Silent Spring for Us?

Would Rachel Carson Find an Audience Today?

by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

 

With her 1962 book, Silent Spring, Rachel Carson got DDT and other synthetic pesticides banned and saved bird life. Today it is humans who are directly threatened by  technologies designed to extract the maximum profit at the lowest private cost and the maximum social cost from natural resources.

Once abundant clean water has become a scarce resource. Yet, in the US ground water and surface water are being polluted and made unusable by mountain top removal mining, fracking and other such “new technologies.”  Ranchers in eastern Montana, for example, are being forced out of ranching by polluted water.

Offshore oil drilling and chemical farming run-off have destroyed fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico. In other parts of the world, explosives used to maximize short-run fish catches have destroyed coral reefs that sustained fish life.   Deforestation for short-run agricultural production results in replacing bio-diverse rain forests with barren land. The “now generation” is leaving a resource scarce planet to future generations.

Nuclear power plants are thoughtlessly built in earthquake and tsunami zones. Spent fuel rods are stored within the plants, a practice that adds their destructive potential to a catastrophic accident or act of nature.

The newest threat comes from genetically modified seeds that produce crops resistant to herbicides.  The active ingredient in Monsanto the devil’s Roundup herbicide is glyphosate, a toxic element that now contaminates groundwater in Spain and according to the US Geological Survey is now “commonly found in rain and streams in the Mississippi River Basin.”

In 2011 Don Huber, a plant pathologist and soil microbiologist, wrote to the US Secretary of Agriculture about the unexpected consequences of GMOs and the accompanying herbicides. He cited adverse effects on critical micronutrients, soil fertility, and the nutritional value of foods.  He cited the impairment of metabolic pathways that prevents plants from accumulating and storing minerals, such as iron, manganese, and zinc, minerals important for liver function and immune response in animals and people. He cited toxic effects on the microorganisms in the soil that have disrupted nature’s balance and resulted in large increases in plant diseases. He cited livestock deaths from botulism, premature animal aging, and an increase in animal and human infertility.

In an interview, Huber said that the power of agri-business has made it almost impossible to do research on GMOs and that regulatory agencies with the responsibility of protecting the public are dependent on the industry’s own self-serving studies and have no independent objective science on which to base a regulatory decision.

In short, in order to secure bumper crops for several years, we are destroying the fertility of soil, animal and human life.

Mankind has been destroying the world for a long time. In his fascinating book, 1493,  Charles C. Mann describes the adverse effects on the environment, people, and civilizations of the globalism unleashed by Christopher Columbus. These include the international transfer of human and plant diseases, deforestation, destructions of peoples and empires, and the impact on distant China of Spanish new world silver.

Mann provides a history lesson in unintended and unexpected consequences resulting from the actions of elites and of those that elites dominated. The Chinese government fixed taxation in terms of the quantity of silver, but the importation of Spanish silver inflated prices (decreased the value of a given quantity of silver) and left the government without sufficient revenues.

A successor government or dynasty evicted Chinese from the coast in order to deprive pirates of resources. The displaced millions of people deforested mountainsides in order to sustain themselves with terrace agriculture. The result of deforestation was floods that not only washed away the terraces but also the crops in the fertile valleys below. Consequently, floods became one of China’s greatest challenges to its food supply.

The first slaves were conquered new world natives, but the “Indians” had no immunity to European diseases. The second wave of slaves were European whites, but the Europeans had no immunity to malaria and yellow fever. By default slavery fell to blacks, many of whom had immunity to malaria and yellow fever. Thus, a black workforce could survive the infected environments and newly created wetlands in which to raise sugarcane, wetlands that were ideal homes for malaria and yellow fever bearing mosquitoes.  Mann, of course, is merely reporting, not justifying black or any slavery.

Mann points out that the lowly mosquito had a large impact on American history. The Mason-Dixon Line roughly splits the East Coast into two zones, the South in which disease carrying mosquitoes were an endemic threat, and the north in which malaria was not a threat. In the South, a person who survived childhood and grew into an adult had acquired immunity.  Northerners had no such protection.

This had enormous consequences when Northern armies invaded the South. Mann reports that “disease killed twice as many Union troops as Confederate bullets or shells.”  Between the summers of 1863 and 1864, the official annual infection rate for what was called “intermittent fevers” was 233 percent.  The average northern soldier was felled more than twice. In one year 361,968 troops were infected.  Most of the deaths from malaria were indirect.  The disease so badly weakened the troops that they died from dysentery, measles or strep infection.

The mosquito was the South’s most powerful ally and so prolonged the war, despite the vast numerical superiority of the Union force, that Lincoln was forced to take action that he opposed and declare emancipation of slaves. Thus, Mann writes, it is not farfetched to conclude that blacks were freed by the very malaria mosquito that had caused blacks to be the preferred workforce.

Mann shows that long before the birth of capitalism, greed drove men to barbarous treatment of their fellows. He also shows that policies, whether driven by greed or by well-intended socio-political design, inevitably had unexpected consequences. His multi-faceted history well illustrates the old adage, “the well laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”

The old world’s colonization of the new world devastated new world peoples, but the new world bit back with the spread of the potato blight to Europe and Spanish and European inflation.

Environmental destruction resulted mainly from deforestation and soils washed away by consequent floods. Prior to modern technology and toxic chemicals, the planet survived mankind.

Today the prospects for the planet are different. The human population is vast compared to earlier times, putting far more pressure on resources, and the disastrous consequences of new technologies are unknown at the time that they are employed, when the focus is on the expected benefits. Moreover, these costs are external to the business, corporation, or economic unit. The costs are inflicted on the environment and on other humans and other animal life. The costs are not included when the business calculates its profit and return on its investment.  The external costs of fracking, mountain top removal mining, chemical farming, and GMOs could exceed the value of the marketable products.

Businesses have no incentive to take these costs into account, because to do so reduces their profits and could indicate that the full cost of production exceeds the value of the output. Governments have proven to be largely ineffective in controlling external costs, because of the ability of private interests to influence the decisions of government. Even if one country were to confront these costs, other countries would take advantage of the situation. Companies that externalize some of their costs can undersell companies that internalize all of the costs of their production.  Thus, the planet can be destroyed by the short-term profit and convenience interests of one generation.

The main lesson that emerges from Mann’s highly readable book is that people today have no better grasp of the consequences of their actions than superstitious and unscientific people centuries ago.  Modern technological man is just as easily bamboozled by propaganda as ancient man was by superstition and ignorance.

If you doubt that the peoples of Western civilization live in an artificial reality created by propaganda, watch this documentary on psyops. The documentary does a good job despite wandering off into a couple of side issues on which it takes one-sided positions.  It is a bit heavy on blaming the rich, and overlooks that Stalin, for example, had plenty of propaganda and wasn’t looking to make himself a billionaire.  Not all the rich are against the people. Billionaires Roger Milliken and Sir James Goldsmith fought against jobs offshoring and globalism, which increases the powerlessness of the people vis-a-vis the elites. Both spoke for the people to no avail.

The documentary also blames the Constitution for limiting the participation of the mass of the people in governing themselves without acknowledging that the Constitution restricted the power of government and guaranteed civil liberty by making law a shield of the people instead of a weapon in the hands of the government. It is not the Constitution’s fault, or the fault of Founding Father James Madison, that the American people succumbed to propaganda by Bush and Obama and gave up their civil liberty in order to be “safe” from “Muslim terrorists.”
The documentary shows that propaganda is a form of mind control, and controlled minds are indeed the American predicament.

In 1962 Rachel Carson caught Monsanto the devil off guard and thus gained an audience. Today she would not get the same attention. Ready and waiting psyops would go into operation to discredit her.  I just read an article by an economist who wrote that economists have decided that environmentalism is a religion, in other words, an unscientific belief system that preaches “religious values.”  This demonstrates what little importance economists attribute to external costs and the ability of externalized costs to destroy the productive power of the planet.  Thus, the question, “silent spring for us?” is not merely rhetorical.  It is real.

