By Lynn Thorp, National Campaigns Director
It's Drinking Water Week – a good time to think about the big picture when it comes to drinking water challenges. One part of the picture that can’t get enough attention is what I call the “Trickle Down” problem.
If you’re like most people in the United States, you think drinking water is pretty important. Maybe you know something about your
Public Water System or about the chemical and engineering miracle that is performed every minute by modern drinking water treatment plants. You might even know there is a law called the
Safe Drinking Water Act and think that it’s practical to protect our drinking water at all costs.
And you know what, you’re right. But, unfortunately, drinking water concerns don’t drive our policy decisions. In fact, sometimes, it seems like we don’t think about protecting our drinking water at all. We let industrial and other activities proceed without protections for our drinking water sources. The pollution problems “trickle down” into our drinking water sources where Public Water Systems clean up the mess and consumers foot the bill.
Take hydraulic fracturing (fracking) for oil and gas, for example. It’s all over the news – and not for good reasons. Not only did we rush headlong into this new fossil fuel extraction process without knowing all the details, leaving communities and regulators overwhelmed, but we let Congress exempt it
almost entirely from the Safe Drinking Act in 2005. You read the right – an industry prone to spills and injecting chemical cocktails into the ground and we exempt it from the Safe Drinking Water Act. That’s “trickle down” in action.
Fracking must be an exemption, right? Wrong.
Yesterday I read about a
new study suggesting that bisphenol A (BPA) exposure in the womb to the notorious plastic additive may contribute to breast cancer. If we truly put drinking water first, our woefully out-of-date chemicals management law would
curb potentially bad actors long before we have to start wondering if they are a threat to drinking water.
Not every drinking water challenge will be solved by changing our activities on the “front end,” but enough examples come to mind to make this a serious proposition. Now that we know the contribution that agricultural activity makes to our nutrient pollution problems; should we have exempted them from the Clean Water Act? Natural gas isn’t the only fossil fuel whose extraction threatens water; look no further than mountaintop removal coal mining, whose very name should tell you that’s not a great idea. Blowing off the tops of mountains pollutes and literally destroys streams that flow into drinking water sources, yet
the U.S. House of Representatives voted numerous times in 2011 to block Clean Water Act programs which touch this process.
So for drinking water week, pull up a glass of tap water and laugh at that person spending 400 times as much for bottled water. Then think about what’s so bad about acting like drinking water matters.
