Spitting in the Face of God
Water is the source of life. To waste and pollute it is fatal arrogance.
“Thousands have lived without love. Not one without water.” W.H. Auden
Water is the most precious substance on Earth, and as far as we know, anywhere in the universe. Without water, there is no life; with water, life is everywhere.
For industry and capital, oil and minerals are precious, but water is worthless until you put it in a bottle to sell. For people and other living things, the opposite is true. To treat the source of life as garbage is colossal arrogance, like spitting God in the face.
Such arrogance is killing us. Along with climate and biodiversity, water protection is the battle of our lifetimes, a huge part of the struggle to keep a livable world. Indigenous people know water is life, and they are putting their own lives on the line to shield it from the profit-driven machines polluting and destroying it.
What happens without water
According to Science Daily, water shortages already affect about 2.8 billion people. When people do not get enough water, our bodies do not function. Water has the unique ability to dissolve everything our body needs — e.g. foods, proteins, hormones, and waste products — and move them in and out of our cells and bodies. The hydrogen in water has a positive charge, while the oxygen side of a water molecule is negative, enabling water to absorb almost anything. About 60% of a human body is water, and while we can survive with percentages as low as 45%, going too low is unhealthy and sometimes fatal.
All plants and animals we eat depend on water to grow and live. So, water scarcity leads to food scarcity. Sometimes, water gets polluted with chemicals or metals or with too much organic waste from farms or cities. Plants, animals, and humans cannot use polluted water. Yet industry and big agriculture continue to treat water as a free waste dump and a free resource for their machines. They can do this because our governments, which they control, allow them to.
Ways capital wastes water include:
Pipelines
Oil and gas are the biggest threats to water. Oil coats the surface of water and poisons creatures who live there. Domestic oil flows through pipelines that often leak, damaging whatever land or water they occupy. But the people whose water and land is being polluted get no benefit from the oil. These people are often the indigenous residents, and they are the leaders in fighting to protect water for all of us.
In 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux and supporters from around the world fought a year-long struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) that the Energy Transfer Corporation was building through their land and under the Missouri River. Police beat and arrested the water protectors, but they stopped the pipeline until President Donald Trump took office and ordered construction be completed.
More pipelines are being built, and indigenous people are still resisting. For five years, Indians in the North Central US led a broad coalition to stop a pipe called Line 3, built by the Enbridge Corporation. Line 3 was completed last year and crosses 227 lakes and the Mississippi River. It’s now carrying hundreds of thousands of barrels of sludgy tar sands oil through Minnesota, some of which inevitably leaks into streams and groundwater.
Methane (‘natural gas’) pipelines also threaten water. Right now the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) threatens over 200 waterways in a 300 — mile span across Virginia and West Virginia. The companies building it say they are making a better environment. “MVP,” their web site brags, “is being recognized as a critical infrastructure project that is essential for our nation’s energy security, energy reliability, and ability to effectively transition to a lower-carbon future.”
(Really? How can burning more fossil gas lead to lower carbon emissions?)
A group called Appalachians Against Pipelines are resisting in court and with their bodies, but MVP says they “remain committed to completing construction by the end of 2023 and flowing domestic natural gas during the winter months for the benefits of reliability and affordability in the form of lower natural gas prices for consumers.”
They say they’re doing it for our benefit, then, but methane gas pipelines have polluted water and killed people many times. Critics say the pipes are inherently unsafe, because they corrode and gas can explode out the holes. Laws mandating pipes be coated against corrosion have never passed because of industry resistance.
Fracking
Much of the gas the MVP will transport comes from the process known as fracking. Hydrofracturing (“fracking”) means injecting large amounts of water, sand, and chemicals, under high pressure into underground cracks containing oil or methane gas. Fracking expands the cracks, allowing extraction of the gas or oil.
Fracking permanently pollutes the 2 to 10 million gallons of water used each time a well is fracked. (Most wells need to be fracked many times.) It’s a straight-up trade of water for oil or gas, but water is needed for life. Fossil fuels aren’t.
Industry groups say water used in fracking will not contaminate drinking water, but according to this article in Scientific American,” the entire groundwater resource in the Wind River Basin in Wyoming is contaminated with chemicals linked to fracking.”
Livestock in areas surrounding wells have died. As with pipelines, the affected people don’t benefit. Despite what companies like MVP say about “energy security” or “affordability” for Americans, the fracked fuel is transported by pipelines to some port, from which it is sold to Asia or Europe.
Environmentalists, farmers, and indigenous people are fighting against fracking from Romania to the UK to the Dakotas, basically all over the world.
Deep sea drilling
There’s a lot of oil under the ocean, but because it requires miles-long extraction pipes, and leaks cannot be easily repaired, deep sea oil is extremely dangerous to extract. That doesn’t stop the fossil fuel companies, who create spill after spill, poisoning fishing waters for everyone.