Corporate Monopolies 'May Dominate Green Economy'

Thursday, December 29, 2011 by SciDev.net

NEW DEHLI - The global push towards a 'green economy' risks being hijacked by large corporate monopolies trying to gain control over natural resources, a report has warned.

A report released earlier this month has warned that global companies, positioning themselves for a post-petrochemical future, may use the idea as a pretext for gaining control over biomass resources, which would eventually replace petroleum as the feedstock for energy and for industrial products. There is a growing emphasis on the concept of a green economy in the run-up to the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), in June 2012, in Brazil. A green economy is widely seen as a way of tackling environmental challenges including climate change, failing fisheries and water security.

But a report released earlier this month (14 December) has warned that global companies, positioning themselves for a post-petrochemical future, may use the idea as a pretext for gaining control over biomass resources, which would eventually replace petroleum as the feedstock for energy and for industrial products.

The report, published by an international nongovernmental organisation Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Conservation (ETC Group), in Canada, says that most of this biomass is in developing countries, where it is managed by poor peasants, forest dwellers, fishing communities and livestock-owners whose livelihoods depend on them.

The report urges developing countries to craft policies that will protect them from such encroachments.

If they do not, they risk being "seduced" by the promise of quick green techno-fixes, which appear as "a politically expedient" alternative plan to save the climate, the report says, because "techno fixes are not capable of addressing systemic problems of poverty, hunger and environmental crises".

"In the absence of effective and socially responsive governance and government oversight, the bio-based economy will result in further environmental degradation, unprecedented loss of biodiversity and the loss of remaining commons," it says.

The report's authors said they were not rejecting the concept of green economy, but that countries should build sustainable economies based on using new, more socially and ecologically sustainable economic models.

Hoysala Chanakya, principal research scientist, at the centre for sustainable technologies at the Indian Institute of Science, said that the report was right to highlight that there was potential for corporate take-overs in the absence of adequate policy support and that developing countries need to have policies to ensure that public resources do not get monopolised.

He added that the assumption that technological advances in algal or plant-based biofuel systems, for example, would solve environmental problems, is based partly on hype.

"The [biomass-based] technologies are still in a stage of infancy," Chanakya said. They also leave lots of organic waste which can be polluting, he added.

Other sustainable development policy experts in India suggested that a solution to some of the problems forecast by ETC Group was to decentralise food and energy security programmes and push for small, farmer-centred agriculture.

Instead of the "overarching generalised programmes involving blanket application of solar or hydrogen power" developing countries should move towards decentralised, locally-managed food and energy security programmes that are rooted in their unique local environments, said Rajeswari Raina, scientist at National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies.

Ambuj Sagar, professor of policy studies at the Indian Institute of Technology, agreed: "We need a different narrative that places value on the livelihoods of small farmers in developing countries rather than on food production at lowest cost and protecting interests of farmers in industrialised countries through subsidies."

"Private-sector and market-oriented food and agriculture systems are unlikely to deliver this kind of outcome since that is not the primary objective of these actors and institutions."

Link to full report

Did chemical reactions cause Twin Towers collapse?

(OK, but it doesn't explain the collapse of building 7.--jef)

By Agence France-Presse
Wednesday, September 21st, 2011

PARIS — A mix of sprinkling system water and melted aluminium from aircraft hulls likely triggered the explosions that felled New York's Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, a materials expert has told a technology conference.

"If my theory is correct, tonnes of aluminium ran down through the towers, where the smelt came into contact with a few hundred litres of water," Christian Simensen, a scientist at SINTEF, an independent technology research institute based in Norway, said in a statement released Wednesday.

"From other disasters and experiments carried out by the aluminium industry, we know that reactions of this sort lead to violent explosions."

The official report blames the collapse on the over-heating and failure of the structural steel beams at the core of the buildings, an explanation Simensen rejects.

Given the quantities of the molten metal involved, the blasts would have been powerful enough to blow out an entire section of each building, he said.

This, in turn, would lead to the top section of each tower to fall down on the sections below.

The sheer weight of the top floors would be enough to crush the lower part of the building like a house of card, he said.

The aluminium-water scenario would also account for explosions from within the buildings just prior to their collapse that have fuelled conspiracy theories suggesting that the structures had been booby-trapped.

Simensen presented his theory at an international materials technology conference in San Diego, California, and has detailed his calculations in an article published in the trade journal Aluminium International Today.

"The aluminium industry had reported more than 250 aluminium-water explosions since 1980," he said.

In a controlled experiment carried out by Alcoa Aluminium, 20 kilos (44 pounds) of molten aluminium was allowed to react with 20 litres of water, along with a small quantity of rust.

"The explosion destroyed the entire laboratory and left a crater 30 metres (100 feet) in diameter," Simensen said.

By comparison, the aircraft carried 30 tonnes of aluminium into each of the towers, according to his calculations.

Simensen speculates that the two commercial jets were immediately trapped inside an insulating layer of building debris within the skyscrapers.

The debris -- especially plaster, which blocks the transfer of heat -- would have formed a shield protecting the rest of the building.

At the same time, however, it would created a super-hot, oven-like zone around the aircraft, heated by burning fuel.

Aluminium alloy, which in jet hulls also contains magnesium, melts at 660 degrees Celsius (1,220 degrees Fahrenheit). If heated to 750 C (1382 F), the alloy "becomes as liquid as water," Simensen said.

This molten aluminium could then have flowed downward through staircases and gaps in the floor, causing a chemical reaction with water from sprinklers on the levels below.

The mix would immediately boost temperatures by several hundred degrees, releasing combustible hydrogen in the process. Such reactions are even more powerful in the presence of rust or other catalysts, which can boost temperatures to more than 1,500 C (2,700 F).

A meltdown period of 30 to 45 minutes would also be consistent with the timing of the explosions and subsequent collapse of both buildings in relation to the moment of impact.

Simensen said there are lessons to be learned, if his theory is correct, that could help avoid a similar disaster were another skyscraper to be hit by a big jet.

"We could develop means of rapidly emptying sprinkler systems in the floors beneath the point of impact," he said.

Firing a rocket with fire-retardant that could coat the aircraft body could also help prevent metal alloy from melting.

'Fracking': Rock Fracturing's Relation to Quakes

Monday, August 29, 2011 by The San Francisco Chronicle

by David R. Baker 

 

The earthquakes that rattled Blackpool, England, in April and May wouldn't have attracted much notice in California. The strongest rated a mere 2.3 in magnitude.

As fracking has spread, most complaints have focused on the threat of groundwater contamination. But some opponents have also asked whether the process - which, after all, involves breaking subterranean rocks - could cause earthquakes as well. But their possible connection to "fracking" raised eyebrows on both sides of the Atlantic.

The epicenter of one of the quakes lay less than 500 meters from a well used for hydro-fracturing, the process of pumping pressurized water and chemicals deep underground to crack rocks and release oil or natural gas. The company fracking the well halted operations and started studying the possible link.

As fracking has spread, most complaints have focused on the threat of groundwater contamination. But some opponents have also asked whether the process - which, after all, involves breaking subterranean rocks - could cause earthquakes as well.

The question is particularly pertinent in seismically active California, where the use of fracking appears to be growing. Fracking projects have been reported in Santa Barbara County and the Sacramento Valley.

Last week's 5.8 temblor in Virginia even prompted a round of speculation in the blogosphere that fracking could be to blame. There are, however, no fracking wells near the quake's epicenter or in any of the surrounding counties, according to the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy.

Mild tremorsScientists say fracking does cause tiny earthquakes, but they're too small to be felt on the Earth's surface. The process can also cause quakes large enough to be noticed on the surface, but only if done near a fault line. And even then, the resulting tremors are likely to be mild.

"You're not going to get a really big earthquake," said Mark Zoback, a Stanford University geophysics professor who has studied the issue. "To get a big earthquake, you'd need a really big fault. When these oil fields are being developed, the companies are very aware of where the faults are. They don't want to do something stupid."

