Back to the Well

The poet-philosophers who compiled the book of Ecclesiastes had it right, at least for their time:

One generation passeth away,

and another generation cometh:

but the earth abideth always . . .

yet the sea is not full . . .

Alas, it is no longer true. The earth abideth okay so far, but not all rivers runneth any longer to the sea, and of those that do, a depressing number runneth a mighty load of crap into the sea. And unless we are very careful, the sea will indeed become full, and our species will be obliged to maketh our way to high ground to flee the rising waters that we ourselves have caused.

Water isn’t as simple as it used to be.

It’s easy to think there is an immense amount of water in the rivers and lakes of our planet. We look at any one of the Great Lakes and we can’t see the other shore. Lake Baikal is more than a kilometre and a half deep. The outflow from the Congo is so strong and so steady that you can dip a bucket into the ocean a hundred kilometres off shore and drink fresh water (the “plume” has been known to stretch eight hundred kilometres out to sea). We read that the Amazon basin accounts for a quarter of planetary runoff all by itself. Many of the numbers are familiar: Russia’s Baikal alone accounts for one-quarter of all the world’s lake-held fresh water (twenty-three thousand cubic kilometres). Africa’s Lake Tanganyika is second in volume (nineteen thousand cubic kilometres), and Lake Superior, on the US-Canadian border, is third at twelve thousand cubic kilometres. The North American Great Lakes, the world’s largest lake system, account for 27 percent of global lake volumes.

We “know” there’s a lot of water in these lakes and rivers because, unlike the aquifers that provide our groundwater, we can see them. We drink them, irrigate with them, play on and in them, drown in them in flood times, fret about them in dry ones, and use them, too often, as natural sewers. They act as drainage channels, provide habitat and nourishment to wildlife, provide transportation routes, and produce electrical energy. But the freshwater lakes and rivers from which we draw so much nourishment contain only about ninety thousand cubic kilometres of water in aggregate, a trivial 0.36 percent of the world’s total supply of fresh water that is itself less than 3 percent of global water supplies. The rest, as we saw in the previous chapter, is water underground.

Rivers and lakes are easily used up, easily polluted. As we are now seeing a little more clearly, to our sorrow.

No exhaustive catalogue of rivers exists. It would be a pointless exercise: What is a river? A creek, a brook, a stream? Is a swamp or a bog a slow-moving river? I was once walking along a dry “riverbed” with a film crew in Namibia and we had to skip out of the way as a wall of water rounded a bend half a kilometre ahead of us — it had rained somewhere a long way away “upstream,” though the skies were cloudless where we were filming. Well, the “wall” was only a foot or so deep, but suddenly there was a river where none had been a few minutes before. It was a standing joke where I grew up, in the arid interior of South Africa, that for eleven months of the year you could jump into a river and have to dust yourself off. Is a flood a temporary river?

Many geography texts insist that there are 165 rivers in the world classified as “major,” but definitions are elusive and the number remains disputed. There are at least a quarter of a million rivers in Canada, many more if you count the unnamed links between adjacent lakes. The United States has nearly as many, Russia twice as many. Some facts are commonplace and in every grade-school atlas: the Nile is the longest river in the world (a shade longer than the Mississippi, which is second); the Amazon has the greatest annual flow (the Ganges is next, followed by the Congo). Of the twenty-five largest rivers of the world, three are in Africa, four are in South America, eleven are in Asia (if you count Siberia), five are in North America, and two are in Europe.1

A credible estimate is that there are 117 million lakes greater in area than two thousand square metres.2 They take up almost 4 percent of the earth’s land area not covered by ice and are overwhelmingly concentrated in northern regions, where glaciation gouged countless holes in the earth’s crust.

The twenty-eight largest account for 85 percent of the volume of all lakes worldwide. I have already mentioned Baikal, Tanganyika, and Superior; rounding out the top ten are Malawi-Nyasa, Vostok (in Antarctica), Michigan, Huron, Victoria, Great Bear Lake (in Canada’s Northwest Territories) and Issyk-Kul (in Kyrgyzstan). The largest lakes in Europe are in Russia (Ladoga and Onega), and in South America (Maracaibo, Titicaca, Poopó, and Buenos Aires). All the Middle Eastern lakes of consequence — the Van, the Tuz, and the Beyşehir — are in Turkey. The Dead Sea, the largest lake in the Levant, is more saline than the oceans; Lake Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee) is not far behind in volume. Australia has no lakes to speak of.

Rivers and lakes intersect in complex ways. One small example is the Mekong River basin, in Southeast Asia. From mid-May to mid-October, the rainy season, the flow of the Mekong itself becomes so large that the delta can’t support the volume. The water then backs up the Tonle Sap River to fill Tonle Sap Lake and its associated flood plain. This infusion has historically created one of the most productive fisheries in the world — or did so until recently. The Mekong, like so many other rivers, is in trouble.

Many rivers and lakes are in trouble either from overuse or from toxins that we have dumped into them. China’s Yellow River is perhaps the starkest cautionary tale. The Yellow is “the cradle of Chinese civilization,” in the comforting cliché of the dreamier propagandists, and what has happened to the Yellow can be taken as a metaphor for what is happening to rivers globally.

