Canary in the Mine

I think of myself as a rather large canary in the mine.

When I was a kid we would play daily on the Kalamazoo River that flowed near my home. The town was one of those small industrial towns that had quite a few factories and a couple of foundries. Upstream from town was one of the foundries. We would follow the river on long summer days, on the hunt for adventures, critters to discover, animal prints in the mud to follow, frogs and crayfish to catch -- kids on the river kind of lazy days. There was one spot on the river just outside of town that we'd stop at that caught our attention; a place where warm water trickled down a hillside from the rear of the foundry property.

I'm sure few people saw this riverside part of the countryside except for maybe the occasional hunter or fisherman, but being kids walking and exploring the area, we stayed. We explored. We played. The water was warm and inviting --  fun and intriguing because if we waded in past the bright orange-colored shore and into the collecting pond of warm water to the side, we would sink down past our knees into the sand below. We called it quicksand and would spend hours splashing in the strange water pretending we were in a Tarzan movie rescuing one another from quicksand.

Years later I learned this site had been cordoned off by the EPA in the late 90's as a toxic wasteland. The earth of the property is contaminated with a long list of long ago buried carcinogenic chemicals that over the years seeped down into the ground and drained into the river. The EPA document shows this spot on the map as the same pool of orange, warm quicksand water we played in years ago.

The waters were poisoned, along with the earth, and my young body. Back in the early 60's there wasn't much thought given to the dumping of toxic waste beyond putting it into barrels and burying it. Today, the foundry sits empty, the land declared "brown land" - land that must sit idle because it can't be sold, built upon, or used. The land, the water, animals, plants, and myself have all been the recipients of the consequences of dumping toxic chemicals into the midwest countryside - unfortunately, nothing unusual in small towns across the land.

My body reflects the earth's. The same tracks cross us both. As a resident of the Great Lakes region one of my responsibilities is to be a guardian of the fresh water - your grandchild's drink.

This is the only water we get. What we see is all we get. There is NO new water. It's the same finite amount of water that's been recycling on our planet for thousands of millennia. The same water the dinosaurs drank millions of years ago ago was pissed out onto the ground, evaporated, and eventually fell as rain re-entering the earth's water cycle. This process has been going on for eons without problems until our modern industrial age.

What can we do?

We can start by appreciating the fact that over 1 BILLION people TODAY do not have clean drinking water. If we appreciate this limited resource we won't squander it. We'll protect it because there's a high probability that the 1 billion without clean water today will grow to become more tomorrow.

We are the lucky ones. We are the privileged ones with clean, treated water. We share in collective responsibility to our children, to our children's children, and to the children across the world, many of whom will walk many miles with buckets and jugs to a dirty watering hole in order to carry some precious, suspicious, brown fluid home for their family, grateful for the only water they have - the only water we all have.