where we get our water

the history of it, the reason why we should care, and more

Greetings, greetings to you, dear reader. 

We’re talking about water. More specifically where our water comes from. 

Humans are about 60% water. Some animals are made up of almost 90% water. We all have a touchpoint with water, whether or not we’re aware of it. 

I first started thinking about where my water comes from when I lived in one of the river towns of downstate New York. My apartment there sat right on the Old Croton Aqueduct (OCA), which was, in its inception, an aqueduct that brought water to New York City.¹

Then, I lived on the road without a constant source of water. I certainly assessed the immediate need of filling up my camper’s tank or my backup jerry can. But in those moments, my only concern was, “does this tap fill the vessel quickly enough with water I can drink or cook with?”

I can often dive deep into random questions out of fascination and almost-morbid curiosity; however, this particular prompting didn’t come out of thin air: three weeks ago, the apartment I now live in lost running water for six days. 

In the midst of not having running water, I began to ask myself a series of questions and promptings: Does my water come from a municipal source? Who controls access to the water in my area? When were the pipes built? Do I know where my water reservoir is? Does my water even come from a reservoir? Does everyone in my neighborhood get access to water the same way? In my town? In my region? In my state? Do I have the right to water where I live?²

When asking these questions, I reached for what I’ve learned from teachers like Wendell Berry and Robin Wall Kimmerer and Toni Morrison and Robert MacFarlane and the questions they have asked of me: What does it mean to know a place? What does it mean to know the water, the land, the people, the animals, the mountains, the valleys? What do my responsibilities look like in that context? 

I returned to the answer that Robin Wall Kimmerer gives in Braiding Sweetgrass, to emphasize my belief that we all have a role to play: 

Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children’s future matters, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it. Because they do.

For centuries, indigenous knowledge and knowledge-keepers have been forcibly removed from conversations on how to care for the earth and how to care for each other and the reciprocity that lives in both of those exchanges. Colonial settlers believed in their version of science, that scientific genocide could prove worthiness, could prove superiority. And when asking where our water comes from, we have to remember that the structures that exist in controlling and maintaining water systems come from this historical background.

I’ve used a particular framework for uncovering where water comes from that aligns with what Wendell Berry said to Naomi Klein in On Fire: “Stop somewhere. And begin the thousand-year-long process of knowing that place.” 

As someone who comes from a specific ancestral tradition in the South of the United States linked to slavery, linked to oppression, linked to how my ancestors moved around in the world, I know it is my responsibility to live differently. 

To know the place, we must ask questions. We must ask about our individual and collective responsibility and roles. We must become better listeners, to hear what the earth and every living thing on it needs. I’m working through my own pathways of Deep Listening. This is what I’ve heard:

Two-thirds of our water in the United States comes from rivers and streams and lakes, whose above- and below-ground sources pool to a defined land area called a watershed. The watershed of the Mississippi River covers 50% of the United States, including Minnesota’s Twin Cities.³ ⁴ If you live in Seattle, your water comes from the Cedar and Tolt watersheds of the homonymous rivers. If you live in NYC, 90% of your water comes from the Catskill/Delaware watershed, which starts 125 miles north, and is fed, in part, through a series of aqueducts from upstate. If you live in Atlanta, your water comes from the Chattahoochee and Flint watersheds. If you live in Chicago, your water travels more than 100 miles from Lake Michigan to reach your taps. And if you live somewhere between Denver and Los Angeles, chances are you get your water from the Colorado River, whose watershed provides water for over 36 million people across seven states.

In more developed towns and cities in the United States, the city or county water department manages the public water-supply system in order to deliver water to homes and sometimes businesses. The distinction between water supply systems has to do with whether the water in any particular area comes from the ground or from the surface.

Groundwater refers to rain and snow that sinks into the soil and is stored underground, in naturally occurring aquifers, and is then accessed through wells or natural springs. Groundwater comprises 36% of public water systems, with the other 64% of water coming from surface water, which is rain and snow that culminates into rivers, streams, and lakes pushed through municipal water treatment systems.