The Yellow is also known as the Huang He, the Hwang Ho, the Mother River of China, and sometimes just as “the river,” its central reaches nourishing the plains that were, indeed, the locus of the birth of Chinese civilization. It is the second longest river in China after the Yangtze; it rises in the Bayankala mountains in Qinghai Province in the far west, flows through nine provinces, and empties into the Bohai Sea, 5,463 kilometres from its source — its basin covers almost three-quarters of a million square kilometres. The water of the river is indeed yellow because it contains a vast amount of silt (if you scoop up a bucketful, as much as 60 percent of the contents by weight is fine-grained yellow silt). The silt is picked up by the rapidly flowing waters pouring through deep canyons carved into North China’s great Loess Plateau.

The Yellow has other names too, among them China’s Sorrow, for the Huang He floods often, and it floods massively. The loess silt in the river, 1.6 billion tonnes of new sticky yellow mud every year, is one reason it has become so deadly. Over the years it has deposited thick layers of silt along the riverbed as it flows through central China’s plains, with the curious effect of raising the riverbed itself, often to levels higher than the surrounding flat plains. Thousands of kilometres of dikes have been built over the centuries to contain the river, but in sharp floods they often give way (or are overtopped), with catastrophic results. The flatness of the plains means that every flood covers hundreds or thousands of square kilometres of heavily populated land. The history books have counted 1,593 episodes of flooding in the last four thousand years. The worst flood of all killed four million people in one miserable episode, still one of the greatest natural disasters in human history. That was less than a hundred years ago.

Flooding is not so much a problem now. Not much more than a quarter century ago, as Lester Brown, then head of the Worldwatch Institute, wrote:

With more and more of its water being pumped out for the country’s multiplying needs, the Yellow River began to falter. In 1972, the water level fell so low that for the first time in China’s long history it dried up before reaching the sea. It failed on 15 days that year, and intermittently over the next decade or so. Since 1985, it has run dry each year, with the dry period becoming progressively longer. In 1996, it was dry for 133 days. In 1997, a year exacerbated by drought, it failed to reach the sea for 226 days. For long stretches, it did not even reach Shandong Province, the last province it flows through en route to the sea. Shandong, the source of one-fifth of China’s corn and one-seventh of its wheat, depends on the Yellow River for half of its irrigation water.3

The water that is left is in parlous condition, much of it unfit even for irrigation, much less for drinking. The Yellow estuary is a cesspool, and nearby offshore waters are not much better.

Although it is perhaps the most visible manifestation of water troubles in China, the drying-up of the Yellow River is only one of many such signs. Satellite photographs show hundreds of lakes disappearing and local streams going dry in recent years as aquifers diminish and springs cease to flow. As water tables have fallen, millions of Chinese farmers are finding their wells pumped dry. In the 1950s, the country had fifty thousand rivers. True enough, many of them were small, with catchment areas not much more than one hundred square kilometres. Even so, by 2010, the number was down to twenty-three thousand — the Chinese had “lost” twenty-seven thousand rivers.

Even those not lost were suffering. Four-fifths of the remaining waterways are so polluted they no longer support any fish — or at least not any fish you would want to eat. Even in the Yangtze, the only river in China greater than the Yellow, the fish catch has declined by more than half just since the 1960s. The government itself has indicated that fully 70 percent of all waterways had been fouled to the point of being unsafe.

By China’s own estimate, 280 million Chinese are obliged to drink unsafe water. Fully a quarter of municipal water-treatment plants in the country do not come anywhere close to complying with quality-control standards. Even more dismally, every year some 190 million people in China fall ill (and 60,000 die) from diseases, such as liver and gastric cancers, caused by water pollution.4

If only China were unique, but it is not. Everywhere you look, rivers are in similar trouble. Four out of five humans now live in areas where river waters are highly threatened by pollution, mostly in Asia but also in Africa and Latin America. Throughout Asia, rivers routinely carry three times more fecal coliform bacteria than is deemed safe, and demand for clean water far outstrips supply. As a piece in the Journal of Health, Population and Nutrition put it in 2008, “So common is water contaminated with human feces throughout South Asia that it is accepted as the norm . . . available drinking water [contains] organisms whose ecological niche is the human intestine. . . . Those who can afford it buy bottled water (of dubious quality), and the majority are left to drink the available contaminated water.”5 The Mekong River that supplies drinking water, farming irrigation, industrial water, the fishery, and wastewater disposal for half a dozen countries has seen its quality deteriorating for decades. A 2003 report by Wijarn Simachaya for the Mekong River Commission Secretariat declared that “economic development of the basin has resulted in elevated levels of pollution from both point and non-point sources. Degradation of water quality in parts of the basin has evolved gradually over time until eventually becoming apparent and measurable.” Simachaya’s charts showed dangerous lev els of parasitic organisms and bacteria, chemical and industrial pollutants, and farm waste.6

In Latin America as late as 2010, only a few percentage points of human waste was being treated in any way instead being dumped on the land (and therefore into the water tables) or into waterways — as we saw with São Paulo. Even the hitherto pristine waters of Lake Titicaca are being threatened by sewage and industrial waste, much of it from the poor adjunct to La Paz called El Alto. The waters off Rio de Janeiro became briefly notorious in 2014 when sailors practising for the 2016 Olympics were advised not to fall overboard lest they become ill from the water or bump into dead dogs. And the Tietê River than runs through São Paulo and Recife actually got worse from 2000 to 2010, despite a $400 million capital infusion from the World Bank and the federal savings bank.

In Africa, all the major rivers have seen cataclysmic drops in fishing catches. The rapid growth of urban populations has far outstripped the capacity to deal with human waste, polluting what meagre water sources there were. This leads to using polluted water for irrigation, and to widespread outbreaks of cholera, dysentery, and other water-vector diseases. About half of Africa’s countries cannot supply clean water to at least half of their populations.

