Environmental Success Stories

Solving Major Ecological Problems and Confronting Climate Change

Frank Dunnivant

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231542906
• Topic: Ciencias físicas
• Subtopic: Ciencia medioambiental

Unlike many titles on environmental issues that portend a dark future, Environmental Success Stories delves into the most daunting ecological and environmental challenges humankind has faced and shows how scientists, citizens, and a responsive public sector have dealt with them successfully.

In addition to presenting the basic chemical and environmental science underlying problems like providing clean drinking water, removing DDT and lead from agriculture and our homes, and curtailing industrial pollution, this book also discusses the political actors, agency regulators, and community leaders who have collaborated to enact effective legislation. Sharing the stories of the people, organizations, and governments who have addressed these problems successfully, Frank M. Dunnivant explains how we might confront the world's largest and most complex environmental crisis: climate change. Now is the time for rededicated scientific exploration and enlightened citizen action to save our environment, and Dunnivant's book offers a stirring call to action.

ONE

Securing Safe, Inexpensive Drinking Water

Water,

wasser,

voda,

eau,

aqua,

acqua,

hydro,

maya

Through the history of literature, the guy who poisons the well has been the worst of all villains.

—AUTHOR UNKNOWN

The noblest of the elements is water.

—PINDAR

This chapter documents one of human’s greatest success stories, acquiring safe drinking water at relatively low costs and the near elimination of waterborne diseases and pollutants in drinking water systems in Global North and many Global South countries. The astonishing simplicity of water treatment will be presented.

Access to safe, clean drinking water is globally viewed as a basic human right. Several constant themes include: (1) the presence of natural microbial pollution in all waters, (2) that we all live downstream, meaning that water that is one person’s waste can become another person’s source, and (3) that any discussion of safe, clean drinking water is inseparable from adequate and effective wastewater treatment, the subject of chapter 2. Here we will mention but not focus on securing drinking water, one of our great future challenges. For example, it is estimated that by 2025 to 2030 some Global South countries water needs will be twice their actual supply and that more than half of the world population will be facing water-based vulnerability. Existing water shortages will only be worsened by increasing climate change, the subject of chapter 6. Securing access to clean drinking water is fundamental to human existence; this is an area in which the Global North countries, and soon, much of the Global South, have largely been successful. We will close the chapter with an assessment of our success and what is needed for the future.

Humanity’s Fundamental Dependence on the Unique Element of Water

Water and life go hand in hand, no life can exist without water, be it the lowly microbes or the largest mammals or trees. Water covers 71% of the Earth’s surface, but only 2.5% of this is freshwater. Of the freshwater that we use in the United States (excluding water in glaciers and water too deep in the ground to access), 70% supports agriculture. Water is considered the medium of life, so much so that it is an essential criterion astronomers look for in the quest for extraterrestrial life. Water also plays an immense role in economics, with a strong correlation between access to safe drinking water and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. Lastly, one of the most fascinating cycles on Earth, which is fundamental to life, is the sun-driven hydrological cycle of evaporation and precipitation.

The Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) Registry, the international database of chemical information, identifies more than 70 million organic and inorganic substances. Unique among these is water, H2O. Water has at least 38 unique properties, properties that would not be expected based solely on its chemical structure. Whether or not we are always aware of it, we interact with water’s unique properties on a daily basis, and our livelihoods are dependent on them. We physically experience water’s unique ability to absorb heat and regulate our local and global weather patterns. As children, we were awed by water’s surface tension when we watched insects walk across it. The fact that water can exist in all three phases (vapor, liquid, and solid) gives us many of our most iconic sites, from the oceans to the Arctic. Other familiar properties of water include its density as compared with other chemicals and how this density changes with temperature increases, its unusually high boiling point, and its unusually low freezing point, resulting in a wide range of temperatures in which liquid water can exist and control our local weather patterns. A unique feature of water is that its solid form, ice, floats on the liquid form; no other chemical behaves like this. Imagine how different aquatic life and the winter season would be if ice formed on the bottom of lakes instead of the top!

Water owes its unique properties to its chemical makeup and size. A water molecule consists of two hydrogen atoms bonded to one oxygen atom. The oxygen atom has two extra pairs of electrons on opposing sides to the hydrogen atoms.

The shape and size of the water molecule allows the hydrogen atoms on one water molecule to interact with the electrons of another molecule. This form of interaction is referred to by chemists as hydrogen bonding and is unique to only three elements: oxygen, nitrogen, and fluorine. The “extra” uniqueness of water is that its small size allows more molecules of water to interact and fit in a three-dimensional lattice than other chemicals. This attraction between water molecules produces its unique properties.

While the chemical formula for water was discovered only in 1805, human’s interactions and dependence on water goes back to the earliest of times. Migration routes around the world and early civilizations had a close connection with surface bodies of freshwater. During our nomadic existence, water pollution was not a big problem because tribes could always move on to new, and hopefully clean, sources of drinking water. As permanent civilizations developed, however, almost always near fresh, flowing bodies of water, the problem of pollution became imminent. We all live downstream. In permanent civilizations, one tended to bathe and dispose of waste downstream of one’s residential drinking water supply. But what is downstream for one person is upstream for another, creating the problem of surface water pollution. Just think of how many towns are located along the Mississippi River and how many people have withdrawn water, used it, and put it back in the river.