A particularly interesting example of sourcing our water from ground- or surface water is quite famous if you happen to be from the South. The Gaffney Peachoid, more commonly referred to as the “Gaffney Peach” or the “butt in the sky,” is a water tower in Gaffney, South Carolina. As its name indicates, it was built and painted to look like a peach and is quite an appropriate landmark for the region, as South Carolina is the largest producer of peaches in the United States.⁵ The water tower is a form of elevated water storage, which uses gravity to direct water to every resident in the area. This particular water tower holds one million gallons of water. 

Once a community, like Gaffney, pulls water from the river or the well, the water must reach a specific purity level, as required by federal and state standards, before it can be used as clean drinking water.⁶

The United States didn’t have clean drinking water programs in place until 1908, when Jersey City, New Jersey was the first city in the country to disinfect their drinking water, significantly reducing the number of waterborne diseases like typhoid fever and cholera. After Jersey City’s success, towns and cities across the country began to disinfect their water. 

It’s almost strange to think that just over 100 years ago, the United States was affected by a   widespread lack of clean water. But it’s even more jarring when we consider that in today’s day and age, although clean drinking water and sanitation are codified as human rights by the United Nations, almost one in ten people don’t have access to clean drinking water around the world. And over 60 million people in the United States are subject to unsafe water from their taps each year. Most are in low-income, rural areas. Even if the water is deemed safe to drink when it leaves a treatment center, it can be contaminated by pipes in aging systems, like in the highly-publicized case of Flint, Michigan.

In Flint’s case, the city’s lead pipes and fittings are the culprit. When switching water sources from the city of Detroit to the Flint River, the city failed to add orthophosphate to control corrosion in the pipes.

Even more devastating than contaminated water supplies is losing water completely. It goes back to the fact that we can’t take more water out of the ground than is available. And when we’re assessing the economy of nature, we are forced to understand that there isn’t enough money in the world to pay for the services that nature provides us. Take Day Zero in Cape Town as a prime example. 

“Day Zero” refers to Cape Town’s water crisis of 2018, when the city government announced, after years of dwindling dam levels, that within twelve months, or on Day Zero, Cape Town would no longer have enough water to run through the taps of the city. 

I started following and researching the crisis closely to understand what constituted a water crisis or drought. The questions I was asking were: Who gets to define what a “crisis” is? Who gets to define when a crisis “begins” and “ends”? How are these crises handled? Who gets more of the credit when the crisis ends? Who gets most of the blame? What is the aftermath of a water crisis, politically and economically, for the people affected by the shortage? 

The Capetonian government monitored the area’s water supply and implemented extreme water-saving measures to avoid reaching Day Zero. While, ultimately, the crisis ended before water ran out, the potential for cities to lose all of their water access isn’t just a hypothetical. It’s here now. To put it in perspective, the Colorado River, which, as mentioned, provides water for over 36 million people in the United States, has suffered decreasing water levels as a result of more than twenty years of drought, which threatens to cut off water for cities from Denver to Los Angeles. By looking at how Cape Town managed and handled their water crisis, we can better understand what successful approaches to other crises may look like, and what protections we might be able to put into place to protect communities’ access to water. It’s not just about polluted water but whether we’ll have water at all. 

One of the key takeaways from how the Capetonian government handled their crisis was the failure to communicate the exact policies and specifics of the Day Zero campaign, instead opting for a mascot named, wait for it, Splash, who looked like a mash-up of the EDM artist Marshmello and Mermaid Man from Spongebob, to deliver important messages for the city. 

The communication issues came to a head when the final “Day Zero” was moved to 2019 by the Democratic Alliance (DA) government of Cape Town, which created an immediate backlash from opposing political parties. There were claims that the DA had acted fraudulently, that there had been no Day Zero in the first place, or even that Day Zero was still to come in 2018. All of this messiness of the “crisis” perpetuated a significant lack of information to those who were most affected by the issue. 