In terms of the number of people it kills, “dirty” water is the world’s most serious pollution problem.

North America and Europe

Mark Mattson, an environmental lawyer and Riverkeeper, pointed out to a small audience in Vancouver in 2014 that “we don’t clean up the rivers or beaches anymore — we just post No Swimming notices, as though that were normal, and think nothing of it.” True enough, every summer there are Do Not Drink and Do Not Swim notices in thousands of waterways across North America — and there is virtually no indignation. We don’t demand that the polluters clean up what they have wrought. We don’t seem to demand anything very much.

A small example of how this works in practice is a gold-mine tailings pond breach in a pristine corner of British Columbia in August 2014. Hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of “water” containing high concentrations of arsenic, lead, and mercury decanted into the Cariboo District waterways, soon making its way down to the Fraser River, a major arterial river known for its salmon runs. The president of the mining company, Brian Kynoch, was distraught. “A gut-wrenching experience,” he called it. But he was also mightily surprised. “If you asked me two weeks ago if that could happen, I would have said it couldn’t happen,” he said at a media update in a community hall in Likely, BC. “I know that for our company, it’s going to take a long time to earn the community’s trust back.”7 The provincial government’s response, at least at first, was eerily similar: “We’ll make sure it does not happen again.” This was similar to the response that greeted the leak from a ruptured storage tank outside Charleston, West Virginia, that contaminated the water for some three hundred thousand residents. The cause there: a chemical used in the processing of coal. The result: Do Not Drink and Do Not Bathe warnings. The consequence? Oh, sorry, we won’t do it again.

True, a few months after the Mount Polley Mine spill, the BC government astonished activists by inviting public opinions on what had caused the spill: “There are a lot of opinions flying around in the public domain, perhaps even in the private domain, and we thought to be properly diligent that we should invite anyone who cares to, to formalize those views and get us to think about them,” said Norbert Morgenstern, an engineering professor emeritus at the University of Alberta and chairman of an investigating panel. Even so, the solicited opinions were restricted to the “mechanism” of dam failure at the tailings storage facility, with a view to heading off future such failures.8 No one was asked to comment on the why of the spill, or on whether the tailings pond should have been there in the first place.

If you’re strolling along a stream bank now almost anywhere in the developed world, and most especially near habitation, would you dip your hand into the water and take a drink? Of course not. You would have no idea what the water contained, or who put it there. It could be anything, or anyone. The presumption that the water is clean, and that the people who use it would keep it that way, long ago began to seem quaintly old-fashioned. Even in Nova Scotia, the bucolic small province where I now live, a small place that is underpopulated and under-industrialized, covered mostly by trees — even here, people no longer drink water from rivers and lakes. “Surface water should never be used for drinking,” the director of environmental health with the provincial Health and Wellness Department told the media in August 2014. Gary O’Toole was commenting on a high fecal coliform count in local rivers. “Those results are not unexpected,” he said. “Our standard advice is that people should never drink water taken directly from a lake or river.”9 Of course, those results might be because of excessive bear shit in the water. But it is much more likely that family farms are the culprit. Not massive agribusinesses, either — just little farmers, all doing their best.

The people who drink bottled water are generally looked at askance by environmentalists, and for good reason: the millions of tonnes of plastic those bottles are made of are a ghastly presence in the environment. But the critics have forgotten at least one of the reasons people carry bottled water: they don’t trust the water supplied to them.

Poisonous algae are found in rivers and lakes all across North America, fed by nitrate and phosphorous runoff from farm fertilizers, porous municipal sewage systems, and home septic “tanks” often made from rusting old oil barrels. Just this sort of accumulated runoff down the Mississippi River has caused a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico of more than twenty-thousand square kilometres. Almost every other estuary on the continent — Chesapeake Bay, Sacramento Bay, the Columbia River estuary, the St. Lawrence, and many more — suffers from the same effect. Poignantly, the Amish farmers of Pennsylvania, famed for their resolute rejection of modernity in all its forms, have been fingered as a major villain in the pollution of Chesapeake Bay, runoff from uncontained manure piles the given reason.

Decades after the Clean Water Act, the American water situation looks like this:

• Rivers and streams: of the 28 percent, or 1,632,721 kilometres the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assessed, 837,876 kilometres were found impaired, and 11,756 threatened. That is slightly more than half that were still polluted.

• Lakes and reservoirs: with 43 percent assessed, 4,885,001 hectares were found impaired, of a total 7,265,227, or 67 percent still polluted.

• Bays and estuaries: of the 37 percent assessed, 61,157 square kilometres out of the 85,449 were polluted, or 71 percent.

• Coastal shoreline: of the small 1.4 percent assessed, 11,734 kilometres out of 13,591 were polluted, or 86 percent.

• Ocean and near ocean water: only 3.1 percent was assessed, and 2,743 out of 4,343 square kilometres were polluted, or 63 percent.

• Wetlands: only 1 percent was assessed, and of those 450,187 hectares, 217,920 were polluted, or 48 percent.

• Great Lakes shorelines: a good percentage was assessed (85.2 percent), and 7,005 kilometres out of the 7,131 were polluted, or 98 percent — that is, the EPA found only 126 kilometres of the American Great Lakes shoreline “good.”

• Great Lakes open water: 88.1 percent was assessed, and 137,969 square kilometres out of 138,129 were polluted, or as close to 100 percent as makes no difference.

