Water is life

(originally appeared in Thinking mission, July 2001)

Father Sean McDonagh SSC, an Irish Columban Priest reflects on the use and abouse of water resources throughout the world, and provides us iwth a sharp challenge.

Human activity is polluting water in the oceans, rivers, aquifers and lakes. In mid-February 2000 a cyanide spill from a gold mine in Northern Romania entered the river Tisza, a tributary of the Danube, destroying aquatic life for hundreds of miles downstream. Pollution and lack of water is also a problem in Asia. The Indus, one of the great rivers of Asia is heavily polluted. Many of the rivers in the Philippines are polluted with agricultural and human waste and mine tailings. The Pasig river which runs through Manila is little more than an open sewer.

More than 97 per cent of all the water on Earth is sea water. During the UNESCO proclaimed International Year of the Ocean, in 1998, it emerged that the oceans are being over-fished and polluted at an unprecedented rate. Important areas of the oceans, close to the continental shelf, are contaminated with human, agricultural, industrial and radioactive waste. Much of this is toxic and carcinogenic. Because we have tended to treat the oceans as sewers the Baltic, Mediterranean, Black, Caspian, Bering, Yellow and South China Sea have all been seriously damaged in recent decades. The waters of the Black Sea, once a flourishing eco-system, is now considered to be 90 per cent dead.

Each year the Danube dumps an estimated 60,000 tons of phosphorus and 340,000 tons of inorganic nitrogen into its waters. It has little chance of being flushed clean since it takes 167 years for the water from the Danube delta to reach the Mediterranean, and much longer to reach the Atlantic.

By the mid-1990s the Aral Sea has diminished by one half compared to what it was in 1960. What remains is now heavily polluted with agricultural chemicals. The Amu Darya and Syr Darya that used to flow into the sea were diverted to irrigate the cotton fields of Uzbekistan. Wind storms blow the toxic sand from the exposed seabed on to villages, contaminating crops and exposing humans and animals to the poison. Destroying rivers was not the sole prerogative of communist regimes. The dams on the Columbia river and its tributaries in the 1930s and 1940s destroyed one of the richest salmon rivers in the world...

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