Foolhardy for anyone to take our water for granted

At last week's Port Williams meeting on feeding ourselves, NDP leader Darrell Dexter told a great story about visiting the province's minister of finance and being offered a bottle of water. He accepted the bottle to have a look at its label and learned the water came from Ontario. And what's wrong with our water, he asked, tongue in cheek?

Well, Dexter's question is important because we have to re-examine so many of the little things we've taken for granted - like bottled water. The fact is bottled water is for rich folks. Multinationals like Pepsi's Aquafina and Coke's Dasani are encouraging the habit of buying bottled water in mostly plastic bottles by planting seeds of doubt about the safety of public water.

I'm told that 25 per cent of bottled water is just tap water with a bit of 'reprocessing' and that the other 75 per cent is pumped from underground springs in many developing nations, depleting those nations in what is called "bottling the desert." In addition, these multinationals are paying lower municipal fees and then selling this water at costs as much as 5,000 times higher than a litre of tap water (2003 profits: $43 billion).

The plastic components of those bottles leech into the water we drink and eventually pollute the environment if there is no system to break them down. I'm no angel, but I've taken to carrying an old juice bottle full of H2O.

It used to be that the United Nations selected a theme annually upon which to focus attention. Now we’re in the U.N. decade called Water for Life. There’s a good reason for that, of course; our global use of water is growing at more than twice the rate of population increase and that’s hardly sustainable.

Chronic water shortage is on the horizon. By 2025, the U.N. suggests that some 1,800 million people will be facing absolute water scarcity and two-thirds of the world's population will be living under stressful water conditions.



Already a large deficit

The city of Lima, Peru already has a large deficit between supply and demand and official projections say it's going to get a lot larger in the future. The latest figures on glacial melt are alarming.

Estimates by a team of Peruvian and international scientists say that Peru and Bolivia, which together account for more than 90 per cent of the world's tropical glaciers, have lost about a third of the surface area of their glaciers between the 1970s and last year.

This is exactly why we should all mark World Water Day Thursday.

Meanwhile, a recent Time magazine boasts in typical American fashion that water provides a monumental opportunity for big business. JP Morgan estimates the world municipal water and wastewater business in 2005 at $465 billion a year; by 2015, it figures it will have almost tripled to $1.2 trillion. Firms like Suez and Veolia are cashing in on what many call a basic human right.

Further studies indicate that the U.S. will have to spend as much as $41 billion a year until 2019 to maintain its water infrastructure. "We've got thick pipes from the 19th century becoming obsolete at the same time as thinner ones laid after World War II," Peter Cook, executive director of the National Association of Water Companies, told Time. "If we don't invest more, we're going to face a real crisis." Are we in any better shape?



Ring the warning bell

It was the Council of Canadians that started ringing the warning bell around here about public-private partnerships and the potential loss of Canadian control over our water resources. With NAFTA, we really do need to worry about the pressure to include water as a commodity for bulk export and sale.

Experience has taught me not to take the water coming out of the tap for granted. I remember when there were innocuous fly larvae pouring out and traces of agricultural chemicals.

Those issues weren’t ignored, but I don't feel as confident about the nitrate content of well water in Kings County. I never felt like the introduction of dry cleaning fluid into New Minas water was followed up. It may have been cleaned up years ago, but what did that exposure do?

I like to think that volunteer groups like the Friends of the Cornwallis River have shown a bright light on the water quality of our rivers. The Cornwallis certainly hasn't been fit for irrigation use.

Remember last fall when we had to stop eating U.S. spinach and lettuce due to E.coli contamination? Could that scenario happen here?

Summer drought conditions, such as we experienced in 1997 and 2002, forced us to think twice about watering, but we need to super vigilant for a full decade.