Mascot aside, Cape Town’s system for responding to a water crisis allows us to understand that open conversations in future situations are imperative. We need to be having open, honest, and complete conversations about water supply, source, use, and distribution, especially if we aren’t able to avoid the shortage in the first place. Which, frankly, didn’t happen in Cape Town.

Journalists wrote stories amidst these bizarre communication methods in a few key categories: the agricultural sector giving water to local towns, thereby ensuring a lower crop rate; families digging ground lines to find water that no longer reached the tap; and communities in townships who already didn’t have access to water suffering further. 

There were occasional op-ed pieces, as well, which highlighted the specific class and racial issues that underline a post-apartheid state: white Afrikaaners complaining about how their rose bush died, because it didn’t have enough water; or middle class families walking through how much they had to cut back on their lifestyles, because water restrictions ensured they had to make a change. 

The stories that did not get told; however, were those of individuals living in townships; of specific farmers affected by water restrictions; of the non-white, working classes who did not have access to financial capital to make underground wells or even receive working taps in the first place. 

The disparity between the stories that were told and the stories that weren’t gives us a framework for understanding water issues in the United States. They are told on racial and economic lines, with Flint; with Indigenous Nations that lack access to clean water or running water. With the Colorado River. With the next water crisis that happens in the United States. 

As someone who lives comfortably, who doesn’t often have to think about whether or not water is going to come out of my taps, this juxtaposition between my position and others forces me to confront my water consumption levels, as well as my water footprint, or daily consumption. The water footprint of an “average” person in the United States is 1,802 gallons of water per day. Almost 33,000 glasses of water. There’s no earthly way we could possibly consume that much water through drinking alone. We’d actually drown. 96% of our consumption comes from everything outside of the water we drink every day: the energy we generate, the clothes we wear, the furniture we own, the food we eat, the miles we drive.⁷

It’s the nature of being human–so much of our living has direct impacts on the earth around us. The vast majority of the world relies on waterways that face critical disruptions to quality and quantity. 70% of freshwater around the world is used by agriculture, specifically for irrigating crops. This is not a farmer slander piece, especially when you consider that an American farmer is said to produce enough food for their family and 150 other people in the world. And as we face the current phase of geological and ecological time, known as the Anthropocene⁸, with droughts and wildfires and hurricanes and tornadoes and tsunamis all increasing, this percentage could also increase. While improvements in irrigation technology mean that we’re wasting less water in the production of our foods, just because water use, at the point of origin, has become more efficient doesn’t mean that the impacts downstream, like water purity, clarity, and quantity, have necessarily improved.⁹

A problem with this form of accounting, though, is that it places blame on farmers and individuals. When we talk about solutions in the United States, oftentimes, the conversations come back to individual actions. That if we eat less meat, if we buy less per week, if we reduce our plastic use, if we cut out producers of microplastics, if we drive electric cars, if we watch our thermometers closer, if we do something more, that the climate crisis will be solved. However, the largest emitters of pollution in the world, the “bad actors” are really corporations. Their sustainability programs aren’t working. We need to rethink the way we’re treating our planet, and that should come before profit. 

This dilemma goes back to how we define sustainability in the first place. The concept of sustainability isn’t radical enough. It’s not outside the purview of capitalism. The basis for the current definition comes from the 1983 Brundtland Commission, stating that sustainability is “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Sustainability exists within the framework and paradigm between people, planet, and profit.

This definition of sustainability can be at odds with conservation and watershed protection efforts, because corporations, prioritizing profit, will act in their own interest instead of the interest of those whose water they pollute. 

This is even more problematic, because unless the pollution is sudden, like in the case of an oil spill, it likely won’t get major coverage, and the corporations will only be held accountable to a specific threshold. 

I have to pause to first explain the concept of eutrophication. Hang with me, it’s important. It’s a major reason why large bodies of water are becoming unusable for any life form. Eutrophication happens when there’s an increase in nutrient concentration and growth in undesirable plant life in a water body, related to human activities. This leads to dead zones (also known as hypoxic conditions for the fellow science nerds out there). It happens when nutrients and water are mismanaged. And it’s hard to figure out where the singular issue is in any particular watershed that’s been impacted by eutrophication, because the water sources are hard to determine.

