Tuesday, July 20, 2010

“Water, Water Everywhere, And Not A Drop to Drink”

Coleridge wrote these words in his poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" to describe a situation on a ship at sea. They also fit the predicament we will be in if environmental pollution is not rapidly halted. People across the planet are becoming more aware of this natural resource most Americans take for granted: WATER! Provincetown has limited water supplies. Its well fields, in Truro, cannot keep up with demand during summer, forcing Provincetown to use two wells in the National Seashore. Since P-town water comes from a town targeted by the utility company for herbicidal spraying, as is Wellfleet, the purity of this water is in jeopardy. Citizens in New York and Pennsylvania have started to unite against fracking companies, which pay good money to lease land, then inject toxic chemicals into the ground to obtain natural gas, polluting groundwater in the process. When you add large amounts of toxic chemicals to an aquifer, be it in New York, Pennsylvania or Massachusetts, you poison your future water supply. How shortsighted can humans be? And, I didn’t even mention the incredible environmental damage in the Gulf of Mexico, causing acid rain to fall in Iowa and beyond. The glaciers are melting. Sea levels are rising. June was the hottest month on record. Read Chris Hedges on how corporations are destroying our world, bit by bit.