Water Is Political

I'm trying to remember the essay that I wrote by this title back in 2000; it began with my attendance at a meeting of activists campaigning against the economic sanctions on Iraq, and me nearly opening a bottle of what I thought was organic apple juice. It was, in fact, a bottle of water from Iraq, contaminated due to a lack of water purification equipment throughout much of that country at the time. Needless to say, it's a good thing that someone caught me before I opened the bottle and poured a sample of it out into a dixie cup. If I had done so, it would likely have exposed me to malaria, E. coli, and gosh knows what water-borne diseases were then ravaging the civilian population of Iraq.

The original essay also made mention of how water access here in the United States reflects how stratified our society has become. When I lived in Phoenix, Arizona during 1990 and the first quarter of 1991, I eventually became aware that the wealthy neighborhoods of both the East and West Valley got their water supply (including the water for their backyard pools) from the clear, clean water sources available to the 100-mile-across metropolis, while the much-

poorer communities south of Indian School road were the recipients of the heavily filtered, chemical-laced water of the Rio Salado (aka Salt River), which contained more than its fair share of liquid and solid pollutants, soil runoff, motor oil, and fecal matter of both animals and humans (more than one ill-advised swimmer or wader in the Salt River lost limbs to flesh-eating bacteria).

When I migrated up to Seattle in the spring of 1991, I found that, overall, the water quality from the Cedar and Tolt River reservoirs was significantly better than that of the southwest's rivers; still, all local water sources were piped first to the homes of the uber-wealthy Eastsiders before we lowly residents of neighborhoods to the west of Lake Washington got hold of it. My parents used to joke that any glass of water I poured from the tap had gone through the likes of Bill Gates and Paul Allen long before I drank it. Graphic, perhaps; but substantially true. Even in the Land of the Free, with Liberty and Justice for all, the wealthy, famous and influential get first dibs on the water sources, unless you drink only bottled water.

Water is a political issue on many fronts. Heated arguments are still being had on when the long-suffering residents of Flint, Michigan, will be able to drink their own tap water. Scientists and government officials are wondering when ocean water levels will begin to flood and swallow up coastal cities around the world. People living in coastal cities live in vague dread of what they will have to do when their local tsunami alarms sound. Migrating fish and marine mammals are plotting courses further north all the time, as their watery habitats become too warm to sustain them and their food sources. And then there are communities worldwide being impacted by a lack of adequate water purification equipment. Yep, we'll have a lot to research and write about herein just on water issues alone.