This actually counts as progress — almost half the country’s rivers and streams are in reasonably good health, and about a third of its lakes and reservoirs. True, the coasts didn’t fare so well (Georgia to Massachusetts the worst, then San Francisco Bay and the Pacific from Los Angeles to Mexico), and the state of the Great Lakes is still abysmal, though it is improving. The worst polluted places are still Lake Erie, southern Lake Huron, Georgian Bay, Lake Ontario, and the lower St. Lawrence estuary.

In a way, though, the numbers may be better than they look. Chemical and industrial pollution is much lower than before. Much of the current pollution stems not from factories, at least not so much in the United States, but from the actions of ordinary consumers, and from farming. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, there are now so many people that ordinary human actions are causing major pollution problems (the best-known “ordinary human action” is a curiosity: suntan oil from millions of bathers is now a serious pollutant on Mediterranean beaches).

Canada, with its small population and vast water resources, should have better water health than the United States, and it does, but not to the degree expected. The Commission for Environmental Cooperation, a trilateral monitoring group, has rated only 44 percent of southern Canada’s fresh water as excellent or good. The standard was considered as fair at 33 percent of sites monitored, and marginal or poor at 23 percent of them. In Canada, phosphorous remains an issue — phosphorous levels exceed guidelines at more than half the sites monitored.

Twenty years ago, it was a national disgrace that two major Canadian cities, provincial capitals on both coasts, had no sewage treatment facilities at all but simply dumped the raw effluent into the oceans. Since then, Halifax in Nova Scotia has built an expensive treatment plant, which mostly works. Victoria, British Columbia’s capital, however, still pumps somewhere between 82 million litres and 130 million litres of sewage daily into the Juan de Fuca Strait. The stuff is pushed along two underwater pipes by twin thousand-horsepower pumps, and emerges into the ocean a kilometre offshore, sixty metres below the surface.

Apologists say the ocean acts as a natural toilet that disperses waste with minimal environmental impact. An indignant website called Responsible Sewage Treatment Victoria, whose purpose is to argue against building an expensive treatment facility, points out that the city’s sewage is screened before it emerges into the ocean, “so there are no floaties,” as though that makes everything hunky-dory. In the 2012 federal by-election in the Victoria riding, all the candidates except the winning New Democratic Party member opposed building a treatment plant, even the Greens (they were for treating the nasty stuff, just not in the way the project’s proponents were suggesting). The only person for it, it seems, is the governor of Washington, where some of those non-floaties end up, who sent an irritable letter early in 2014 to the province’s premier, pointing out that “it is now more than 20 years since your province agreed to implement wastewater treatment in greater Victoria, and yet today Victoria still lacks any treatment beyond screening. Delaying this work until 2020 is not acceptable.”10

In Canada, in some ways, things are getting worse. For example, for Mark Mattson, the environmental lawyer, a raft of environmental protection laws enacted in the last decade of the twentieth century allowed him to become the first litigator in Canada to successfully prosecute a polluter, only to have every one of those laws gutted by the first prime minister of the twenty-first, Stephen Harper.

Mexico’s water can sometimes be clean, but not very often. Even the ecotourism resorts on the Pacific coast can do little to avoid the toxins pouring down on them from rivers flowing from the interior. Mexico City’s water can emerge from residential taps in a variety of sometimes strangely attractive colours, but its effects on gastrointestinal tracts is not so pretty. As the Guardian’s Kurt Hollander once put it, “Although the excrement that I and millions of others dump each day into toilets throughout Mexico City takes an amazing voyage beneath the city streets, through 6,000 miles [9,655 kilometres] of pipes, 68 pump stations and across almost 100 miles [160 kilometres] of canals, tunnels, dikes and artificial lakes, it has an uncanny knack of finding its way back to me.”11 The Commission for Environmental Cooperation has found fecal coliform bacteria, fed by human or animal waste, in more than half of the drinking water supplied to Mexicans. And, “as in the rest of North America, levels of nitrogen and phosphorus in surface water are also a problem for Mexico. Elevated levels of pollutants containing these elements were detected at a majority of monitored sites.”

Europe has historically not been much better. Since the Industrial Revolution, Europe has treated its waterways as convenient conduits of waste to the sea, destroying in the process the biodiversity of thousands of kilometres of rivers and polluting coastal waters, never mind what it has done to the humans obliged to drink the water along the way. In the days of the Industrial Revolution, just dumping stuff into waterways seemed sensible enough — Europe has several million kilometres of flowing water and more than a million lakes and, like the oceans, they seemed inexhaustible. As a result, stinking rivers, dying fish, and polluted lakes were commonplace.

But in the last twenty years or so, sewage and industrial wastes have been sharply reduced across the continent, resulting in what the EU calls a “measureable improvement in water quality.” Phosphorous levels and organic wastes have been reduced at source, and the amount of discharge into the oceans has dropped. Heavy metals and other toxins are still present, but at levels now harder to detect.

European agriculture, however, remains unreconstructed and to a degree recalcitrant, an arrogance due at least in part to the high esteem in which it has been generally held in Europe, and to the high levels of subsidy to which it has been accustomed. In essence, farming has been a coddled darling, and it has behaved uncaringly because of it. The levels of nitrates from farming runoff have actually increased in the last decade, as an EU report asserted in 2013: “Nitrate pollution, particularly from fertilizers used in agriculture, has remained constant and high. Nitrate concentrations in rivers remain highest in those western European countries where agriculture is most intensive.”12 At the turn of the twentieth century, more than eight hundred pesticides of varying virulence were licensed for use in the EU. That number has been dropping, and the tonnage spread has diminished too, but mostly because newer pesticides are more aggressive than older ones. The picturesque but unhelpful practice of “blowing” liquid manure onto winter snow cover is still prevalent, leaching bacteria into the waterways.