In other words, when inappropriate concentrations of nutrients end up in a waterway, algal blooms appear, which takes away the desired use of the water. When the algal blooms die, dead zones appear. 

You may have been to a dead zone before without realizing it. One of the largest dead zones in the world is in the Gulf of Mexico. Pollutants are transported in the water stream by the Mississippi River. It’s especially hard to tell where the specific bad actors are in this example, because all of the land in the watershed (which for the Mississippi River covers 50% of the United States) can contribute to the toxicity.

Thanks to science and observation, we know specifically how the dead zone forms in the Gulf of Mexico. In the spring, freshwater from the Mississippi River is heated by the sun and sits on top of the saltier water in the Gulf. This barrier cuts the saltier water from reaching the oxygen in the air. The nutrient runoff in the top layer of water, particularly nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizer, sewage, urban areas, petroleum, septic tanks, and natural runoff, create huge algal blooms. And when the algae die, they fall into the saltier water below the freshwater barrier and decompose. That decomposition uses up more and more of the oxygen that already existed in the deeper water in the Gulf. Because the oxygen levels are decreasing in the deeper, saltier water and the freshwater barrier is blocking the deeper water from resupplying its oxygen levels, the deeper water eventually doesn’t have enough oxygen to sustain life forms. The entire chain of life is impacted. Fish either avoid the area or die off completely. All the way down the food chain, tiny organisms die as well. And the cycle restarts every spring with new runoff. 

It can all feel very doom and gloom, right? We feel pulled in one direction by the desire to contribute positively to a solution with our individual actions. We feel pulled in another direction when we realize that even collectively, our individual actions don’t contribute to as much pollution and devastation as corporate actors’ actions do. These are complex issues. If you fall into the grouping of people who want to make changes, it’s hard to feel like you can because of how complicated and difficult this really is. Even moreso when we consider the extent to which the current regulations and legal frameworks don’t fully protect nature. 

Generally speaking, throughout the existence of what we define as the “modern” United States, water has been mismanaged (or, what others might define as “left alone”).

Indigenous nations’ knowledge of land and water management has been historically mocked and cast aside. And because of that, the only thing you needed from 1899 to 1948 was a permit to dump in water bodies and rivers in the United States.¹⁰ In 1948, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (FWPCA) created legislation that focused on pollution that comes from a single point, like sewage waste.¹¹ In 1972, amendments were added to the FWPCA, earning the moniker of the “Clean Water Act,” which is what sets the basis for much of how water issues are addressed and the respective standards that are set in the United States today.¹² ¹³

Outside of legislation and regulation, the legal framework of water rights is notably complex. I’m not a lawyer, but I do come from a family of lawyers which is why this is interesting to me and an important place to mention that you shouldn’t take any of this as legal advice. One of the big theories in environmental law is trying to make the environment count in its own right. The largest hurdle is that there is no right to the environment or an absolute right to property in the US Constitution. Historically, there are two primary doctrines used in legal arguments to define water rights: a “prior appropriation” doctrine, which states that the first person to use the water is the one with the best right to the water, and a law of riparian rights, which says that there are water rights for reasonable use to the owners of land adjacent to water bodies. The implications of these doctrines are widespread, particularly when we understand that the US government is essentially able to “take” land from people (and companies) with “just compensation” to complete certain projects or to attempt to settle a conflict.¹⁴

Toni Morrison highlights a particular example of a taking and its long-term impacts on the land, the water, and the living beings in, of, and around the region when she said in her critical talk titled “The Site of Memory” for the New York Public Library in 1986: “You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding: it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”

I’ve given you a lot to chew on. I’ve given myself a lot to chew on. Where do we go from here? 

For me, the answer lies in stewardship, in reciprocity and in regeneration with ourselves, with others, with the land, with its inhabitants. 