The inevitable results are disasters like the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska and the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizons explosion in 2010, which killed 11people, and polluted the northern Gulf of Mexico and the marshes of southern states for years. Even now, according to an article in Nature, fish in the Gulf are contaminated. Meanwhile, even deeper, more dangerous undersea wells are being drilled.
Other forms of pollution
Companies pollute water with products other than oil and gas. Mines, chemical, and manufacturing plants toxify the water of millions. Plastic in water kills fish, marine mammals, and sea turtles. Other major sources of non-chemical pollution are factory farms, with their tons of organic waste that create life-killing harmful algal blooms (HABs) in the water exposed to it.
Loving and protecting water
Can we learn to value water for the creative force it truly is? Can people start to treat it as the indispensable source of life? There are things we can do starting today.
● Love water like you would love God if you believe(d), because it really is the life force inside us. When you drink, taste and appreciate it; when you bathe, feel and enjoy it. Give thanks to it when you do gratitude. Thank the water inside you that keeps your life going, and inside all other living things keeping them going.
● Stop using harmful chemicals to wash our clothes and clean our homes. There are water-friendly alternatives to products that kill fish.
● Don’t dump motor oil, household chemicals, or medications down drains. Most local governments have places to take hazardous waste.
● Don’t use chemicals on your lawn that will wash into sewers. Better yet, don’t have a lawn at all. Grow organic food or native plants instead.
● Minimize the use of plastics that inevitably wind up in the ocean, killing sea life.
● Conserve water whenever you can. Don’t waste it on, say, watering a lawn in Arizona or washing your car in the heat of day.
● A Connecticut town published ten water protection tips for suburbanites here. There are dozens of other sites about preventing water pollution from your home.
● Participate in ceremonies that celebrate and express love for water, such as these or these or any of the ways people have created or that you create for yourself. There are inspiring videos of water ceremonies on YouTube.
● Are there waterways near your home: streams, lakes, wetlands, shores? Most likely, they are threatened by development and/or pollution. Probably, there are groups of citizens working to protect them or clean them up. Find those groups or start one. Even trash pickups on a coast or park will help.
But individual and small group efforts can only do so much. How can we protect water from the rapacious forces of industrial civilization? We have indigenous leadership on this, and we can follow them.
Supporting water protectors
Some indigenous water protectors are looking for help:
◘ After losing the immediate fight against Enbridge in Minnesota, Stop Line 3 is organizing people to fight pipelines throughout the Americas.
◘ Honor the Earth seeks to protect the Great Lakes from pipelines and mines. They invite people to come and block pipeline construction or to get involved in other way.
Some good groups that support indigenous resistance with advocacy and financial help:
◘ The Water Protectors Legal collective “provides legal support and advocacy for Indigenous people, the Earth, and climate justice movements.”
◘ Cultural Survival brings together indigenous people and their supporters from around the world.
◘ Survival International “fights for tribal peoples’ survival. We stop loggers, miners, and oil companies from destroying tribal lands, lives and livelihoods across the globe.” They have won some amazing victories over industrial giants.
◘ Non-indigenous groups protecting water include Appalachians Against Pipelines. They are calling on people to come to West Virginia to stop the MVP.
Protecting / Restoring the ocean
To save the oceans, the biggest treasuries of water in the world, we can work with or contribute to organizations such as
◘ Greenpeace fighting for oceans for over 50 years
◘ Sea Trees — surfers working with indigenous people to restore coral reefs and kelp beds and plant mangrove trees. Love these guys.
◘ Indigenous people are leading struggles to protect oceans from overfishing and mining, fights crucial to maintaining life on Earth. Check some out and support them here.
— — — — — — —
Thanks for reading! Please comment, share, or steal. Follow me on Twitter, on Facebook , on Medium.com, or my blog The Inn by the Healing Path. Hire me for freelancing, editing, or tutoring on Linked In.
A wonderful column! We have to drink bottled water because our well is contaminated, and not responding to being "shocked" with chlorine, due to too many neighbors close by all with the same access to the aquifer, and all with similar septic systems. And now I read that even bottled water may contain some PFAS (the so-called "forever" chemicals). And the fights out west about the overuse of the Colorado River are legendary.
It would be great to reduce our dependence on maintaining green lawns, but many residential communities prohibit the alternatives!
Our disrespect for water may prove our undoing, while, ironically, too much water in the sea from melting glaciers may inundate low-lying coastal communities. Remember the Dutch fable about the boy and the dyke? The modern equivalent of that, the partial destruction of New Orleans during hurricane Katrina, a few years ago, when levees and pumps failed, is a taste of the future.