Despite efforts to clean up industrial sites, twelve European countries have reported heavy-metal contamination of groundwater because of mining dumps and industrial discharges.

In some ways, you’d expect lakes to be in better shape than rivers. Unlike rivers, they don’t just pass through on their way somewhere else, so if the water levels change, or the pollution quotient increases, it would be obvious to the users, and they would be impelled to do something about it.

Unless they felt powerless to do so. Or didn’t feel like it.

Most of the world’s major lakes are in an okay condition, but there are worrying signs. Baikal, the deepest lake on the planet at 1.7 kilometres, is beginning to suffer surface pollution from surrounding pulp mills, as well as “cultural eutrophication,” the technical term for human abuse. (Still the native seal population has been making a comeback, thanks largely to Living Lakes, an NGO operated out of Lake Constance in Germany.) But even a lake this large is not immune to input pressures. Lake Hovsgol in Mongolia is the headwater for Baikal, and its supply (and quality) is now under substantial pressure from resorts and hotels, among other things. Lake Tanganyika is showing even more distressing signs of eutrophication — there are too many people dumping too much sewage sludge into water that seemed limitless but wasn’t. Worldwide, the trend is the same. Almost twenty years ago, UNEP, the UN Environment Programme, did a survey on eutrophication and found that 54 percent of lakes in Asia were eutrophic, 53 percent in Europe, 48 percent in North America, 41 percent in South America, and 28 percent in Africa. There is little reason to suggest that things have improved since then.13

A long-running study by researchers at the Experimental Lakes Area in Ontario has found something depressing: the notion that eutrophication can be reduced by controlling the amount of nitrogen entering lakes, a policy on which the EU and others are spending many millions of dollars, may actually be making things worse rather than better. The study was done on a small lake, Lake 227, in the Precambrian Shield area of Ontario. The scientists, led by David Schindler of the University of Alberta, fertilized the lake for thirty-seven years with constant annual inputs of phosphorous and decreasing inputs of nitrogen to test the theory that controlling nitrogen was sufficient to control eutrophication. For the final sixteen years, the lake was fertilized with phosphorous alone. The lake, Schindler reported, remained stubbornly highly eutrophic: “The impact on human society is immense, as cultural eutrophication severely reduces water quality, which not only kills and contaminates fish, shellfish and other animals, but also can become a health-related problem in humans once it begins to interfere with drinking water treatment.”14

In an all-too-common act of scientific vandalism, the increasingly anti-science national government of Stephen Harper shut the Experimental Lakes Area facility down, with no warning and no attempt to salvage its data, possibly because Schindler has long been an opponent of some of Harper’s cherished projects, including the Alberta tar sands. The facility was rescued only through a last-minute grant from the Ontario government.

The American Great Lakes, as mentioned before, are far from pristine. But they are improving in many places. However, in the summer of 2014, the residents of the Ohio city of Toledo were told not to drink their water — “sludgy algae” the given reason, its cause said to be “unknown.” Toledo is on the shores of Lake Erie, the smallest, shallowest (average depth only eighteen metres), and most intensively used of the Great Lakes. It has been declared dead once before, in the 1960s, and was revived through the US’s Clean Water Act. More recently, Lake Erie has been dying again because of increased population pressures and the over-application of much more potent phosphorous-based fertilizers. The mechanism is not at all unknown, as the residents of Toledo had been told. On the contrary, it is well understood: the phosphorous doesn’t just fertilize farm fields; it also “feeds a poisonous algae whose toxin, called microcystin, causes diarrhea, vomiting and liver-function problems, and readily kills dogs and other small animals that drink contaminated water. Toledo was unlucky: A small bloom of toxic algae happened to form directly over the city’s water-intake pipe in Lake Erie, miles offshore.”15

All the other Great Lakes are cleaner than they were thirty years ago, when beluga whales tagged in the upper St. Lawrence River met the classic definition of toxic waste. This is largely because of the International Joint Commission (IJC), the bilateral body tasked by Canada and the United States with managing the lakes’ ecosystem. Still, in 2002, fish caught on the Great Lakes contained many neurotoxins, including PCBs and methylmercury, and many studies have indicated that persons consuming such fish were vulnerable to a shopping-list of negative side effects. The problem is that scientists have only a hazy notion of what chemicals these fish actually contain. Researchers for the IJC have only been able to identify about a third of them: “Several halogenated compounds as well as antibiotic and other pharmaceutical residues in Great Lakes samples remain unidentified. The presence of brominated diphenyl ethers, chlorinated paraffin and napthalenes and PCB metabolites in the tissue of a variety of species ranging from snapping turtles and herring gulls to polar bears and humans, remains a mystery.” Worse, because they can’t identify the chemicals themselves, there is no way to guess at what chemical mixtures might do to animal tissue. The chemical soup ingested by fish, and thus by humans, has unknown properties: “Some of these chemicals interact with each other, but how mixtures affect the biota remains unknown.”

In 2010, an IJC report said that PCB concentrations in Great Lakes water were substantially down, but were still a hundred times higher than they should be.16

Quality of the water is not the only issue: the sheer volume of water, or the lack of it, is another. The Great Lakes may house a quarter of the world’s lake-held fresh water, but, as pointed out earlier, they are a long way from delivering even a fraction of the world’s renewable water. Even a small drop in inflow causes the water levels to drop. In fact, in June 2013, mean levels dropped to the lowest levels recorded since measurements began in 1918 — annoying cottagers and recreational boaters, but much more alarming for the $3- billion-a-year Great Lakes–St. Lawrence Seaway shipping industry. Prolonged drought was blamed.