Some of the quakes that critics have blamed on fracking may have been caused by a related process - the disposal of the water used in fracking.

Similarity to air hockeyMany, but not all, fracking operations inject the wastewater deep underground. As the quantity of water builds up over time, it can change the pressure along a fault line, making the fault more likely to move.

"It's a little bit like an air hockey table," said Cliff Frohlich, associate director of the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas, Austin. "You pump air into an air hockey table so that when you push something, it will slip."

Frohlich was part of a team of researchers who studied a series of small quakes that struck near Dallas in 2008 and 2009, in an area where natural gas companies had used fracking. The epicenter turned out to be within a kilometer of a water disposal well, under the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. The largest quake measured 3.3.

"These earthquakes were not cases where frack jobs got out of hand," he said. "In a way, it was good news for the companies. If it's disposal that causes the quakes, you've got lots of options."

Those options include treating the water on the surface or shipping the water to a disposal well that isn't near a fault.

In July, Arkansas officials placed a moratorium on new disposal wells in a portion of the state shaken by hundreds of quakes, the largest of which reached magnitude 4.7. Four wells that had been used to dispose of water from fracking operations were shut down.

As fracking becomes more common in California, environmentalists want state officials to keep a close eye on any link to tremors.

Locating faultsA state bill that would force companies to disclose the chemicals they use in fracking originally contained a clause that would have required the companies to report whether the wells they planned to frack were near known fault lines. The clause, however, was taken out as a compromise with the oil and gas industry, said Renee Sharp, California director for the Environmental Working Group. She'd still like to see the state adopt that requirement.
"At least we'd know what was going on, so there'd be the possibility of really studying this issue," Sharp said.

Zoback says seismicity related to fracking and disposal wells is a manageable problem, one that shouldn't derail the growing production of gas from shale rock formations. Oil and gas companies need to identify faults near potential well sites, stay away from the faults, monitor for quakes during operations and stop work if quakes occur.

"I think we can replace coal with natural gas - I'm kind of militant about this," said Zoback, who recently served on a U.S. Department of Energy committee that recommended ways to protect the environment during fracking operations. "We've got to develop shale gas in an environmentally responsible way, and that means air and water quality, and it means not causing earthquakes."

US Advisory Group on Fracking Has Abundant Ties to Energy Industry

Thursday, August 11, 2011 by iWatchNews.org
As first recommendations emerge from Energy panel, scientists seek ouster of the chairman, John Deutch - a former CIA chief and director of Energy companies
by Evan Bush

All but one member of a government advisory panel weighing the safety of one of the most contentious forms of energy development, known as fracking, have financial ties to the natural gas industry, scientists and some environmental groups are asserting. The scientists called for the ouster of its chairman, former CIA director John Deutch, who sits on the boards of two energy-related companies.

The group, which reports to Energy Secretary Seven Chu, is concluding that development of shale gas can be done safely provided that companies fully disclose the chemicals used in fracturing liquids, and that they face monitoring of their activities and rigorous standards for emissions of airborne contaminants.

While the Energy Department doesn't regulate natural gas production, the Environmental Protection Agency is still months from reaching conclusions in its own study, and the panel is leaving largely unaddressed the most sensitive issue of toxic chemicals that may make their way into drinking water supplies, opponents of fracking fear the Energy panel's recommendation can give a boost to the industry.

The committee, formed in May, was tasked to review fracking, also known as hydraulic fracturing, in which gas companies pump sand, water and chemicals into wells drilled into the ground to break up the earth below in order to release and then capture natural gas. Critics say fracking could be tainting groundwater, killing wildlife and, as iWatchNews has reported , giving off methane gas that contributes to global warming.

Earlier this year, in his State of the Union address, President Obama endorsed natural gas as part of the solution to feed the nation's energy needs, and then sought to have the advice from the Energy Department panel.

In a letter to Chu , 28 scientists complained that the committee, formally known as the Natural Gas Subcommittee of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, "appears to be performing advocacy-based science and seems to have already concluded that hydraulic fracturing is safe." The scientists ask Chu to replace Deutch "with a person with no financial ties to the natural gas and oil industry," as well as add "independent members" to the committee.

An environmental group, the Environmental Working Group, previously objected to the advisory group's makeup, saying Deutch received more than $1.4 million from energy companies Schumberger and Cheniere Energy between 2006 and 2009.

Other members of the committee said to have current financial ties to the natural gas and oil industry are Stephen Holditch, Kathleen McGinty, Susan Tierney, Daniel Yergin and Mark Zoback. The scientists said their "conflicts of interest make it appear that the subcommittee is designed to serve industry at taxpayer expense rather than serving President Obama and the public with credible advice."

Energy Department spokesperson Tiffany Edwards defended the committee's composition, saying it is "balanced" and that each member has experience and expertise, including technical and practical knowledge. "Some have said that the panel is too weighted toward industry, while others say it is too weighted towards environmentalists. We think we got it just right, and having a diversity of perspectives will only strengthen the final product."

Industry representatives often serve on government advisory boards, including the one that advises Energy Department Secretary Chu. As iWatch News has reported, Chu's advisory board on energy policy includes one of the president's big campaign fundraisers, a venture capitalist who has invested in companies receiving seed money from the Energy Department.

A 1972 federal law, the Federal Advisory Committee Act, requires only that advisory committees be “fairly balanced.” There are an estimated 900 formal advisory groups scattered across the government, comprising some 65,000 committee members who counsel more than 55 agencies, according to a 2008 Government Accountability Office report . By advising agencies such as the EPA, FDA and Energy Department, members of the advisory committees can influence standards for food safety, environmental protection and energy use.

The role of advisory committees can be more important than it might seem. Industry players or technical experts with a vested interest in agency decisions gain access to regulators and a platform to advance arguments in Congress. Sometimes, agencies have faced legal challenges for ignoring the recommendations of advisory committees.

While the Obama White House has advertised efforts to minimize the direct influence of registered lobbyists, efforts at a crackdown have been soft. Last year, Obama appeared to call for an end to the membership of lobbyists on advisory committees – in the form of an announcement on a White House blog by Norm Eisen, then the president’s special ethics counsel. Lobbyists and executives from Boeing, International Paper Co., IBM and 13 other companies and trade organizations quickly complained - and threatened to circumvent the requirement by having their lobbyists simply stop registering.


"There are financial ties with the industry" on the fracking advisory panel, said Kyle Ash, a lobbyist for the environmental group Greenpeace. "The administration said they weren't going to have special interests."

The letter seeking Deutch's ouster was signed by 28 scientists, including researchers and professors at the University of California, Cornell and Penn State.

While the Energy Department weighs its views on fracking, the EPA has undertaken a study on groundwater quality, due to be finished late next year. Among environmentalists' concerns: The Energy Department's advisory panel could influence the issue before that study is made public.

"We're concerned their findings could undercut the Environmental Protection Agency's findings, which have taken a lot more time and have been a lot more rigorous," said Leann Brown, spokesperson for the Environmental Working Group.

In 2009, the Department of Energy predicted that shale gas, the kind of gas that fracking produces, would account for 20 percent of the United State's total energy consumption in 2020.

In Pennsylvania, according to a study for the American Petroleum Institute, drilling in the Marcellus shale region, which is one of the most prominent in the country, has risen substantially over the past five years. In 2005, just three wells were drilled. In 2009, that number rose to 710.

Drought-Stricken Texas Town to Recycle Urine

Desperate Times, Desperate Measures
By: Megan Gibson

We all know that recycling is a good thing. But recycling sewage water?


According to Discovery News, the drought in Texas has gotten so desperate that the town of Big Spring is considering recycling toilet water for its 27,000 residents.While it sounds unusual (and more than a little gross) it's not that uncommon. NASA for example, has a system where they filter urine directly to salvage water. 


However, the process in Texas would work a little differently than NASA's system. "We're taking treated effluent (wastewater), normally discharged into a creek, and blending it with (traditionally supplied potable) water," Big Spring's district manager, John Gran, told Discovery.