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass: “We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgment of the rest of the earth’s beings.”

But what that looks like in practice may look different for all of us. The first step is education.¹⁵

We can vote. We can make market-based decisions. We can be activists and co-conspirators. We can donate. We can volunteer. 

But when faced with all of these choices, I return to Wendell Berry: “Stop somewhere. And begin the thousand-year-long process of knowing that place.”

I’ve included quite a few resources in the footnotes, should you like to go further.¹⁶

Onward,

Sara¹⁷

1. Alongside the Aqueduct was a footpath that runs from Croton-on-Hudson all the way down to the Bronx. If you haven’t had a refresh on Roman construction recently, allow me to provide a middle-school architectural lesson. Aqueducts are channels that bring water to highly-populated areas. The genius behind an aqueduct is gravity. The pipes of this particular modern-day aqueduct lightly drop the water by 13 inches per mile, a challenge to the workers to ensure a steady gradient through the 41-mile construction. While the drawings you might have seen before feature an above- ground series of large bridge-like structures, the OCA sits underground, in a tunnel 7.5 feet wide by 8.5 feet high. It has a stone foundation, a covering constructed by dirt and grass, and a stone face at the retaining walls.

The Aqueduct was originally built in response to fires and disease-related epidemics that obliterated the city. These disasters could be linked back to contaminated wells and poor infrastructure for water supplies, as decontaminated water sources didn’t emerge in the United States until 1908. From 1842 to 1955, the OCA brought water to New York City, landing in two reservoirs: one in what’s now the Great Lawn of Central Park and the other in what’s now the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. It took twenty-two hours for the water to flow from Croton all the way down to the Harlem River. And due to a growing population in the city, the aqueduct was unable to supply enough water for its residents. Thus began the construction of the New Croton Aqueduct, which is three times the size of the original aqueduct, further underground, three miles to the east, and inaccessible to the public. The New Croton Aqueduct started running water to New York City in 1980 and still is in use today.

The trail on the OCA is almost as old as the aqueduct itself and was created for two primary purposes: to prevent local opponents to the aqueduct from sabotaging the water supply and to provide workers access to the water.

There are still remnants of access points on the trail, and my former neighbor (hi Michael!) who I would consider an expert on the local land, did several recon missions to find different portions of the Aqueduct lost to time and modern building codes.

2. To answer my own questions, I learned that I get water from an underground aquifer, which is a formation of porous rock that contains or conducts a path for groundwater. This groundwater is pulled up through a well to a pump, which leads into a holding tank. This holding tank is connected directly to the house I live in. The only way I learned this was because the seal on the well was broken, and the heater for the pump needed replacing, which culminated in my lack of running water. But my point for you reading this isn’t to explain my particular situation, rather to prompt you to think about your own.

3. If you’ve ever been interested in finding out what your watershed is, you can use the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s tool. Clicking around is a keen reminder of how little we really know about the water and land around us. 

4. The watershed I currently live in is the Bash Bish Brook watershed, which is a sub-watershed of the Roeliff Jansen Kill, a tributary of the Hudson River. The “Roe Jan,” as it is known to locals, flows through towns in Columbia County and Dutchess County.

5. The Gaffney Peach holds the record as the world’s largest peach, and it lives directly adjacent to Interstate 85, which takes you from Charlotte, North Carolina to Atlanta, Georgia. Just to rub it in the face of Georgia, whose national and international claim to fame is being the “Peach State.” I must have driven by The Peach hundreds, if not thousands, of times as a kid. And I knew relatively little about it, other than the interstate sparring between South Carolina and Georgia and the singular story that one of my parents climbed the water tower (not quite legally) in their youth.

The inception of the Gaffney Peach began with a commission from the Gaffney Board of Public Works, as they needed a form of elevated water storage and were able to leverage federal funding to have it built. It now holds one million gallons of water and is a source of water for the local area, as well as tourism as it had its own plot point in Netflix’s House of Cards. As it goes in small towns, even the paint jobs are of notable interest. 

