By Barbara Allen

Have you ever thought about water, about what an amazing substance it is? It’s this pure clear liquid that is relatively tasteless. The human body is made up of over 70% water, as are the bodies of most animals. 70% of the earth is covered by it. In fact all living things are composed of mostly water. We can live for months without food – but only days without water. Without water everything on earth would die, some things more quickly than others.

Try to visualize getting up in the morning and getting ready for the day ahead – without water. What tasks do you do with water? Well, you may start out like me. You begin by brushing your teeth, washing your face, using the toilet and then wandering into the kitchen to make a pot of tea. Then I usually rinse off a couple things left in the sink the night before and put them in the dishwasher for washing later. I might do a load of laundry and then take a walk with the dog. When we get back we are both thirsty so I fill the dog’s bowl with fresh water and drink a glass or two myself. When I have cooled down I go in and take a shower and come out to fix breakfast. All the food I eat has been grown or processed or created using water. The pig from which your bacon comes drank a great deal of water. Its excrement is put in large ponds of water. The butter on my toast comes from a cow who also drank a great deal of water to produce the milk from which it came (which is mostly water). The newspaper I read is made of trees grown with – you guessed it – lots of water. The paper mill that produced the paper for it is run with water – the logs are often floated in on water. I just read that there are a number of industries shutting down in the southeast because of the prolonged drought. The rivers they use to run these factories have dried up and they can’t function without them.

I venture to say that there isn’t anything you see around you that isn’t grown or produced with water. We make electricity with it, run machinery with it, clean things with it. The water in our wetlands serves as a natural filter of toxic chemicals that might otherwise pollute our rivers, lakes, and coastal waters. They act as natural sponges to help prevent flooding.

From the Clean Water Network:
“Three decades ago, the problem was very clear -- water pollution was visible to everyone in the country. In 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Ohio burst into flames. Historic Boston Harbor was a cesspool, and so was the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. and other rivers, lakes and coastal beaches across the United States. Lake Erie was declared dead, and a 1969 oil spill off scenic Santa Barbara, California, contributed to the public outrage. All of these events created a groundswell of support from the public demanding immediate reforms to end water pollution.

Congress responded in 1972 with passage of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, commonly referred to as the Clean Water Act (CWA). The Clean Water Act announced a national mission: to "restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the nation's waters." The new law set important goals: zero discharge of pollutants into navigable waters by 1985, and fishable and swimmable waters by 1983.” The EPA reports that in 2002 40 percent of our nation's waters are still not fishable and swimmable. The major problem is that many portions of the law have not been adequately enforced.
Tap Water Blues, produced by the EWG and Physicians for Social Responsibility, states: "Every spring, farmers across the Corn Belt apply 150 million pounds of five herbicides--atrazine, cyanazine, simazine, alacholor and metolachlor to their corn and soybean fields. Every spring, rains wash a substantial portion of those chemicals into the drinking water of 11.7 million people in the Midwest and Louisiana. According to this article, none of these herbicides are removed by the conventional city municipalities drinking water treatment technologies that are used by more than 90% of all water utilities in the United States."

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sets safety levels for only 60 of the thousands of chemicals found in our water. They report that almost 1/2 of all municipal water supplies in the U.S. annually violate Federal health standards on even these 60 chemicals. Over 120 million people have been affected in recent years by serious violations of our water quality standards.

"There is hardly a city where water is not disinfected or sterilized through the addition of chlorine, compounds of silver or irradiation with quartz lamps."  Dr. Joseph M. Price feels "chlorine is the great crippler and killer of modern times. It is an insidious poison. Most medical researchers were led to believe it was safe, but we are now learning the hard way that all the time we thought we were preventing an epidemic of one disease, we were creating another."

Our very existence is intimately connected with the quality of water available to us.

F. Batmanghelidj, MD, author of  'Your Body's Many Cries For Water” says "The brain is said to be 85 percent water. Human blood is 90% water, muscles are 75% water, the liver is 82% water and our bones are 22% water. Every part of the human body is dependent on water. If our glands and organs are not nourished with good, clean water, their functions begin to deteriorate. It is vital that we should become concerned not only for the health, vitality and quality of the water we drink, but also for its original source and the treatment it receives. If water quality and vitality is so important to us, why do we continually add chemicals and toxins to it?”