Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
chemical pollution of water resources was not considered as a big problem, the fecal
pollution retaining the attention of public health specialists (especially during the
nineteenth century). After the Second World War, the development of scienti
c
ecology and the rise of modern environmentalist movements highlighted other
forms of water resources degradation.
As illustrated by a French 1829 law, the conservation of water resources
emerged relatively early and not later than policies to preserve drinkable water
quality. But hygienic measures encouraged many people engaged in commercial
and recreational
.
The Izaak Walton League, created in 1922 (named after a famous British writer and
angler of the seventeenth century, author of The Complete Angler), acted to pro-
mote the protection and restoration of American waters, before broadening its range
of interests to topics related to the preservation of
shing to
ght situations they perceived as ongoing
“
water crises
”
air pollution,
clean energy, and sustainable agriculture. In 1951 appeared in West Germany the
Vereinigung Deutscher Gewasserschutz to arouse public interest in water resources
issues. Fishers and scienti
“
Outdoor America
”
c amateurs were forerunners of ecologists and launched
many operations long before the 1970s and the popularization of environmental
protection topics. During the 1950s, the Amsterdam waterworks played a major role
in forging international links between other waterworks along the Rhine River.
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A
new cause of environmental degradation has been
“
”
pollution from nuclear
reactors, whose wastewater can raise the temperature of rivers high enough to kill
all organisms in the water. In the 1970s for instance, several protests took place in
West Germany to attempt to block nuclear reactor projects along the Rhine. In
1986, the catastrophe provoked by a
thermal
re at a chemical site near Basel (Switzerland),
showed how downstream users of river water (and living organisms of the river
ecosystem) have to face upstream pollution. In some cases, a short event can have
consequences for many years on the water resources, hundreds of kilometers
downstream.
Another change upon water resources has been the fantastic increase in chemical
fertilizers and pesticides. As early as 1962, the American ecologist Rachel Carson
wrote that synthetic pesticides
have been recovered from most of the major river
systems and even from streams of groundwater
“
owing unseen through the earth
”
and even found
. Since her pioneering work,
pesticides have been largely incriminated. However they are not the only threat to
water resources brought by the twentieth century farming modernization. The use of
fertilizers on agricultural lands indirectly produced algal blooms and lakes eutro-
phication, especially in the 1930s
“
in
sh in remote mountain lakes
”
1970s period. This phenomenon also happened
in enclosed seas like the Baltic Sea, the Adriatic, the Red Sea and numerous inland
lakes. The excess nutrients provoked a proliferation of algae, but not the same
expansion for
-
sh stocks.
32
Disco (
2007
).
