Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Our Water Supply
Aquifers around the world are drying up, including in the U.S. and Canada. The gigantic
Ogallala aquifer in the Great Plains, which gives the U.S. about 30% of its irrigation water,
is being used at many times the rate it's being recharged and may be dry in as little as 25
years.
Half of the wetlands around the world have been lost since 1990. At least a third of
rivers and streams in the U.S. are so polluted that fish contain toxins and are inedible, and
swimming isn't safe. Lakes are worse off. Farming accounts for about half of this pollution.
The majority of wells have pesticides and even more of them have pharmaceuticals and
other man-made toxins. Even in rural areas, many of our wells are contaminated with pesti-
cides and excess nutrients.
In the city, substances like fluorine, chlorine and chloramines are put in our water in an
attempt to clean and improve it. Some of it is necessary and definitely helps make our wa-
ter safe to drink, but some of it is unnecessary and harmful to us. None of it focuses on the
root cause of the problem, which is the absurd chemicals we shouldn't be producing and
disposing of in the first place.
The implications for you and me are that we need to stop using toxins in all areas of our
lives and start protecting our water supply, find ways to collect and recycle water, and then
responsibly use municipal or well water to make up for what we can't collect. You might
also consider doing something to clean your drinking and irrigation water, some combina-
tion of ozone, ultraviolet light, carbon filtration, reverse osmosis, hydrogen peroxide, ion
exchange or distillation. I have a relatively inexpensive filter for my drinking water that
takes out 99% of the chlorine, lead, pesticides, cysts and many other compounds.
To protect our water, we can start by not using pesticides, chemical fertilizers and genet-
ically modified products. We can also establish a garden that is teeming with plant and mi-
crobial life in order to clean up toxins and pollutants. There are certain microbes that spe-
cialize in doing just that, such as the
Rhodopseudomonas palustris
found in many microor-
ganism inoculants.
