Paupers in the Midst of Plenty

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We feel certain that most MOTHER-readers are vitally aware of the threats to drinking-water supplies in the United States . . . after all, no single substance is as crucial to humankind's well-being as is plain old H 2 O. In his latest book, Nor Any Drop to Drink — from which we here bring you Chapter I, "Paupers in the Midst of Plenty" — environmentalist and author William Ashworth has stated the situation with shocking clarity. His analysis throws light on the very core of the problems . . . thereby helping us all to work toward their solutions.

Excerpted from Nor Any Drop to Drink by William Ashworth. Copyright © 1982 by William Ashworth. Reprinted by permission of Summit Books.

Life on earth is bound inextricably to the presence of water. It is the one unvarying necessity for all living things. There are life forms — the anaerobic bacteria — which can do very well without oxygen, and in fact are destroyed by exposure to it. There are creatures deep in caverns which can live without light; there are plants that can survive indefinitely without any food but sunlight and air. There is nothing that can live without water. Water is the basic material of protoplasm, the life stuff of the living cell. Stained red with iron and other necessary impurities, it becomes blood, to transport the body's nutrients and wash away its wastes. Sticky with sugar in the stem of plants, it becomes sap. We drink it; we grow our crops with it; we use it for a multitude of industrial purposes, for transport and for cooling, as a solvent and as a raw material, for food, for furniture, for books, for automobiles, for jewelry, for gasoline, and for everything else under the sun. "Noblest of the elements," sang the poet Pindar some twenty-five centuries ago, and for all the generations from that time down to this that truth has been constantly reaffirmed.

We Americans are the inheritors of a continent once richly endowed with this most precious of all natural resources. Early settlers found this land an Eden, laced with great rivers, bubbling with springs, bathed by sweet rains, and cupping some of the world's most magnificent freshwater lakes. William Bradford of the Plymouth Colony wrote of enjoying "the best water that ever we drank" out of the stream the Pilgrims had named, with marvelous creativity, Town Brook; settlers on the Connecticut were so enamored of its waters that they first named it the Fresh River, and the Dutch on Manhattan wrote home ecstatically of brooks "pleasant and proper for man and beast to drink, as well as agreeable to behold, affording cool and pleasant resting places." The Mohawk was "as clear as crystal and as fresh as milk." Farther west there was the Sangamon, with its "pure and transparent waters," and the Mississippi, "Father of Waters," and the Ohio, that "clear majestic tide" which the French knew as La Belle Riviere and whose "limpid waters" inspired the early traveler and historian Charles Fenno Hoffman to write effusively that the stream and its lush valley made "a moral picture whose colours are laid in the heart, never to be effaced."