Last week, OnEarth.org editor Scott Dodd sat down in New York City’s Bryant Park to talk water with Alex Prud’homme, author of The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the 21st Century, and documentary filmmaker Irena Salina, a producer of 2008’s Flow and an editor of this year’s Written in Water: A Message for the Future. Here are some notes.
When it comes to the world’s water supply, Prud’homme and Salina agreed, we’ve got some serious issues. For one thing, the abundance of freshwater is likely to ebb as global temperatures climb, and a growing population may soon find that there just isn’t enough of the stuff. Also, while water pollution has long been cause for concern, the addition in the past few decades of pharmaceuticals and thousands of other new chemicals to the nation’s list of groundwater contaminants means there are ever-more-disturbing health and ecosystem threats.
"We no longer have the luxury of ignorance," Prud’homme told those gathered beneath the park’s verdant canopy. In addition to pointing out the need for a universal shift in the public mentality, he called for further development of water-efficiency and conservation measures and suggested that the federal government establish a regulatory agency dedicated solely to issues of water supply and quality.
"I think, unfortunately, we’re a bit asleep," said Salina in her thick French accent. "On the one hand, we possess so much genius. One the other, we are prehistoric dumb."
Touching on the problem of pharmaceutical pollution -- those unused drugs routinely dumped down the drain and into treatment systems unequipped to filter them -- Prud’homme considered what he called "the cocktail effect." Many waterways and groundwater supplies are already polluted with older contaminants, he explained, but no one knows what happens when those legacy pollutants become infused with newer pharmaceuticals, soaps, perfumes, and other substances. While researching The Ripple Effect, for example (every time humans use water, a ripple of consequences results), the author discovered that male bass in the Chesapeake Bay have been developing eggs in their testes. Why should we care? "Well," he explained, "It turns out that the human endocrine system is very similar to that of fishes."
Groundwater contamination in the nation’s heartland also poses a problem. A map compiled by the U.S. Geological Survey in 1997 indicates that the nation’s agriculture industry uses some 76 million pounds of the herbicide Atrazine every year. Salina wanted to know why, despite the European Union’s ban of Atrazine back in 2004 (a 2009 NRDC report linked the widely used chemical to birth defects), its use continues to be sanctioned in the U.S.
Prud’homme chose a narrative style for his book, he said, in hopes of making the complicated and sometimes-depressing subject of water scarcity and contamination accessible to a wide audience. Reporting from a range of locales -- Poland Springs, Maine; New Orleans; and Las Vegas, among others -- he looked at the issues surrounding water quality, drought, flooding, and water supply in the 21st century.
"Reading his book," Salina observed, "is like watching a science-fiction movie."
Having spent five years documenting water conflict for Flow ("It was draining," she offered with a smile), Salina said she wanted to take a more positive tack for Written in Water, a book that explores water issues through various anecdotes. (In Flow, Salina had tackled the complex world of water privatization, asking, "Can anyone really own water?") For this project, she enlisted some of the water world’s most influential figures -- Alexandra Cousteau, Peter Gleick, Bill McKibben, and Christine Todd Whitman -- to share their personal stories.
A few days before the Bryant Park gathering, Prud’homme had appeared on The Daily Show, where host Jon Stewart half-jokingly portrayed him as the quintessential bearer of bad news. But the good-natured author assured the Bryant Park audience he was an optimist at heart. "I believe that man has the ability to engineer ourselves out of trouble."
Photo by Benjamin Preston