Sources of Water Pollution

But what is pollution? Is it natural or human-made? Is it isolated to Global North countries? Is it organic, inorganic, or biological? Is pollution everywhere? Does it really matter, or is pollution a product of eco-hippy, left-wing rants that undermine capitalism? My education and life are products of the 1960s and 1970s when antipollution efforts were in their infancy, especially from a legal or regulation standpoint. I remember my ecology professor lecturing about how because of pollution, one could no longer drink out of streams in the country without experiencing adverse effects. This was a bit of an overstatement. I continued my education in chemistry, biology, and toxicology, and soon I realized that it would be very unwise to ever drink directly from any stream in the world—today, during the 1970s, or during prior human occupancy of the Americas—because of naturally occurring bacteria. While the problem has gotten worse with human waste in streams, humans, as well as other species, have been dealing with the reality of microbial contamination since our first existence. Microbes such as Escherichia coli and protozoa like Cryptosporidium and Giardia are common in all wild animals and they are excreted into every stream. While wild animals have evolved to deal with these pathogens, humans do not fare so well.

FIGURE 1.1. (a) Lewis dot structure of water. “Chemistry: Molecular Geometry,” in Structural Biochemistry (https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Structural_Biochemistry/Molecular_Geometry); (b) Hydrogen bonding. “Chemistry: Chemical Bonding—Hydrogen Bonds,” in Structural Biochemistry (https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Structural_Biochemistry/Chemical_Bonding/Hydrogen_bonds).

Microbial Pollution

No discussion of microbial pollution would be complete without noting the work by John Snow, who is considered one of the founding fathers of modern epidemiology. During Snow’s lifetime in the mid-1800s, cholera (the Black Death) was believed to be caused by chemical pollution and poor air; modern germ theory was not promulgated until the late 1880s. Around 1854, London had yet another outbreak of cholera. After careful investigation of the locations of outbreaks, Snow identified the Broad Street pump, one of many pumps delivering water from the Thames, as the culprit. After the handle to the pump was removed and other sources of water were secured, the epidemic was contained. This case is representative of several common themes used throughout this chapter: (1) location of your drinking water source is everything and (2) everyone lives downstream (from someone else’s waste).

Surprisingly, not all bacteria found in warm-blooded animals are harmful to humans. One group of bacteria that receives significant attention is enteric bacteria, bacteria of the intestines that include the well-known E. coli. Most varieties of E. coli are completely harmless to humans but are measured as “indicator organisms,” since their presence indicates that fecal material and the other actually pathogenic bacteria that this material typically contains have entered the water.

“Natural” Pollution

While microorganisms are certainly important with respect to drinking water, it is also not uncommon for harmful, but natural, chemical agents to exist in some surface waters and certainly in groundwater. Depending on local geology, mineral deposits can contribute chemicals such as fluoride and arsenic to sources of drinking water, creating either short- or long-term health effects. A small amount of fluoride, less then one part per million, is good for our teeth, but excessive amounts can cause adverse consequences. But let us explore the example of arsenic pollution in more detail.

Arsenic pollution of drinking water obtained from groundwater sources is far too common a problem, yet it is completely natural. In 2007, one study estimated that approximately 137 million people in 70 countries drank from groundwater containing unsafe levels of arsenic, including the United States. The most serious case is the water supply in the Ganges Delta in West Bengal, India, and Bangladesh. Because of the need for a sanitary source of drinking water, millions of relatively deep groundwater wells were constructed, however, one in five of these wells tapped arsenic-contaminated water. Today, the contaminated wells have been identified and new wells use an installation-treatment procedure that largely removes arsenic from groundwater.

Industrial Pollution

While natural pollutants are certainly an issue, local or upstream industry can greatly complicate surface and groundwater pollution. Given our ingenious ways of making chemicals today, history has shown that health effects from some chemicals can take decades to document. Prior to the creation and implementation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the series of environmental laws that followed, there were very few regulations concerning what industry or anyone else could release into a waterway in the United States. Why is industry commonly located near or on rivers? The answer is that industry typically uses large volumes of water, and in the absence of water rights laws, this water is essentially free. The waterways also provide a very inexpensive means of shipping products to national and international markets. And, prior to the EPA and the Clean Water Act, waste disposal was relatively easy, since wastewater was diluted with river water—hence, the disturbing and incorrect expression, “dilution is the solution to pollution.”

But in the old days, wastewater from industrial processes could either contain relatively nonharmful trace concentrations or highly toxic pure substances in high concentrations. Waste disposal greatly changed with the passage of the various forms of the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 and amendments in 1977, 1986, and 1996. While this act has several far-reaching dictates for cleaning up waterways, industrial pollution from wastewater disposal falls under the jurisdiction of the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) of the Clean Water Act. The EPA defined which chemicals were controlled, and under the NPDES they strictly specified and monitored what could be released into a waterway. Permit violators could be fined, imprisoned, or have their contributing facility shut down. Implementation of the NPDES greatly changed how industry conducted business. In order to meet the requirements of the permit, many facilities were forced to install wastewater treatment facilities to remove pollution from the water prior to its being released into the environment. Some treatment systems were as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Securing Safe, Inexpensive Drinking Water
• 2. Effective Treatment of Our Wastewaters
• 3. The Removal of Anthropogenic Lead, and Soon Mercury, from Our Environment
• 4. Elimination of Chlorinated Hydrocarbons from Our Environment
• 5. The Safety of Chemicals in Our Food and Water: Risk Assessment
• 6. Saving Our Atmosphere for Our Children
• 7. Legislating Industry: The Need and the Success
• 8. The Rapid Advancement of Technology: Our Best Hope
• 9. Humans’ Greatest Challenge: Climate Change
• 10. Conclusion and Transition to a Bright Future
• Afterword: Imagination, Responsibility and Climate Change
• Bibliography
• Index