Which might not be enough to reassure the squeamish, but with less than 0.1 inches of rain in the region for months, you do what you have to do.

Bad News About Water Quality — and Quantity

(Sometimes I feel guilty watering my yard. Real life water rationing is right around the corner, and we won't have a choice. People will bitch--mainly business folks--but we won't have a choice. Soon "lost to history" will be water parks; and the backyard family pool will soon be a thing of the past. But someday soon, we will literally wake up and wonder where all the water went.--jef)

Friday, August 5, 2011 by The Toronto Star
by Antonia Zerbisias

The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart practically cowered under his desk last month when journalist Alex Prud’homme appeared.



That’s because Prud’homme’s just-published The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century is 435 pages of bad news about how North Americans waste, contaminate and violate our water supplies.

“Water is a deceptively plain substance,” he notes in his introduction. “Yet it is the basis for life, and is considered an ‘axis resource,’ meaning one that underlies all others.”

Without water, there is no life. As we have seen this summer, droughts have ravaged the U.S. mid- and southwest, China and even France. In Somalia and Kenya, it’s a humanitarian disaster.

In North America, we’re spoiled.

On the phone from his home in New York City, Prud’homme says, “We really need to start thinking about water.

“Because we’ve become so good at collecting, transporting and treating water, people feel they can turn the tap on anytime they want and get as much water as they want, at any temperature they want, for as long as they want. So we’ve forgotten how important it is. But what we haven’t done is manage it very sustainably or wisely.

“But now conditions have changed. There are more people on Earth, we are using water more and more, the climate is shifting, our diets are changing, the ways we pollute water are shifting. Our indifference is a luxury we no longer can afford.”

On a per-capita basis, Canadians are just behind the world’s most wasteful water users, the Americans, reports the Conference Board of Canada. That’s a lot of water down the drain.

What’s more, says Prud’homme, we excrete Viagra, synthetic estrogen and other prescription drugs — as well as illicit substances — when we use the toilet. Some of us are even flushing chemicals and leftover pills away. We poison fish every time we wash with antibacterial soap. Our factory farms send rivers of runoff — including potentially E. coli-carrying manure — into lakes and streams. Turn on an appliance, including the computer on which you may be reading this, water is used to power hydroelectric dams, or cool nuclear plants, or run coal generators.

And personal water usage is just a few drops in the bucket compared to what industry uses and pollutes on a daily basis.

Then there are the catastrophes. Last year’s BP Deepwater Horizon explosion spewed at least 2.5 million gallons of oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico, ranking it as the worst environmental disaster in the nation’s history.

But that’s nothing, according to Prud’homme, who notes that every day “millions of tiny leaks from the cars, trucks, motorcycles, lawn mowers, boats, planes, snowmobiles and other machines we use” get washed into sewers and flow into the rivers, lakes and the ocean.

Citing a National Research Council report, he writes that “humans spill more than 300 million gallons of oil into North American waters every decade, which is double the highest estimate of the BP spill.”

“This is not as photogenic as Deepwater Horizon or Hurricane Katrina, something where images can really sway people emotions,” he tells the Toronto Star. “The fact is, ultimately it’s far more destructive.”

But The Ripple Effect is about a lot more than water quality. It’s also about water quantity, which we take for granted.

In the U.S., water is literally poured into the desert.

That’s why Prud’homme zeroes in on the driest city in the driest state, Las Vegas, Nev., where the famous strip’s hotels boast extravagant water features, water slides, water shows and even shark tanks.

While Sin City has started to recycle and manage its water — that could be your used bathwater spurting out of the Bellagio’s famous fountain — it has also been snatching up ranch land to claim the groundwater beneath.

“Las Vegas is the city that wasn’t supposed to be,” says Prud’homme. “Despite the fact that they have implemented a lot of efficiencies, it’s still a city in the desert, which is kind of crazy. So they’re considering this project which would essentially build this pipeline up to central eastern Nevada where the basins are seemingly dry on the surface but there’s actually water beneath. The ranchers and the environmentalists and Native Americans are not happy about it and, most important, the state of Utah is not happy about it because that aquifer is shared between Nevada and Utah.”

Which brings us to water ownership.

Prud’homme devotes many pages to tycoons such as Canada’s Maurice Strong and American corporate raider T. Boone Pickens, who both own thousands and thousands of acres of land atop two of the U.S.’s largest aquifers. It’s a 21st-century bonanza.

“The hydrocarbon era is over. Water is the new oil!” says Pickens in The Ripple Effect.

Then there are the multinationals that are eager to buy water, bottle it and sell it for profit.

They’ll also tempt cash-strapped municipalities with offers of replacing aging infrastructure, such as century-old sewer pipes, in return for collecting fees for water.

“This gets to this really interesting moral question,” says Prud’homme. “Is water a common (good) like the air we breathe and therefore should be free to everyone, or is it a commodity like oil and natural gas that is extracted and processed and then sold in the market place?

“Sometimes private water can be good. They’ll come in and fix up your utility and they will run it more efficiently and you’ll get better water. Yes, there’s a price for that but it’s an affordable price.

“But there are other times where the dark side of human nature has gotten the better of water companies and they have seized on this essential resource. Private water companies have occasionally gouged their customers and started charging high water rates when people are desperate for a drink. This has happened in places like Central and South America, and it’s led to protests and riots.”

Like many, Prud’homme worries the coming water scarcity could lead to hostilities.

“That’s the great fear,” he says. “If you look at places like Pakistan-India, the two Koreas, China and its neighbours or the Tigris-Euphrates nations, there are certainly going to be tensions in the coming years, maybe even violence. There’s only so much water in the world, the population is growing, the climate is changing and people are using water in new ways.”

Canadians, who may feel smug about having one of the world’s largest supplies of fresh water, may need to, well, pour some of that water into their wine.

“Canada is water rich but it’s not so easy to pipe water from Quebec to Alberta, for example, and there are consequences,” cautions Prud’homme. “There is a way of managing water more holistically instead of having a hodgepodge of laws and initiatives.”

Pointing to the tiny island nation of Singapore, he says, “It’s an island nation and it’s ruled by an autocrat but they use water extremely efficiently. Their system is overseen by a body of highly skilled and educated managers who are well-funded and independent. It can make decisions based on what’s right rather than what’s politically expedient.

“Every drop counts there. They are always reminding citizens how important it is to be efficient and to conserve. There’s a great depth of education about water there that neither Canada nor the U.S. has.

“So these are lessons and strategies that can be adopted on a larger scale for nations like Canada and the U.S. We are going to have no choice over the coming decade.”

Peak Water Has Already Come and Gone

(Is water really a finite resource? This article says it is, what do you think?--jef)

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Wednesday, March 23, 2011 by Inter Press Service

by Stephen Leahy

UXBRIDGE, Canada - Canadian Kevin Freedman is celebrating World Water Day Tuesday by living on 25 litres of water a day, instead of the North American average of 330 litres per day. And he has enlisted 31 others in his "Water Conservation Challenge" to go water - lean, using just 25 litres per day for cooking, drinking, cleaning, and sanitation for the entire month of March.

"People in Canada and the U.S. have no idea how much water they use or how much they waste," Freedman told IPS.

"Although people live on less, it is very difficult to use just 25 litres a day. You can't shower or use a washing machine," he said. "I'm hoping to raise awareness that water is a finite resource."

Nearly a billion people don't have good access to safe fresh water. In a single generation, that number could double as growing demands for water will exceed the available and sustainable supply by 40 percent, according a recent study. "Peak water" has already come and gone. Humanity uses more water than can be sustained, drawing on non-renewable reserves of water accumulated over thousands of years in deep aquifers.

"Water cannot be created, it can only by managed," said Margaret Catley-Carlson, a former senior official with both the Canadian government and at the United Nations, a renowned global authority on water issues, and a director at the Canadian Water Network.