By November, just a few months later, the Army Corps of Engineers was reporting a different story: water levels had recovered substantially, because of greater than normal winter snows and heavy spring rains. They weren’t back to “normal” (however that is measured), but they did rise fifty centimetres or so.

There is also, happily, good news about rivers.

If all you know of the Hudson River is the stretch that skirts New York City, you will know it mostly as an unlovely thing, rank-smelling, ripe with flotsam, and in heavy rainfalls the recipient of millions of cubic metres of stormwater mixed with “partly treated” sewage. To get the flavour of that particular stretch of river, you could do worse than read a queasy-making piece by Lindsay Crouse of the New York Times, about triathletes paddling and then swimming down the river, collecting along the way what the athletes call the Hudson Mustache, “the thick band of silty debris that clings to a swimmer’s upper lip.” Crouse quotes one of the participants, who likened the first wave of swimmers to emerge from the river to coal miners, their faces obscured by grime, the only “clean” skin where the goggles had been.17

Well, okay, that doesn’t sound like good news, and it isn’t. But upriver, things are different.

The Hudson was long considered the region’s sewer, but in the 1960s the fishermen along the river began to fight back. At the same time, a group of citizen activists launched an effort to save Storm King Mountain from the clutches of the electrical utility, Consolidated Edison, that wanted to build a hydro plant across one of the most scenic stretches of the river. This resulted in the first true test of the statutes recently passed by US Congress, the most important of which was the National Environmental Policy Act. The activists, under the umbrella of the Scenic Hudson Preservation Coalition, launched a lawsuit against the utility in 1962. It dragged on until 1979, when Con Ed finally capitulated.

Here’s how the Riverkeeper website describes what has happened since:

Three decades later, the Hudson has once again regained its status as the region’s gem. Anglers, boaters and bathers flock to its waters to experience the wonders of this great river. By and large, industries and municipalities have ceased their polluting ways and have developed a respect for the resource. However, sustained vigilance is needed to ensure that the great gains in water quality are not reversed. Many river segments, particularly in urban communities and areas of sprawl growth, remain threatened. And with government enforcement of environmental laws spiralling downward at the state and federal level, Riverkeeper is working overtime to bring violators to justice.

While infinitely better, the cleanup is not yet finished. GE still has a nasty reservoir of PCBs to clean up; there is still what the Riverkeepers call the “toxic brew of sewage, coal tar, PCBs and heavy metals in the Gowanus Canal.”

It is true that the Hudson activists benefited from one resource few other such groups can claim: true star power in the person of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer who has been Riverkeeper’s driving force for more than two decades. Kennedy can sometimes hold opinions that border on the crank (he’s suspicious of vaccinations, for example), but the Kennedy name, and money, still effortlessly attract attention.

Elsewhere in the United States, the Love Canal has been cleaned up. The Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act in the United States have provided regulators with some teeth. A survey by the US Geological Survey in the summer of 2014 showed that restrictions on pesticide use have already had an effect — pesticide residues in American streams and rivers have dropped sharply.18

• The level of protection should be “high.” In this context, this means that countries are directed not to settle for minimum acceptable levels (those at which human health is probably not affected). “Water” here means all water resources and natural ecosystems.

• Actions should be governed by the precautionary principle. That is, policy should be based on recognized scientific knowledge but should leave a margin for error, and err on the side of caution where the basic science is not fully established or knowledge is incomplete.

• All states have a moral duty to prevent damage to the environment. This is called the prevention principle, which recognizes that it is more difficult and more expensive to treat pollution after it has been committed than it would be to prevent it at source.

• The polluter pays principle must be enforced. This principle is simple enough: those who produce wastewater or contaminate the environment are obliged to pay the full cost of remediation. The EU argues that invoking this principle prevents distortions in the marketplace by ensuring that external costs are included in production costs. It also acts as an incentive to prevent pollution at the source.

• Rectification should be at the source: wherever possible, pollution should be fixed where it is committed, rather than downstream.

The most famous river rectification effort to date has been with the Rhine, Europe’s most important waterway. Not very long ago, the Rhine was derided as “the sewer of Europe,” but it has been steadily cleaning itself up for several decades. There are now fish in the river, though you wouldn’t necessarily want to eat them, and in places it is even possible to swim without hazard. The Rhine is the poster child for awakening awareness of how rivers went wrong — but also for how they can be fixed.

The Rhine rises in the Reichenau municipality above Lake Constance in Switzerland and flows for 1,320 kilometres to the Wadden Sea in the Netherlands. Most of its course is through Germany, but its catchment area of 185,000 square kilometres takes in large swathes of Germany, France, Holland, Austria, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Belgium, and even Italy, and contains more than seventy million people.

By the 1980s, the Rhine was not really a river anymore, but an engineered shipping lane and a conduit for a multiplicity of poisons. Dutch law professor Hans Ulrich Jessurun d’Oliveira, usually known just as Ulli, has been involved in the cleanup effort since the late 1970s. “Everything was wrong with the river,” he has said. “It was considered dead. Nothing could live in it. Enormous industries were all based on its banks because of the possibilities it offered for getting rid of waste.” The biggest villains were a group of French potassium mines that poured hundreds of tonnes of waste salts into the river every day, killing the few fish that remained. A group of Dutch tulip growers, who found they could no longer use the Rhine’s water even for irrigation, formed the Clean Rhine Foundation and sued. Ulli was the group’s chairman. As he explained, “It was a French government-owned company, Les Mines de Potasse d’Alsace, and they dumped chlorides in the Rhine in such bulk — that was phenomenal. It was the biggest polluter — in terms of bulk — in the Rhine. And so we thought, this is a target we could use in order to open the eyes of the people [to see] that this is really a threat to Dutch society.”19 In 1988, after the case reached the Netherlands Supreme Court and the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, the mines were ordered to pay compensation — unspecified. But the dumping continued unabated.

