Friday, October 15, 2010

Nor Any Drop To Drink

Many of us who grew up with black-and-white TV have been led to believe that the key to happiness lies in the chance discovery of oil while shootin' at some food. Ol' Jed's a millionaire, so it worked out well for him, but in the real world, it is a very unlucky thing to live over an oil reservoir or a seam of coal. Before you know it, Jed and his buddies are busily stripping oodles of cash off your land, then stripping off your land itself, and you're left with a god-awful job, poor health, no education, no topsoil, and few options. Warriors thunder through. Stuff blows up. You might get the feeling someone at a remote distance is pulling all the strings, and you'd be right.

I won't even shoot a rifle at the ground lest I ding a salamander, but I'm not going to discover a bubbling crude in any case. I'm one of the lucky ones who live on top of the best resource of all: water. We're planted on spongy ground, and if we sit still long enough our northern bits green up.

The annual rainfall is less than you might think. Most of the time it hangs in the air, sometimes acquiescing into a drizzle. Oh, we have had considerable deluges from time to time, notably during the last ice age, when the Columbia River repeatedly flooded to a height of a thousand feet, strewing chunks of prehistoric Montana and some surprised indigenous people all over the valley.

For the longest time, humans could be found only in places with good water. We don't do well without it; our cells gum up. A native American term for water is "pah," and it shows up in many place names in the arid west: Pagosa Springs, Tonopah, Pahrump, and the like. Pittsburgh, PA? Even coal country has its priorities straight. We need this stuff. The other stuff doesn't matter.

But because we are clever, we have come up with ways to make water potable and transfer it all over the place. Now we're everywhere.

Generally speaking, in view of the vital nature of water, communities band together to see to its distribution and safety. The Romans rendered unto Caesar and rigged up some mighty spiffy aqueducts. That's how we do it today: everybody chips in, and out comes the water, Crystal Light optional. It's hard to imagine doing it any other way.

Unfortunately, our powers of imagination are not required. The water we need is already being treated as a commodity to be bought and sold and traded to whoever can afford it. Examples abound. The oilman T. Boone Pickens has bought up significant acreage over the Ogallala aquifer in order to pump its water and sell it to cities. The aquifer is replenished but slowly, and not nearly as fast as he plans to pump it; in fact the water he's drilling was deposited in sands millions of years ago. It's fossil water, basically. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar.

"I don't have any concerns about depleting the aquifer," Mr. Pickens has said. That's a relief, because stress can kill a guy. "And it could make a lot of people a lot of money."

Pah.

There are other ways Ol' Jed and his buddies can privatize and profit from the water we need. Take the notion that people would actually buy tap water if only it were served up in a petroleum-based container and labeled something like Mother Nature's Woo Woo Dew. That succeeded beyond any sensible person's wildest dreams. In fact, the Nestle Corporation has been able to tap water sources for about $.002/gallon and sell it bottled for $5.30 a gallon all over the world. They are proposing to perform that very alchemy not thirty miles from here, in the gorge, where our seemingly inexhaustible supplies of water have already been drawn down, pumped, dammed and diverted; groundwater levels are in steep decline. Free speech tends to be less effective than the paid-for kind, but if you want to tell Nestle to stick to mining for chocolate chips and leave our water the hell alone, you've got till October 29th to do it. It's either that, or we start rinsing off our steelhead and salmon one bottle at a time.

Pah.


We have interrupted our regularly scheduled Murrmurrs to slip in this post on Blog Action Day, sponsored once a year by Change.org. This year's theme is Water. Bloggers worldwide, including my pals Sara Stratton and Vickie Henderson, are spreading the word about clean water issues. I encourage you to click on the "tell Nestle" link above to comment on the proposed bottling venture. 


And because I'm a softie, I'm going to go ahead and put in your regular Saturday Murrmurrs on Sunday. Y'all come back now, hear?

26 comments:

  1. Oh, I'll head right on over there and see what's up with Blog Action Day, but I'll click on that Nestle link right away. We have a tax here in Washington state on bottled water that is trying to be removed, whereas I think if you want to drink bottled water in a petroleum based plastic package, fine, but you need to pay for it! Great post, Murr. I am fired up now.

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  2. I can clearly see I need to visit your blog more often. You make me laugh, sometimes I even snort, and you make me think about the bigger picture, and that's a pretty cool combo. Thank you.

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  3. Very timely, Murr. Just listened to a bit on CBC radio the other day about the dwindling ground water resources on dear old Mother Earth. There are too many of us and too little of the stuff we like to exploit or take for granted.

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  4. Hear, hear, Murr...I raise a glass of tap water and toast your efforts to fend off the Toll House Cookie Mongers. I'll be on that link like a Columbia Torrent salamander on a semi-aquatic invertebrate.

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  5. I live on a thin layer of cryptobiotic soil atop a thick wedge of basalt. Mingled in and betwixt are a few rapidly depleting aquifers. I'm surrounded by lawsuits, greed, salmon, and my own thirst.
    Mark Twain said "Whiskey's for drinking, water's for fighting."
    He knew it.
    Farmers know it.
    Corporate America knows it.
    Most people don't give a fig and they're gonna get hurt.
    I need to go read about the community baby on the plane again. One could get quite depressed thinking about water. Cool, clear water.

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  6. We went to the "tell Nestle" link, and liked the letter, but were unable to send it on, because no buttons or links on the page. What are we missing?

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  7. Ah but will the Nestle company "create jobs"? If the answer is YES, then we need to be prepared to go upstream without a paddle. There are those among us (not me) who would happily market rat poison as baby food if it was profitable and created jobs. -- Seriously: Here is the link to the trailer for the documentary "Tapped". This film mentions Nestle's involvement directly. Do watch it.