In many countries and regions water scarcity is a fundamental challenge to development, Catley-Carlson told IPS. A lack of access to water can lead to starvation, disease, political instability and even armed conflict.

"Governments see their role as delivering water to the public and industry," she said. "This has to change to sustainably managing water resources for society and the natural environment."

Policy-makers haven't treated water as a valuable resource and as a result water is wasted, with leaky water infrastructure losing 20 to 50 percent of the water it is supposed to deliver. Even water-poor countries in the global south don't make water a top priority because water availability is mainly an issue for women and the poor and they are not well represented in government, she said. Instead limited public funds are spent on things like the military and other priorities.

"It is so frustrating," she said. "We can do without oil but we can't do without water."

On Tuesday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged governments to make pro-poor investments in water and sanitation, particularly in urban areas where the need is acute and has grown by 20 percent in the last decade.

This is "a crisis of governance, weak policies and poor management, rather than one of scarcity," Ban said in a statement.

As the world population and economy grows, the water challenge becomes all the greater. By 2030 the global water demand will be 40 percent greater than today's "accessible, reliable, environmentally sustainable supply" according to the U.S.-led study "Charting Our Water Future" by consultants McKinsey and Company.

About one-third of the population, concentrated in developing countries, will live in basins where this water deficit is larger than 50 percent, the report found.

Agriculture accounts for approximately 71 percent of global water withdrawals today and the water challenge is closely tied to food provision, the study notes. Inefficient and inappropriate irrigation accounts for much of this water use. Thirsty crops like maize are grown in dry places like Spain, requiring enormous amounts of irrigated water. Even a low-value crop like sugar cane is grown under irrigation in some places, which Catley-Carlson calls "ludicrous".

Poor policies, subsidies, such as those for biofuels, trade agreements and bad habits are collectively responsible for much of the world's water misuse in food production, she says.

Domestic water use is just eight percent of overall water consumption. Industrial use is the other major user of water. All products have a water component, often called "virtual water", to describe the volume used to make something.

"A desktop computer, for example, requires 1.5 tonnes (1,500 litres) of water; a pair of denim jeans, up to six tonnes; a kilogramme of wheat, one tonne; a kilo of chicken, three to four tonnes; a kilo of beef, 15 to 30 tonnes," says Nicholas Parker, chairman of the Cleantech Group, an international firm that works to accelerate the development and market adoption of clean technologies.

The annual global trade in "virtual water" today is said to exceed 800 billion tonnes, the equivalent of 10 Nile Rivers.

"What people don't often realise is how much water there is in everything we make and buy, from t-shirts to wine," says Parker.

Everyone can become a better steward of water no matter who they are, says Kevin Freedman. The lessons learned through the month-long 25-a-litre-a-day water diet can be applied all year round, he says.

"Everyone in North America can reduce their water use by at least 25 litres. I challenge people to make a pledge to do it," Parker says.

UN Declares Water, Sanitation as Human Rights

by Bradley Bouzane | Wednesday, July 28, 2010 | Postmedia News

Access to clean water and sanitation was declared a human right Wednesday after a vote aimed at helping the world's neediest, passed unanimously at the United Nations.

Although the motion passed with 124 countries voting in favour of the resolution drafted by Bolivia, Canada was among the 41 nations to abstain on the issue.

In June, Bolivia's draft resolution indicated that global water rights would "entitle everyone to available, safe, acceptable, accessible and affordable water and sanitation."

Maude Barlow, chairwoman of Food and Water Watch — a Washington-based group — who previously sat as a senior adviser to the United Nations General Assembly on the water issue, said Wednesday's vote was groundbreaking.

"We're absolutely thrilled," said Barlow, who also serves as national chairwoman of the Council of Canadians. "This is a historic day and I think every now and then, the human species advances somewhat in our evolution and today was one of them."

June's draft resolution declared that countries unable to provide water to their residents should be assisted through "international co-operation and assistance," essentially calling for rich countries to give foreign aid to any government that says it doesn't have the means to meet its citizens' water rights.

According to the UN, more than one billion people lack access to safe drinking water and 2.6 billion are without basic sanitation.

Weighing Safety of Weed Killer in Drinking Water, EPA Relies Heavily on Industry-Backed Studies

Agency Says Company's Evidence 'Scientifically More Robust' than Independent Research
by Danielle Ivory, Huffington Post Investigative Fund

Thursday, July 8, 2010 

Companies with a financial interest in a weed-killer sometimes found in drinking water paid for thousands of studies federal regulators are using to assess the herbicide’s health risks, records of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency show. Many of these industry-funded studies, which largely support atrazine’s safety, have never been published or subjected to an independent scientific peer review.

Meanwhile, some independent studies documenting potentially harmful effects on animals and humans are not included in the body of research the EPA deems relevant to its safety review, the Huffington Post Investigative Fund has found. These studies include many that have been published in respected scientific journals.

Even so, the EPA says that it would be “very difficult for someone to put a thumb on the scale” to slant the outcome.

Atrazine is one of the most widely used herbicides in the U.S. An estimated 76 million pounds of the chemical are sprayed on corn and other fields in the U.S. each year, sometimes ending up in rivers, streams, and drinking water supplies. It has been the focus of intense scientific debate over its potential to cause cancer, birth defects, and hormonal and reproductive problems. As the Huffington Post Investigative Fund reported in a series of articles last fall, the EPA failed to warn the public that the weed-killer had been found at levels above federal safety limits in drinking water in at least four states. Some water utilities are suing Syngenta to have it pay their costs of filtering the chemical.

Now the EPA is re-evaluating the health risks of atrazine, which was banned in the European Union in 2004 due to a lack of evidence to support its safe use. That ban includes Switzerland, where atrazine’s manufacturer, Syngenta, is headquartered. The EPA expects to announce results of its re-examination of the herbicide in September 2010. It could take action ranging from restrictions on its use on crops to an outright ban. Or it could permit continued use without additional restrictions.

The company, one of the world’s largest agribusinesses, says the chemical has been used safely for decades and restrictions could prove devastating to farmers who are heavily dependent on the inexpensive herbicide. Atrazine poses “no harm” to the general population or to drinking water supplies, said company spokesman Steven Goldsmith.

EPA records obtained by The Huffington Post Investigative Fund show that at least half of the 6,611 studies the agency is reviewing to help make its decision were conducted by scientists and organizations with a financial stake in atrazine, including Syngenta or its affiliated companies and research contractors.

More than 80 percent of studies on which the EPA are relying have never been published. This means that they have not undergone rigorous “peer review” by independent scientists, a customary method to ensure studies are credible and scientifically sound before they can be published in major journals.

At the same time several prominent studies by independent academic scientists in well-respected scientific journals – showing negative reproductive effects of atrazine in animals and humans – are absent from the EPA’s list.

That finding may raise concerns about how the agency is doing its work. Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees environmental regulators, told the Investigative Fund, “it’s critically important that EPA use all of the information at its disposal.”

Agency scientists may review studies not on the list, but EPA senior policy analyst William Jordan said that the 6,611 studies are those considered “relevant to the assessment of atrazine.”

‘Not Just Atrazine’

EPA spokeswoman Betsaida Alcantara said the list was not exhaustive and that some studies may not be on the list because they were not given an eight-digit “master record identification number,” which the agency uses to keep track of studies. There is “no uniform practice” for assigning numbers to studies submitted by people other than those working for herbicide, fungicide or pesticide manufacturers, she added.

EPA officials said that with a limited budget the agency must rely heavily on research sponsored by parties with a stake in the outcome. The agency’s “test guidelines” governing how experiments are conducted – the types and number of lab animals to be used, for instance. These provide sufficient safeguards against skewed results, officials said.

“Companies have a very strong incentive to follow the guidelines,” said EPA senior analyst Jordan. “We hope and think that we have written the guidelines with enough detail that it would be very difficult for someone to put a thumb on the scale, as it were, to slant the outcome, [or] to make something look safer than it is.”

Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist specializing in health issues at the Natural Resources Defense Council, argues that relying on a company to test the safety of its own product – an “inherent conflict” of interest – is part of a larger pattern at the EPA. “It’s not just happening with atrazine,” she said.

Hundreds of herbicides, pesticides, and other chemicals are regulated by the EPA, whose decisions can have significant implications for public health and on the abilities of an array of multinational companies to earn billions of dollars in the U.S.

By law, industry influence often is built into the regulatory process of the federal government. At the Food and Drug Administration, for instance, clinical trials conducted by pharmaceutical companies are used to determine whether pills and devices work and are safe. Makers of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides also must pay for studies on their products. If they meet agency rules for conducting the testing, the EPA must accept them.

The ‘Funding Effect’

But is industry-funded research always reliable? A pair of scientists funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the EPA scrutinized a Syngenta-funded Canadian study – one that is not on the EPA’s list. The scientists said they found numerous inaccuracies and misleading statements.

The scientists who questioned the study, University of South Florida biologists Jason Rohr and Krista McCoy, published their critique in the March 2010 issue of the journal Conservation Letters. In all, they tallied what they said were 122 inaccurate and 22 misleading statements, of which 96.5 percent appeared to support atrazine’s safety. The widely cited study focused on the herbicide’s effects on fish and other aquatic creatures.

Rohr and McCoy also asserted that the Canadian study, which was done in 2008, misrepresented more than 50 other studies. For example, it incorrectly suggested that only one scientist had demonstrated the chemical’s gender-altering effects on frogs. In fact, several other scientists demonstrated such effects.

The study dismissed one of Rohr’s papers as invalid, noting wrongly that the researcher had filtered atrazine out of a water tank while trying to assess the chemical’s effect on the aquatic organisms in the tank.

The Canadian study also misrepresented results, figures, and conclusions of other studies, according to the University of South Florida biologists.

Rohr, who served on an EPA advisory panel examining atrazine last year, told the Investigative Fund that he felt compelled “to set the record straight given the potential policy and environmental implications of these misconceptions and inaccuracies.”

The author of the Canadian study, University of Guelph (Ontario) biologist Keith Solomon, declined to respond to questions from the Investigative Fund about his financial ties to Syngenta, the company’s influence, or the inaccuracies and mischaracterizations the South Florida biologists said they had uncovered. Solomon noted that other scientists had come to similar conclusions, and that governments in the U.S. and Australia had not found any significant risk to creatures living in water.

While the critiqued study is not on the EPA’s list, several other studies by Solomon are.

Wendy Wagner, an expert in environmental policy at the University of Texas law school, said that the criticism of the Canadian study demonstrates a phenomenon sometimes referred to as “the funding effect.”

“It is next to impossible to squeeze all of the discretion out of a researcher, and when he has a strong incentive to find a particular result, the result can be unreliable and badly biased research,” said Wagner, an authority on the influence of politics and special interests on science. “There is compelling evidence that bias still pervades sponsored pesticide research – research that presumably is done in accord with EPA’s guidelines.”

Meanwhile, some independently-funded academic research published in major scientific journals is missing from the list of papers the EPA is using to make its decisions on atrazine. Absent are studies published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Environmental Health Perspectives, and Nature. Many works by independent academic scientists such as Tyrone Hayes and Rohr – who have demonstrated a range of potential reproductive and hormonal effects of the chemical – are not on the list.

Some peer-reviewed studies from prestigious journals fail to meet the agency’s standards, said EPA analyst Jordan, citing as an example work by scientists such as Hayes, who recently found that low doses of atrazine could turn male frogs into female frogs.

Jordan explained that the agency couldn’t rely on Hayes’ and the other scientists’ research in part because the government lacked protocols for testing chemicals on frogs. So the EPA developed those guidelines and asked Syngenta to study the issue. The company’s researchers reported that they were unable to replicate Hayes’ findings. Jordan said the Syngenta study “superceded” Hayes’ and the other scientists’ studies. The EPA, on its Website, currently states that atrazine causes no such adverse effects on frogs and that “no additional testing is warranted” to address the issue.

Environmental groups have in the past criticized the EPA for allowing chemical companies to wield disproportionate influence over regulatory decisions. While evaluating the safety of atrazine in 2003, the EPA allowed representatives from Syngenta to participate in closed-door negotiations with the agency, according to documents obtained by the NRDC in 2004.

Missing Evidence

Dale Kemery, an EPA spokesman, defended the practice of omitting some studies. The agency’s safety “review may not include every study that has been conducted, since some may not meet the standards that are appropriate for a regulatory setting or they may not be on target for the issues to be assessed.”

The EPA considers industry-sponsored studies “scientifically more robust than are the studies generated by people in academia,” said Jordan, the agency's senior policy analyst. “That’s generally because companies spend more money on their studies and can attend to details that are potentially important that people in academia just can’t afford to do.”

Jordan added that agency oversight of the thousands of unpublished studies on the list is just as rigorous as a peer-review by scientists prior to publication in a scientific journal. “I know that people might not agree with this proposition, but I believe that the scientists at EPA constitute a peer-review,” he said. “Our scientists go over the studies with a fine tooth comb.”

EPA officials said they were not able to provide a list of all omitted research.

A spokeswoman for CropLife America, the Washington D.C.-based trade association that represents pesticide and herbicide manufacturers, said EPA oversight is thorough, regardless of whether studies have appeared in peer-reviewed journals.

“Whether or not they have been published, the studies submitted to EPA for registration support of pesticide products are subject to scientific review by EPA scientists that is equally, if not more, rigorous and demanding than the pre-publication peer review conducted by any scientific journal,” said spokeswoman Mary Emma Young.

Some people are skeptical about the rigor of the EPA’s scrutiny. “What worries me,” said the University of Texas’ Wagner, “is the possibility that there isn’t time or energy within EPA to give a lot of oversight to this unpublished, industry-funded research, especially when the number of unpublished studies for a chemical like atrazine are in the thousands.”

A former EPA official, epidemiologist Lynn Goldman, said it is normal and necessary for the agency to accept unpublished and industry-funded studies, most of which would not be interesting enough to publish in scientific journals.

“This is the way that the system was built by Congress. It could be changed but the EPA does not have the authority to turn the system upside down,” said Goldman, a former assistant administrator for toxic substances during the Clinton administration.

The existence of a list of relevant research for EPA review has played a prominent role in public arguments for the herbicide’s safety. Journalists, scientists, and advocates for atrazine have frequently cited the “6,000” studies.

In 2005, Anne Lindsay, then a top official in the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs, brought up the number of studies during congressional testimony. “Atrazine is one of the most well-examined pesticides in the marketplace,” she said, noting that “there are nearly 6,000 studies in EPA files on the human health and environmental effect of atrazine.”

Syngenta now cites the number in its press materials and on its website – not merely as a tally of studies but as proof of its safety. “Atrazine passes the most stringent, up-to-date safety requirements in the world,” said spokesman Paul Minehart. “In 2006, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) re-registered atrazine in 2006 based on the overwhelming evidence of safety from nearly 6,000 studies.”

EPA's List of Scientific Studies on Atrazine

Science from the International Space Station

video link

Nitrate Contamination Spreading in Water of California Communities

Tainted Water
By Julia Scott, California Watch
May 17, 2010

The water supply of more than two million Californians has been exposed to harmful levels of nitrates over the past 15 years – a time marked by lax regulatory efforts to contain the colorless and odorless contaminant, a California Watch investigation has found.

Nitrates are now the most common groundwater contaminant in California and across the country. A byproduct of nitrogen-based farm fertilizer, animal manure, wastewater treatment plants and leaky septic tanks, nitrates leach into the ground and can be expensive to extract.

The problem affects both rural Californians and wealthier big-city water systems. State law requires public water systems to remove nitrates. Many rural communities, however, don’t have access to the type of treatment systems available in metropolitan areas.

Nitrates have been linked to “blue baby syndrome,” which cuts off an infant’s oxygen supply. Some studies have found connections to certain cancers in lab animals.

