by Gary Gagne

Created on: December 27, 2008   Last Updated: November 26, 2010

Having access to clean water is a fundamental human right, in that human beings cannot survive more than a few days without it. We sometimes think and talk about places far away where people are unable to secure clean supplies of water without great effort or not all in others. Here in the United States our water supplies are also in grave danger. I grew up in Massachusetts, and as a child, I was surrounded by a river system that had been contaminated, used as a sewer, since early colonial days. The Industrial Revolution added its own spice in the form of heavy metal contaminants which rendered the river system as unsafe to drink as radioactive material. We were using city water, of course, so we didn't need to drink the contaminated river water. However, I was acutely aware, from a very young age, that we had lost a valuable resource as I loved to fish and to hunt frogs and turtles. I spent a lot of time by the river, despite warnings not to go near it, thinking of ways to clean it up. Imagining that, in days past, people swam, canoed there and ate the fish they had caught from there. As a young man, I attended nursing school and was trained in a state hospital. I couldn't help but notice the high number of cancer cases that came from certain areas of Massachusetts, particularly Cape Cod.

As I grew older, I had an opportunity to move to beautiful Cape Cod and found a possible reason for an increased incidence of cancer. The aquifers near my new home had been contaminated with jet fuel that had been dumped carelessly at Otis Air Force Base, since World War II . As we lived on well water, at the time, I was now faced with the possibility of exposing myself and my family to unsafe drinking water. Even though we tested our water regularly, we began to purchase bottled water on a weekly basis as the jet fuel contaminants were traveling through the aquifer at a rapid pace. Recently, I moved to North Carolina where we appear to be blessed with an abundant water supply but even here, with an increased population, a recent drought event caused near emergency water conditions. I hear that in mid-west states the aquifers are drying up. I hear that California is squeezing the surrounding areas for all the water it can get. When I took my children to Disney World we stayed in a motel where the water tasted like filtered swamp water making our stomachs feel queasy to the point that the kids couldn't stand the thought of eating macaroni and cheese, their favorite meal.

Within my lifetime, we have painted ourselves into a corner from which there is no apparant exit. As the world population climbs towards the stratosphere, global warming changes rain patterns and man-made pollution renders whole river systems, aquifers, and bodies of water useless to local populations, our need for water will continue to accelerate at an ever faster pace. If the world's water supplies continue to deteriorate, I can imagine a time when we will find ourselves on a planet-wide toxic desert broken up by small oases. A world where our grandchildren might wage wars for water or food. The legend of America, as the land of plenty, would be just a memory, a golden age, from the distant past..

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