6. Seattle and New York City are two of the five major cities in the United States whose water doesn’t need to undergo filtration at its end point, due to the protection programs in place. New York, for example, has programs in place to work with those who live and run businesses upstream to ensure a clean water supply. While urban areas take up a small percentage of the physical land that sources water, they are major sources of potential pollutants in the water source. For most other towns and cities, the water department sources water from a reservoir, river, or well, and directs it to a water tower, like in Gaffney, South Carolina.

7. My water footprint is about 1,000 gallons per day, with most of my water consumption coming from my diet, which is low-meat to begin with, and somehow from the pet food I buy for my dog. The total water consumed to produce food is estimated to be ten times more than what’s required for personal or municipal use. You can calculate your personal water footprint here.

8.  I highly recommend reading John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed or listening to his homonymous podcast.

9. In rain-fed systems, the most important indicator of water availability is the soil moisture content: how much water is available in the soils that can be taken up by roots. At the heart of any hydrological study is the concept of water balance, which is a means by which stores and flows of water can be taken into account. 

If we were to draw a diagram, the accounting would look like the following series of arrows: 

→         Storage     → 

Inputs                Outputs

For example, when considering irrigating a crop with groundwater, that irrigation can undertake the water balance on a regional groundwater system/aquifer. In areas where the amount of rainfall is significantly less than the annual rate of evaporation, dam water supplies can be augmented by enhancing the amount of water harvested. 

This may not mean a whole lot to you if you’re not agriculturally-inclined. The gist I’m getting at here is we can't take more out of water sources than is available. 

10. The oldest piece of federal legislation relating to water emerged in 1899 called the Rivers and Harbors Act.

11. The FWCPA was amended in the late 1960s due to continued concern. And in 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, caught on fire due to significant pollution. After this fire, President Nixon created the National Environmental Protection Act, which helped to establish the Environmental Protection Agency.

12. What does the Clean Water Act actually do? Post World War Two, with the acceleration of manufacturing and industrialization, it became easy to see (quite literally) point-source pollution from manufacturing, the growth of towns, and raw sewage. But the non-visible forms of pollution, known as non-point source pollution, weren’t recognized yet. Synthetic fertilizers were just coming into widespread use. So, the Clean Water Act in 1972 began to regulate easy-to-see pollution. This first amendment set the structure for laws regulating discharges of pollutants in water bodies. And it also set a technology-based water quality standard for point sources. By implementing a process to reach the set standards, there was significant improvement in water quality for the first time since 1908, when Jersey City began managing its water. 

In 1987, the Clean Water Act was amended again to include further regulatory and legislative policies. Of note, Section 319 began to address the non-visible sources of pollution for surface waters, like rivers, lakes, streams, estuaries, and coastal waters. This amendment had two primary components: the first was allocating funds for solutions, like construction of wastewater facilities, and the second was rules and regulations on water quality. From a non-regulatory standpoint, this amendment enabled the federal government to set aside grants for states, indigenous nations, and territories to help address non-point pollution through the development and implementation of non-point source management programs. Section 319 also began a federal and state partnership, in which the Clean Water Act sets water quality guidelines and requires states to set the water quality standards and to implement them. It’s important to note, however, that in this amendment, Congress chose not to address non-point sources through regulation, in stark contrast to how it has regulated point sources. By this point, legislatively-speaking, most point sources of pollution have come under regulation: waste water, solid waste, and concentrated animal feeding are included in water management practices. And so, most of the water pollution problems were now agricultural and urban storm runoff. 

13. There are three primary areas of water quality standards: designated uses, water quality criteria, and an anti-degradation policy. 

Designated uses apply to states and indigenous nations for appropriate or desired water use. There are six predominant designated use categories: recreation, aquatic habitat, industrial water supply, agricultural use, drinking, and fishable/swimming. A water body might have more than one designated use, and economic factors can be used to set a designated use but not a water quality score.