The State Water Resources Control Board acknowledges that nitrates are a problem affecting vast regions of California. And the situation is worsening, especially in the Central Valley, Central Coast, and the Los Angeles and Imperial Valley regions. High nitrate levels have already impacted public water system wells in many areas, and the contaminants continue to migrate toward groundwater supplies that could ultimately impact the water supply for millions of additional Californians.

Statewide, the number of wells that exceeded the health limit for nitrates jumped from nine in 1980 to 648 in 2007. Scientists anticipate a growing wave of nitrate problems in some parts of the state if remedial steps aren’t taken.

And yet the state’s patchwork regulatory efforts remain riddled with gaps that have allowed nitrate contamination to spread virtually unchecked. Consider:

Nothing is being done to regulate the use of the leading source of nitrate pollution in many regions of the state – nitrogen fertilizer. A lettuce farmer can apply as much fertilizer as he wants, within feet of the nearest water supply well, without having to worry how much of it might contaminate the groundwater with nitrates. Officials aren’t even equipped to determine the sources of contamination, meaning no one is held accountable.

Sixty-five percent of domestic wells at Central Valley dairies test over the public health limit for nitrates, putting local residents at risk of potential exposure. Yet, according to records obtained from the State Water Resources Control Board, none of the dairies were fined for a nitrate problem identified by the state.

When polluters are found responsible for nitrate contamination, the state rarely does anything to correct it. Californiahas issued 248 enforcement actions against 44 polluters for nitrate contamination in the past six years. But only once has the state ordered a polluter to clean up contaminated groundwater.

In one of life’s ultimate ironies, families in poorer, rural communities typically pay more for tainted water than ratepayers hooked up to clean water systems.

Residents in the tiny town of Seville in eastern Tulare County, for instance, pay a flat monthly fee of $60 for nitrate-laden water they have been warned by local health officials not to drink. By comparison, the average metered bill is just $26.50 a month for San Francisco residents, who consume water from the pristine Hetch Hetchy water system.

“The people who are polluting the water, they don’t pay for that cleanup – the ratepayer does,” said Debbie Davis, a legislative analyst with the Oakland-based Environmental Justice Coalition for Water, a statewide network of grassroots groups that advocates for clean, safe water. “If California is going to meet the water challenges of the future, we have to figure out how to deal with nitrates.”

State officials, meanwhile, say that efforts to regulate and clean up nitrates have taken a backseat because the state has too many other environmental dangers to worry about. California finds itself grappling with a host of difficult water issues – ranging from the logistics of delivery and supply to basic safety and health concerns. Nitrate contamination is just one challenge facing regulators.

Darrin Polhemus, deputy director of the State Water Resources Control Board's division of water quality, said his agency has chosen to spend more time and resources dealing with chemicals such as perchlorate and dry cleaning solvents, which cause more acute health effects when leached into groundwater.

“On the scale of things we deal with, while nitrates is certainly a concern and we’re managing for it, I don’t rank it high up there as something that makes me stay awake at night,” he said.

It’s unclear how often nitrate exposure has led to serious health consequences, because the dots aren’t always connected.For instance, more than 2,000 cases of acute “blue baby syndrome” have been tied to excessive nitrate consumption around the world since the mid-1950s, but scientists say many cases go undiagnosed. Bottle-fed infants whose formula was prepared using water are at greatest risk if the water exceeds public health limits for nitrates. Pregnant women are also at risk.

Many of the state’s fastest-growing regions overlie vast stores of nitrate-polluted groundwater. In the Eastern San Joaquin Valley, one of every three domestic wells has nitrate levels that exceed public health limits.

One of those wells is located on property owned by Camelia and Manuel Lopez in East Orosi, a small Central Valley town in Tulare County.

The Lopez family volunteered to have their family’s private well tested by the state last winter. The water contained nearly three times the federal health limit for nitrates. Follow-up testing of the family’s tap water by California Watch confirmed these results.

“You would never imagine in this country, that someone would have this problem,” said Camelia Lopez, who emigrated from Mexico as a young woman and moved to the countryside from the Bay Area.

Now the family buys bottled water for drinking and cooking at a cost of $60 a month – a real hardship since Manuel Lopez, a contractor, is unemployed.

Their three boys, age 6, 16 and 18, take the bottles to school as a precaution.A local high school has had nitrate problems for years. Camelia Lopez has taught them how to brush their teeth with bottled water and keep their mouths closed when they’re in the shower. Putting filters on all the taps in the house would cost at least $750.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that as many as 52 percent of community water wells and 57 percent of domestic water wells in the United States are contaminated by nitrates. And 15 percent of contaminated wells in agricultural and urban areas have been found to exceed levels considered safe, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Much of the nitrates are only deep enough to affect private wells, which are shallower than their public counterparts. But the contaminant isstarting to sink further into aquifers, deep enough to affect towns and cities, according to Karen Burow, a Sacramento-based scientist with the USGS.

“In the absence of some sort of mitigation, it’s likely that the water that’s at the domestic wells now is going to move downward and eventually reach the public supply wells,” Burow said. “So the question is, how long is it going to take until that really high-concentration water gets deeper in the system?”

Don’t drink the water

In parts of the state where serious nitrate problems have already taken root, communities have a limited menu of options available to cope with the contamination.

Large municipalities can afford to pay millions of dollars to remove contaminants like nitrates before they reach the tap. But these kinds of solutions are beyond the scope of many small communities, which are often home to the poorest and most disenfranchised residents in California.

Many communities rely on at least one well that contains dangerous levels of nitrates, forcing residents to use water they’ve been warned not to drink, say clean water advocates.

The Community Water Center, based in Visalia, has helped dozens of residents, schools and communities across the Central Valley deal with nitrate problems.

Co-founder Susana De Anda says many communities pay twice for water each month: once for contaminated well water, once for bottled water.

Some communities have used state money to drill a test well, only to find nitrate problems there, too. And they can’t trace the nitrates back to their sources, so they can’t hold anyone accountable.

“The community has to figure out how to fix the problems when they didn’t pollute the water,” De Anda said. “It is not OK for communities to have to subsidize the cost of pollution through their health and their pocketbooks.”

Schools struggle with tainted water

On the other side of Tulare County from East Orosi, nitrate problems have been one long, expensive headache for Norm Brown, principal of Citrus South Tule Elementary School in Porterville. Several years ago, Brown applied for a state grant to dig a $100,000 well on school property to alleviate the school’s chronic nitrate problem, only to learn that the school’s entire local groundwater basin was loaded with nitrates.

“I was really going to make a difference on that,” Brown recalled. “But if they’re digging a well they’re not going to find clean water. It’s a waste of money.”

The school, which has 53 students, is one of 12 across the state now coping with nitrate contamination in their well water, affecting a total of about 3,000 students, according to public health records.

Testing by California Watch showed the school’s well water contained twice the public health limit for nitrates. A second set of tests analyzed the DNA fingerprint of the nitrates under the school and traced the contaminant back to its likely sources, including local citrus farms and natural sources in the Sierra foothills. The DNA test, known as a nitrogen isotope tracer test, indicates the general type of source the nitrates came from but can’t isolate exactly who would be responsible.

Bottled water is the only affordable remedy now but only barely. The school pays more than $2,000 each year to stock its water coolers and distribute plastic cups. Brown is also required to test the well water every month, which cost $2,500 in 2009, a hardship for a school that has just three teachers for six grade levels and was forced to tap its small reserve fund this year just to avoid laying off one of those instructors. Brown sends the test results to the Tulare County Department of Environmental Health.

Boiling water isn’t an option. It can actually make matters worse, scientists say, because it concentrates the water without eliminating the nitrates, making the dose of contaminants even more potent.

Even though no one has ever suspected the school of being the source of nitrates, last year, Citrus South Tule Elementary School had to pay $750 in fines for water quality. Brown calls it adding insult to injury.

