 fracking would cause more problems because of liquified CO2’s toxicity, leaving local water supplies at risk of being contaminated and becoming harmful to humans.” |
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