Individualism and the Struggle to Improve Water Quality

The Ganges River is a tragic flow of a polluted destiny. Individuals such as Alexander the Great Macedonian military explorer and founder of nations sought to continue from the Indus to the Ganges and perhaps change the flow of history a priori yet his captains compelled him to turn back toward the Euphrates and death from pestilence. Countless people of the world have perished from polluted water for drinking and cooking that could have been avoid with better scientific knowledge and a pragmatically adapted life-style in democracy.

Instead of a Hellenized subcontinent perhaps with a better scientific future India became a vacation land for visiting conquerors until the British yielded foreign rule at last to Mahatma Gandhi's secularized political non-violent resistance movement paradoxically finally revolting against the initial Aryan invasion from seven thousand years before, or more, that gave the future of India a caste system and a belief in the sky God Brahma. Individuals can make a difference in all things political including water quality.

Individualism is an expression of free use of one's own intellectual and physical capital-spend it wisely. The world's future may be in your control to bring good water or bad to the next millennium. The world's oceans are a sink for millions of chemical compounds made by scientists. Major cities dump vast quantities of psychiatric drugs in to the sewers through water toilet vectors after excretion or urination by their consumers. PCB's and a variety of chemicals corrupt the waters of the Arctic ocean transforming polar bears and Beluga whales into hermaphrodites or the swimming dead collecting elements of death in the blubber.

Individuals can protest against the corporatist machine that irrationally expands over the globe to concentrate wealth for a planetary oligarchy dead set against active democratic pragmatism. After the oil is expent they will seek fossil fuel or carbon based fuel supplies from other sources such as ocean floor methane hydrates when more intelligent, non-polluting solar powered electric engines would be a better choice.

Eight thousand years ago, more or less, the Black Sea experienced a flood of saltwater from the Mediterranean Sea when a land dam was breached perhaps over a period of forty days and nights. The sea level rose several hundred feet and the fresh water sea was transformed forever. Today the Black Sea below the depth of 550 feet is a dead zone, reportedly without oxygen. Life and oxygen exists just at the surface; what can be done about that?

Human ingenuity has overcome adversity countless times. In the present era of pervasive polluted water quality above and below ground, in fresh water and saltwater-when even the ice of Alaskan glaciers is melting each years sufficiently to fill an area the size of Chesapeake Bay individual initiative needs to lead to break free from the complacence of mass economic following of global corporatists and their hollow reassurances that the economy and environment would do better without regulation.

About 8,000 years ago Semitic people left the rising waters of the Black Sea perhaps on vessels of stout construction. Imagine one such boat that emerged from the storm and the flood in the midst of the limitless expanse of the newly saline black sea beyond sight of shore. Prevailing winds of the age may have carried the boat along through the new channel and along the Syrian shore. Semitic peoples are said to have descended from the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates in the 3rd millennium b.c. to live in Mesopotamia and settle the middle east. They perhaps brought the story of the flood and volkerwanderung and the first diaspora with them to reach the Bible in time, with the higher spot known referred to as the kingdom of Urartu becoming later known as the transliterated name Ararat. Humanity today should reclaim the Black Sea for fresh water uses and provide a source for drinking water carefully conserved for that portion of Asia.

Transforming the Black Sea once again in to a fresh water lake is a practical venture requiring generally the creation of strong safe redundant locks on the Dardanelles or Bosporus at a select locations so the flood cannot accidentally repeat itself. Desalination plants powered by solar cells and evaporation/condensation of freshwater from salt can create an inflow of fresh water as the surface salt water is pumped out. Fresh water rivers would continue to flow in to the Black Sea of course and in time the transformation to a fresh water lake with a greater portion able to support life could emerge.

Ecological initiatives in support of no net loss of biota on the land areas would synergize with conservation of river drainages and the quality of water. Ecological economic policy isn't presently popular with corporatists or communists however. Ecological economics is premised on the minimal waste of mass through thermodynamic increase in entropy-that is non renewable resources should not be quickly wasted as humanity in a hurry to get comfort maximally destroy the planetary environment in the effort quite profligately.

Reading about the pollution in the Niger-its quite astounding, I considered how several forms of pollution make waters undrinkable. Several million chemical compounds make it in to water-Clive Cussler's novel 'Sahara' covered many of those back in 1996. The second and third world haven't really improved much politically regarding the containment of political corruption or pollution and that trend may continue.


In the United States it is difficult enough to keep high water quality. Yet even with reasonable standards water use is horribly short-sighted. Underground aquifers continue to become repositories for pollutants. Water based flush toilet sewage systems are too common with electric waterless toilet technology underutilized. If the federal government would fund high quality renewable home battery technology electric toilets like the Incinolet could become solar powered and more used saving water.

So many lawns in front yards are watered in order just to be trophy lawns for drive by voyeur in cars on the way to car washes. Most of the streams and rivers in the United States are transformed in to drainage ditches and become sources for oceanic pollution themselves. The cycle is really quite devastating and even in the third world, or especially in the third world modern economic development procedures such as created the increasing problems in the first world are dumped willy nilly as if they were good for people without need for ecological qualification.

Individuals can make a difference by taking up alternative energy for themselves and getting off the grid. Conserve water as part of a general basic personal transformation toward an energy independent, low water use lifestyle.

Living in Alaska near an area with ground water contaminated with arsenic once the guy I rented from brought water over for drinking. I learned that I drank just five gallons of fresh water each week. Even in a hot climate that might be just ten or fifteen gallons. With systems analysis of water use requirements personally, and perhaps with a centrifuging, micro-waving bath water recycler, personal water use might be reduced to under 25 gallons each week-and why not?

Trans-nationalism concentrates political power in the class of global economic players most disinclined to conserve water or water quality. In China water quality and air quality famously has taken a beating as that nation races towards material affluence. Basic political and economic forms and relationships exist such that the large scale destruction of natural waterways continue to increase rather than decrease. Better social and ecology studies can be pursued by individuals in order to comprehend without economic bias how the health of the planetary hydrological cycle is in substantial decline. Not only do pcbs destroy killer whale packs in Puget Sound and Beluga whales in the St. Lawrence seaway, estrogen worldwide in waterways proliferate through plastics and other manufacturing processes. Antibiotics are found in municipal water supplies evading filtration amidst a host of other bio-vectors. A votre sante!