It took a catastrophe to get the riparian countries to pay real attention. What followed is well known in European environmentalist lore.

In October 1986, a fire broke out in an electrical switching box in a riverside warehouse in Basel, Switzerland, nearly five hundred kilometres upstream from the place where the Sieg enters the Rhine. It was no one’s fault — a mechanical system had failed. But flammable material was stored nearby, and that was definitely someone’s fault — the owner’s, Sandoz, one of Switzerland’s largest chemical companies. Through a cascade of sloppiness and bad luck, more than thirty tonnes of poisons poured into the river following the fire, an evil brew of herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, dyes, heavy metals, and two tonnes of mercury. Yet even this ecological disaster, perversely, was leveraged into good news, perhaps because Chernobyl was still a recent and terrifying memory. The people and their politicians were frightened into action.

The Rhine cleanup, begun with little popular enthusiasm decades before, was galvanized. Riparian countries would, at last, do what must be done. As little as four years later, dozens of dams and other obstacles had been removed, wetlands had been restored wherever possible, and thousands of salmon fingerlings had been released. By the turn of the century, several viable populations of salmon were spawning in the Rhine, a fraction of what was there before. Not yet edible, but self-sustaining nonetheless.

“The rebirth of the Rhine . . . has to count as one of the great environmental success stories of the century,” said Angela Merkel, then Germany’s environment minister, with considerable hyperbole but some justification.

Pollution can, it is clear, be fixed. All it takes is political will. And money. And a determination to make the polluter pay.

Other rivers in Europe have shown similar improvements — Austria’s Upper Drau, the Órbigo of Spain, and the Danube (though the Danube actually went from terrible to pretty bad and is still only on its way to okay).

Amiable cooperation along the Danube dates back to the 1856 Treaty of Paris, which set up a body called the European Commission of the Danube, with representatives from all riparian countries. It was concerned neither with monitoring supply nor with pollution — modern problems about which the commissioners were entirely innocent. Its purpose was to make sure that navigation along the river was free to all, and it ran smoothly enough (with hiccups for the world wars) until 1948, when the Cold War arrived and, as the website for the Strategic Action Plan now delicately puts it, “new alliances resulted in a new management approach,” meaning that the East Bloc no longer wanted anything much to do with the West or any vessels emanating therefrom.

And there it rested until the mid-1980s, when alarms began to spread over the increasing degradation of the river. This had something to do with the work of a Russian researcher, Irina Zaretskaya, who was highly critical of the engineering works that had been perpetrated on the river, and even more critical of the quality of its water. Of the Danube’s re-engineering, she wrote: “These works [carelessly] changed cross sections, coast lines, slope, bottom and suspended sediment discharge, as well as water quality . . . The quantitative and qualitative depletion of water resources in individual regions of the basin has resulted in a critical situation, especially during dry periods. An increasing water resource deficit in the region can become a brake on the economic development of the countries.” As to the quality of the water, she found that dozens of cities and half a dozen countries allow huge amounts of “insufficiently purified storm runoff, industrial wastes, and agricultural pesticides to enter the river,” virtually unmonitored. And then the zinger: The Danube poured 80 million tonnes of contaminated sediments into the Black Sea every average water-flow year.20

With this prodding, in 1985, the eight riparians (Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria) signed the Declaration of the Danube Countries to Cooperate on Questions Concerning the Water Management of the Danube, fortunately for posterity renamed the Bucharest Declaration, that established a basin-wide monitoring network. This was followed by a meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital, in 1991, that set up the Environmental Programme for the Danube River Basin, which in turn was succeeded by the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River. This remains the main instrument for cooperation among the Danube countries. The point of all these proliferating commissions was to make sure all the riparians were on the same page and used the same monitoring metrics, so that they could thereafter discuss the issue of liability for cross-border pollution while defining rules for the protection of wetland habitats and developing guidelines for conserving areas of ecological importance or aesthetic value.

Since then, water quality has improved, though it remains true that the river’s water can only be used for drinking purposes on its highest reaches, between Dettingen and Leipheim in Germany and Mohács, in Hungary.

More interestingly, a private-public initiative called the Danube Water Program has been created, initially funded by the Austrian government and headquartered in Vienna, its declared aim being “to support the water supply and waste water sector in improving operational practice improvement within the Danube Region.” This is a joint venture between the members of the International Association of Water Supply Companies, a private consortium that manages mostly wastewater issues in the basin, and the World Bank. The program coordinator is Philip Weller, a Canadian engineer and hydrologist. In recent surveys, a few pollutants, like organochlorine pesticides and heavy metals, have actually been getting worse over the last decade, but a great many others have been satisfactorily reduced, such as ammonium and phosphate levels and biodegradable organic pollutants. Efforts are, as they say, ongoing.21

We’re polluting the oceans too, of course, as we have already discussed. It is true this has little to do with freshwater supply and management, except in the larger sense that the planet’s health depends to a scary degree on healthy oceans.

