Who cares for our water?
Written by Matt B · first published 07/04/2009
Thanet District Council may be able to crow about the quality of sea water for swimming in but Thanet might not be able to boast the same thing about our drinking water.
Only recently I saw a headline in the local advertising supported (free) newspaper that more or less said that most of the contaminants in our drinking water came from us.
Each of us flushing a bit of this and a bit of that down the sink has added up, it seems, to more toxic rubbish in our drinking water than the efforts of a number of well known industrial groups.
The truth is we are all on thin ice and so perhaps it is time to widen our sights a little and address the entire picture. For example no one locally has commented on the fact that the industrial complex of "Thanet Earth" not only uses more water than it can source from local reserves but will need to drain local marshland for further water too. read more.
Yes those big complexes sat on our water supply could dump a heavy load into our water and ruin it for generations to come - that worries me. However, what also worries me is that we might slowly ruin it for generations to come anyway.
What I'd like to know from the Save Thanet Water Supply supporters is what about the marsh, what about us sticking our own household crap into the water what about the unsustainable "Thanet Earth" supply demands?
It only takes one failure to hurt our water and one big enough failure to take it away. We can therefore afford no failures to protect our water.
We each need to protect our water from our own actions. Keep reading to find out why this might never happen.
It is easy to point to China Gateway and worry about what it might do even though it does not intend to. It is almost as easy to worry that the airport might also harm our water through an accident or other unforeseen event. Yet it is harder to complain about excessive use of that same water when our bellies are filled with cheap food.
It is harder still to make a change when the person that has to change is ourselves.
As humans we don't want to worry about how to get rid of this bottle of household chemical or that waste product so we pour it down the sink and forget about it. But that liquid is going to end up in the same pot that your cup of tea and your children's beaker of blackcurrant drink drew it's water from.
Even so the human desire to not think about things like that leads us to do the most insanely stupid things. "Surely this once would not hurt" we say and yet there are 125,000 people or more in Thanet saying that and tipping things into the water supply.
Drip, drip, drip... slowly but surely we are killing ourselves because our contribution is "just a drip".
We let the accountants and big media sooth us with claims that people in Thanet earn lots of money and that it's all right and the building is not on fire (please ignore the smoke and screaming).
However in order to fight to protect our water from big problems we must face the fact that we are doing so hypocritically if we do not first address the issues that are easy for us to reach out and touch - our own homes, our own lives.
Change starts at home.
Only recently I saw a headline in the local advertising supported (free) newspaper that more or less said that most of the contaminants in our drinking water came from us.
Each of us flushing a bit of this and a bit of that down the sink has added up, it seems, to more toxic rubbish in our drinking water than the efforts of a number of well known industrial groups.
The truth is we are all on thin ice and so perhaps it is time to widen our sights a little and address the entire picture. For example no one locally has commented on the fact that the industrial complex of "Thanet Earth" not only uses more water than it can source from local reserves but will need to drain local marshland for further water too. read more.
Yes those big complexes sat on our water supply could dump a heavy load into our water and ruin it for generations to come - that worries me. However, what also worries me is that we might slowly ruin it for generations to come anyway.
What I'd like to know from the Save Thanet Water Supply supporters is what about the marsh, what about us sticking our own household crap into the water what about the unsustainable "Thanet Earth" supply demands?
It only takes one failure to hurt our water and one big enough failure to take it away. We can therefore afford no failures to protect our water.
We each need to protect our water from our own actions. Keep reading to find out why this might never happen.
It is easy to point to China Gateway and worry about what it might do even though it does not intend to. It is almost as easy to worry that the airport might also harm our water through an accident or other unforeseen event. Yet it is harder to complain about excessive use of that same water when our bellies are filled with cheap food.
It is harder still to make a change when the person that has to change is ourselves.
As humans we don't want to worry about how to get rid of this bottle of household chemical or that waste product so we pour it down the sink and forget about it. But that liquid is going to end up in the same pot that your cup of tea and your children's beaker of blackcurrant drink drew it's water from.
Even so the human desire to not think about things like that leads us to do the most insanely stupid things. "Surely this once would not hurt" we say and yet there are 125,000 people or more in Thanet saying that and tipping things into the water supply.
Drip, drip, drip... slowly but surely we are killing ourselves because our contribution is "just a drip".
We let the accountants and big media sooth us with claims that people in Thanet earn lots of money and that it's all right and the building is not on fire (please ignore the smoke and screaming).
However in order to fight to protect our water from big problems we must face the fact that we are doing so hypocritically if we do not first address the issues that are easy for us to reach out and touch - our own homes, our own lives.
Change starts at home.
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Michael Child wrote this comment:
The point it misses completely is the 290,700 m³ per year collected by the roofs would have fallen on the ground soaked in and replenished the underground sources before the greenhouses were built, so the shortfall is really 493,968 m³ per year.