Water quality criteria can either take the form of qualitative (excessive algal use) or quantitative (algal use to not exceed X%) limits. The standards are based either on studies or reference water bodies.

A designated use impairment is a challenging process. The remedies are not one-size-fits-all: some naturally entropic lakes are good for fishing. The analysis takes into account the Total Max Daily Loads (TMDL), but it’s up to the state to evaluate the impairment, list the impairment, and restore it. During that process, the water body goes on the 303(d) Impaired Water Bodies List. The state then sets the TMDLs to be approved by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). And if the EPA doesn’t approve the suggested loads by the state, the agency can set the number.

The calculation of a Total Max Daily Load (TMDL) takes into account a cap on the allowable pollutant load, which means the amount an ecosystem can assimilate; the margin of safety (MOS), and the allocation of the cap among water sources.

What are the top reasons for a water body to be placed on the 303(d) Impaired Water Bodies List? For lakes, it could be nutrients, sediments, dissolved oxygen, or pH level. For estuaries, it could be pathogens, bacteria, metals, or dissolved oxygen. And for streams and rivers, it could be sediments, metals, pathogens, or nutrients.

In order to implement changes to pollutant load through the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Agency policies, there are three main routes taken. The first would be regulatory, through Section 402 of the Clean Water Act, which provides a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit. The second and third would be voluntary and funding through Section 319 of the Clean Water Act, to utilize the non-point source program. 

14. The Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause defines “just compensation” by stating that private lands can’t be taken for public use without compensation equivalent to the “market-value” of the private land. The implications of this clause are widespread, and many advocates, scholars, and activists for environmental justice find that the idea of just compensation becomes problematic when seeking to understand what truly is “just” as “compensation” when it comes to the taking of property. This is further complicated when we incorporate indigenous wisdom and knowledge which holistically approaches land ownership with the understanding that no person owns the land or the water. We are all stewards of the earth, but the earth owns itself. 

In a lot of environmental disputes, another type of property emerges: common property. The Tragedy of the Commons is often used as a justification for environmental rulings, as it posits that rational people, even when they want to, find themselves unable to govern the commons effectively. Solutions extending outside of this framework include “privatized” commons (notably problematic) and cooperative solutions (like community land trusts). I recommend looking up Professor Bernadette Atuahene’s research and scholarly work on this topic. 

Further complicating the legal argument, just compensation and the Tragedy of the Commons don’t always account for the fact that it is a human right to have access to clean drinking water and sanitation.

15. Industrial Workers of the World founder Lucy Parsons once said that “a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence… do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals.”

16. Where you can donate and find opportunities for advocacy:

Search through One Percent for the Planet

Books you can read: 

• Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer

• Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler

• The Water Dancer - Ta-Nehisi Coates

• We Are Water Protectors - Carole Lindstrom

• Black Woman in Green - Gloria Brown

• An Indigenous People’s History of the United States - Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

• As Long As Grass Grows - Dina Gilio-Whitaker

• Where the Water Goes - David Owen

• The Death and Life of the Great Lakes - Dan Egan

• Water Follies - Robert Glennon

• The Poisoned City - Anna Clark

• The Water Will Come - Jeff Goodell

• When the Rivers Run Dry - Fred Pearce

• Underland - Robert MacFarlane

• The Hidden Life of Trees - Peter Wohlleben

• Entangled Life - Merlin Sheldrake

Calculate your water footprint

Find your watershed

Free classes you can take to learn more:

• https://www.coursera.org/learn/indigenous-canada 

• https://www.coursera.org/learn/best-practice-farming-sustainable-2050/home/info

• https://www.coursera.org/learn/environmental-law/home/info

17. I had an extraordinary editor work with me on this piece, and I cannot recommend her enough if you’re looking for someone to help you get your piece to a finished (and readable) place. It was Sarah’s excellent suggestion to include a great deal of my thoughts and learnings in the footnotes, as well as her guardianship of my writing through which I was able to trust that you, dear reader, would be able to understand what I was trying to say. To learn more about Sarah Carter and to work with her, visit this link.