“They get their money, they’re happy. I will pay a bill and buy the water. But don’t make me test the well,” he said. “I don’t care if you dig to China. There’s going to be nitrates.”

Enforcement doesn’t keep pace with spreading nitrates

Nitrogen fertilizers are an essential component of California agriculture, but they are also the leading source of nitrates in many agricultural areas, scientists say. In 2008, farmers applied 855,699 tons of nitrogen-based fertilizer to 6.7 million acres of irrigated farmland.

Dairies contribute an additional 240,000 tons of nitrogen from cow manure used to grow forage crops for the cows. Although crops absorb some of the nitrogen, up to half of it reaches the water table, scientists say.

In soils with enough oxygen to support it, nitrogen compounds convert to nitrates. Some of these eventually sink deep enough to affect drinking water.

Officials say nitrates are so common and mobile that they are difficult to track once they get into the groundwater, making the contaminant hard to monitor. And it can be just as hard to pinpoint the exact source of nitrates. Regulators can trace a gasoline tank leak to its source, or rocket fuel leaching from a factory. It’s not as simple with nitrates.

The regulatory challenges are even more vexing because so much of the nitrates seeping into the groundwater began their migration decades ago. It’s nearly impossible to know if contamination identified in 2010 came from a modern-day farm or from the same farm owned by a different family in 1970.

“It is much more difficult to go out and identify a single cause of a nitrate problem in the area, and it can be also very difficult to identify responsible parties and figure out what corrective action needs to be taken,” said Ken Landau, assistant executive officer of the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board.

But clean water advocates say the State Water Resources Control Board could be doing more to protect ordinary Californians with stronger regulations, tougher enforcement and more monitoring to better understand what’s happening underground.

“Unfortunately, the (state) water board sort of throws up their hands and says, ‘If we can’t find the source how can we enforce?” said Davis, of the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water.

Even if the state board has reason to believe that a dairy farm or a food processor is leaching nitrates next to a residential area, it rarely requires farmers to test the nearest homeowner’s well to see if the contaminants have spread.

Farmers and companies are urged not to degrade groundwater but are mostly left to employ voluntary strategies to comply. Fruit and vegetable farmers are completely exempt from enforcement oversight when it comes to groundwater, according to a review of agricultural policies across the state.

State water board staff members say they’re doing the best they can with limited resources. The Central Valley Regional Board, for instance, has six staff members to handle enforcement and compliance issues for hundreds of sewage treatment plants, food processors and other facilities that discharge waste, records show.

Critics charge that when it comes to regulating the industrial and municipal causes of nitrate leaching – farmers, dairies, food processors and sewage plants among them – economic considerations take precedence over public health.

Richard McHenry, a 20-year veteran of the state water board, says that when he worked for the regulatory authority, he felt pressured to write permits that did not place undue economic burden on certain operations. McHenry retired in 2008 after a final stint with a special investigations unit in the Office of Enforcement.

He says some companies have benefited from a clause in the Porter-Cologne Water Quality Control Act, enacted in 1969 to limit the spread of contaminants, which allows authorities to waive waste discharge requirements if it is in the “best interest” of Californians.

“The regional boards just make off-the-cuff remarks that a dairy employs people and produces milk, and therefore it’s in their best interests to pollute,” McHenry said. “What kind of analysis is that? You’re not looking at the whole big picture. It’s not only about jobs.”

Landau of the regional board said he knows of no regulatory agency that approaches its job in the manner McHenry described.

“This absolutely does not reflect the view of the boards,” he said. “Might a single board employee ever have said or thought something like this? We're not privy to employees' private opinions, but that statement certainly does not reflect the boards' opinion. The boards' view is that current regulation is vigorous and appropriate.”

Pollution yields few consequences

While the state water board and its regional entities have begun treating nitrates as a significant issue, regulations vary greatly by industry and region.

Where regulations do exist, former inspectors say a toothless enforcement system enables polluters to pay small fines for nitrate problems – if they are fined at all – rather than bring their operations into compliance.

Consider the case of Monterey Mushrooms Inc., the country’s largest marketer of fresh mushrooms. Its wells have exceeded nitrate limits 17 times, according to records reviewed by California Watch.

In 2006, the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board cited Monterey Mushrooms for four of those violations. “Nitrate out of control!” one staff member scrawled on a lab report obtained by California Watch.

Yet the facility has never been fined or required to limit the amount of nitrate-contaminated water it sprays onto adjacent fields. This nutrient-rich wastewater is left over from the process of spawning, growing, and processing the mushrooms.

Monterey Mushrooms is hardly alone. In the past six years, state regulators issued 248 enforcement actions against 44 polluters for problems specific to nitrates in groundwater, records show. Most received routine violation notices. Even repeat violators are rarely fined.

Polhemus, of the State Water Resources Control Board's division of water quality, says his agency has put greater emphasis on regulation than enforcement when it comes to nitrate polluters.

“We certainly don’t approach it from the same standpoint we do a chemical contamination, where we’re trying to find who released it, make them clean it up and penalize them for that,” he said. “Nitrates are so much everywhere that you’d spend too much time trying to track them down and the levels are such that it wouldn’t make sense to go after it that way. We think it’s much more important to try to get ahead of the curve through our different programs.”

The impact on towns and communities is steep. Several drinking water wells in Royal Oaks, a community neighboring Monterey Mushrooms, have already been shut down due to nitrates. Since 1983, residents have been asking the Central Coast Water Board to limit the amount of undiluted wastewater it allows Monterey Mushrooms to apply. Environmental studies conducted by the company show the Royal Oaks facility has applied far more nitrogen than the land can actually absorb – 36 times more.

The regional water board has said it is “concerned” about the potential for nitrate problems. But the agency has been unable to pinpoint the cause of the contamination.

Wayne Bautista, general manager of Monterey Mushrooms, says the high nitrate readings come from a well that’s closer to other fields on a ridge above the mushroom plant, and are not attributable to his plant’s operations. He also said the company has “significantly” reduced the amount of wastewater it applies to land, due in part to five newly lined wastewater ponds that help the plant reuse water in its composting process.

Monterey Mushrooms is located in the Salinas Valley – the heart of Monterey County’s $3.8 billion dollar agricultural industry. The region ranked first in the state for the most severe nitrate contamination back in 1995, according to a report prepared by the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board. The water board has not updated its numbers since then.

Yet the regional board does not require all growers to conduct groundwater monitoring. They are required to fill out a checklist of water quality management techniques they may be using on their farm, but they won’t face consequences for operating without them.

Farmers in both the Central Coast and the Central Valley may soon face new regulations that could require them to limit the amount of fertilizer they apply to crops. Farmers in areas known for heavy nitrate contamination would have to deal with more restrictions.

Fresno County farmer Parry Klassen says farmers shouldn’t be blamed for legacy nitrate problems that may have migrated in groundwater from elsewhere.

“Cities can’t say the farmers did it, the farmers can’t say the cities did it. I don’t think it should be set in someone’s lap. We need to figure out what the problems are and solve them where we can,” said Klassen, who is president of the East San Joaquin Water Quality Coalition.

Although nitrates are considered a pollutant under the Porter-Cologne Act, they have never been regulated that way, according to Davis, of the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water.

Back in East Orosi, Camelia Lopez feels helpless about her family’s nitrates problem, which testing has traced to animal manure, possibly from nearby cattle ranches, or a leaky septic system.

The reasons Lopez moved to the San Joaquin Valley – a simpler, rural life among the vineyards and the orange trees, the cows and chickens – may be harming her home and her community.

She knows nitrates are a big problem that will require a Sacramento-sized solution. But today she’s starting small – going door-to-door, talking to other mothers about getting their wells tested. She’d like to tell lawmakers what it’s like to be unable to drink water from her own tap. She’s even been practicing her testimony.

“Please care a little bit about this community,” she says. “Just like I’m worried about this, there are other mothers with a lot of kids who are worried about this issue, too. If it were you and your kids in this community, what would you think? What would you do?”