A report in Science in January 2015 examined human impact on ocean life and concluded that “although defaunation has been less severe in the oceans than on land, our effects on marine animals are increasing in pace and impact. Humans have caused few complete extinctions in the sea, but we are responsible for many ecological, commercial, and local extinctions. Despite our late start, humans have already powerfully changed virtually all major marine ecosystems.”

In an interview, the report’s lead scientist amplified the point. “We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” Douglas J. McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told the New York Times’s Carl Zimmer. “But there is still time to avert catastrophe. Compared with the continents, the oceans are mostly intact, still wild enough to bounce back to ecological health.”22

A 2006 UN Environment Programme report found that “overall, good progress has been made on reducing Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), with the exception of the Arctic. Oil discharges and spills to the seas have been reduced by 63 percent compared to the mid-1980s, and tanker accidents have gone down by 75 percent, partly as a result of the shift to double-hulled tankers.”23

It is also good news that both rivers and lakes have acquired their protectors.

One way of tracking the progress being made in managing the world’s rivers, for example, is through an Australian public-private initiative called the International RiverFoundation and its associated International Riversymposium. Launched by the Australian city of Brisbane and its energetic mayor, Jim Soorley, its declared aim is “to fund [through partnerships] and promote the sustainable restoration and management of river basins.” That partnerships notion raised a few eyebrows in the prickly world of water NGOs, especially when Coca-Cola was enlisted as a partial funder of the foundation’s inaugural European prize in 2013. However, the foundation remains unrepentant, pointing out that one of its declared aims is “to support the corporate social responsibility of companies by facilitating actions and projects in sustainable river basin management.”24

Be that as it may, since 1999, the foundation has awarded annual RiverPrizes to acknowledge cleanup and remedial efforts in river basins worldwide. Winners have included England’s Mersey Basin Campaign, Canada’s Grand River Conservation Authority, Australia’s Blackwood basin, Asia’s multi-jurisdictional Mekong River Commission (a winner despite the troubles it is facing), the Siuslaw River system in the United States, the Drôme River in France, and others. The International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River won the 2007 prize, the Willamette River in Oregon won in 2012, and Kenya’s Mara River Water Users Association won in 2013. The separate European RiverPrize, initiated in 2013, awarded the inaugural prize, predictably, to the Rhine.

Everyone agreed it was justified. It showed what can be done by clever management and political will.

There are dozens of NGOs and quasi-NGOs whose business is to monitor lake waters worldwide, to report on them, and to encourage remediation where necessary. In many cases, they partner with local governments. In just as many others, they operate without government participation or scrutiny.

One of the most interesting is Living Lakes International, originally a creature of the Global Nature Fund, a foundation based at Lake Constance in Germany. The network grew out of an informal alliance between four partners: the Lake Constance Foundation, the Mono Lake Committee in California, the Lake Biwa Environmental Research Institute in Japan, and the Wilderness Foundation, whose job is to take care of Lake St. Lucia in South Africa, an exquisite tropical jewel in northern KwaZulu-Natal Province, itself part of the iSimangaliso Wetland national park. These four were joined by the clumsily named International Lake Environment Committee Foundation (ILEC), a Japanese-based NGO that had produced a seminal report on how to manage lakes for sustainability.25

The initiative was subsequently adopted by the Chinese, who hosted an ILEC-sponsored World Lake Conference in Wuhan, responding to an alarmed call from the country’s own growing environmental movement. The topic at hand: “Eighty percent of [Chinese] lakes are suffering from heavy pollution through industrial and domestic sewage, algae blooms . . . excessive water withdrawal, and increasing development. . . . The state of the world lakes has deteriorated alarmingly during the last decades, and Chinese lakes are a sad example of it. . . . The 24,900 Chinese lakes cover an area of over 80,000 square kilometres, and with a few exceptions nearly all lakes are heavily polluted or on the verge of drying up.”

Chinese alarm about the country’s lakes kicked into gear around 2000, when the government stopped pretending that the problems were only malicious propaganda from “wreckers and saboteurs,” a nice phrase from early Leninist days. One of the first signs was the sudden attention paid to the attempt to save the failing Baiyangdian Lake system, the largest in North China, stretching across the flat plains that lie to the south of Beijing. In the 1950s, the lakes of Baiyangdian covered more than 800 square kilometres. By 2000, no more than 480 square kilometres remained under water, and a decade later, the number was down to 114 square kilometres.

As of 2014, the Living Lakes network had scooped up more than seventy partners representing fifty-three lakes worldwide, from all three North American countries, a handful of South American countries, a dozen or so in Europe, and others, from Kyrgyzstan to Estonia to Mongolia. The network is financed through fundraising efforts that include, encouragingly, grants from corporations like Daimler, Lufthansa, and Unilever. The representative lakes vary greatly in size, type, location, and health. They may be urban or remote. And they are chosen partly because they already have active local committees to monitor their health and partly through a more deliberate process of selecting lakes that contain, in the words of the Living Lakes people, “valuable ecosystems and hotspots of biodiversity, offering important ecosystem services such as drinking water, irrigation for agriculture, fish, recreation, buffer zones against floods and micro climates favorable for all kinds of cultivation as well as for the people living in the watershed.”

The UN has helped the cause. Two lakes, Baikal and Lake Ohrid on the Macedonian-Albanian border, have been declared World Heritage Sites (Ohrid because it is one of Europe’s deepest and oldest lakes — and most biodiverse, with more than two hundred endemic species). Five more lake basins have been declared biosphere reserves: Champlain in New York, the American Great Lakes, Issyk-Kul, Malawi-Nyasa, and Tonle Sap. These designations have helped publicize their advantages — and their problems.

It’s a start.