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  8. Rubob, I just checked that link, and the letter was there, underneath which you could fill in your own name/address; and underneath THATat the very bottom was a button that said "Send Message." (I wrote my own letter, of course!) Try it again and see if you see what I see. If there's still a problem, I'll try to find another link. Thanks.

    There's some mighty fine writin' going on in this comments section, I'll tell you.

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  9. I recall marching against Nestle as a college student, when it was revealed that they strongarmed Third World mothers into buying their crappy infant formula, telling them breast milk was bad for their babies. And psst...their chocolate tastes like wax. Pah on them, and roo roo for you for this wonderful post.

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  10. Hmmm... Could this be the same Nestle that is encouraging women in third world countries to use formula instead of breast feed? I clicked. I signed. Bastards. I'm eating oatmeal cookies from now on.

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  11. Thanks, Murr. Yes, water's going to be a huge issue just about everywhere, very very soon. You can't turn a whole planet into a farm (zoo? prison?) without huge, huge outlays of water, and we're depleting our aquifers at an astonishing rate :-(

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  12. You know that we up North are busy polluting that beautiful river, don't you? I think we made another new contribution last week.

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  13. Another great documentary is "Flow", which also mentions Nestle, I think re: somewheres back in my homeland Michigan. Bastards is right.

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  14. Done.

    I still remember the Nestles boycott of the 70s over their unethical baby formula sales in Africa, and it doesn't look like they've changed their policies all that much. I can't get over the shortsightedness of companies draining the aquifers this way. It's a bit like the people who insist on having private swimming pools and expensive grass lawns in the desert no matter what negative impact this has on the environment.

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  15. Nothing gets you more conscious of your water source than living in places like central Mexico where you only get water 2 to 3 times a week which is then stored in your tanque on your roof. You learn to flush less, do without soaking baths, and copy the locals by repurposing "used" water (ie. mop water) into stuff for your trees or plants. Course you also come to appreciate the luxury we have up here in El Norte of the ability to drink straight from the tap without worry. Down there you buy water in garafons (the big bottles) weekly from delivery trucks to drink.

    Water's just another resource we tend to use like there's no tomorrow.

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  16. I swear I can hear Mother Nature weeping while all of this is taking place. But are her tears becoming 'acid rain'? Bless you for raising this issue.

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  17. Currently, we are experiencing a drought in Southern Indiana. Our well is almost tapped out and we are looking into connecting to city water. This issue is one that will become increasingly important as the decade progresses I believe and as you have raised here in your post.

    BTW, thanks for stopping by in my little corner of the blogosphere.

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  18. I like your polemical posts. You make me think, which is a rarity in blogging. You make me laugh too, which is also a rarity. You are fab.

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  19. while i always appreciate a funny murrmurr, it is refreshing to see your powerful communication skills harnessed toward a goal beyond amusement.

    That being said, "Mother Nature's Woo Woo Dew" has been the highlight of my otherwise depressing day of research on depressing subjects for a very likely useless university degree.

    maybe we would appreciate water more(those of us who don't normally think of water because we could run it freely from taps 24hrs a day if we cared to) if we called it Mother Nature's Woo Woo Dew.

    My city has a world renowned water purification system and yet I constantly see otherwise intelligent people buying bottled water and weird filtering devices. The ironic thing is the tap water they are so frightened of is governmentally regulated and inspected, while the liquid in the bottles is provided by psychopathic corporations whose only concern is profit. I don't get it, I really don't.

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  20. We can be a remarkably shortsighted species, huh?

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  21. Shortsighted, and probably short-lived, a flash in the pan. We're the opposite of ants. All jumbled together, working at cross-purposes. Mme. DeFarge, back atya. You are fab. (People should definitely click on your blog.) Plus, now I have to look up "polemical."

    And while I'm at it, if any of you has failed to click on that name Sara Stratton, you are missing a mighty powerful piece by a woman who knows some things and knows how to string words together. It is enlightening.

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  22. while i always appreciate a funny murrmurr, it is refreshing to see your powerful communication skills harnessed toward a goal beyond amusement.

    That being said, "Mother Nature's Woo Woo Dew" has been the highlight of my otherwise depressing day of research on depressing subjects for a very likely useless university degree.

    maybe we would appreciate water more(those of us who don't normally think of water because we could run it freely from taps 24hrs a day if we cared to) if we called it Mother Nature's Woo Woo Dew.

    My city has a world renowned water purification system and yet I constantly see otherwise intelligent people buying bottled water and weird filtering devices. The ironic thing is the tap water they are so frightened of is governmentally regulated and inspected, while the liquid in the bottles is provided by psychopathic corporations whose only concern is profit. I don't get it, I really don't.

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  23. Currently, we are experiencing a drought in Southern Indiana. Our well is almost tapped out and we are looking into connecting to city water. This issue is one that will become increasingly important as the decade progresses I believe and as you have raised here in your post.

    BTW, thanks for stopping by in my little corner of the blogosphere.

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  24. You know that we up North are busy polluting that beautiful river, don't you? I think we made another new contribution last week.

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  25. Oh, I'll head right on over there and see what's up with Blog Action Day, but I'll click on that Nestle link right away. We have a tax here in Washington state on bottled water that is trying to be removed, whereas I think if you want to drink bottled water in a petroleum based plastic package, fine, but you need to pay for it! Great post, Murr. I am fired up now.

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  26. With any luck, I won't live long enough to see the big drought that is on the way. I don't know WHAT you youngsters are going to do. Anybody putting in rain catchment tanks yet?

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