For the past several months, the John Muir Chapter has been working hard to prioritize Wisconsin's water quality and quantity. From in person meetings to taking to social media for #WaterWednesday to promoting our petition to the EPA, the Chapter's water team has been busy!
But the members of the John Muir Chapter water team are absolutely not the only Wisconsinites concerned about Wisconsin's water. College students and recent graduates have been taking to the press to voice their concerns. Below are just two opinion pieces written by young adults in Wisconsin over the past few months. If you, too, are concerned about water in our state, the Chapter water team ecourages you to join Hartzheim and Bevers in submitting an op-ed or letter to the editor to your local paper.
A call for clean water
To the Editor:
If anyone has been paying attention to what is happening around the world and to our neighbors, we know water is one of our most valuable resources, when it's clean at least. Mother Nature has a magnificent way of cleaning our waters from pathogens and contaminants, however, the lifestyles we live today with fracking, agricultural runoff, waste dumping, tar sand spills and so much more, lead to a water that will no longer be drinkable, usable or even touchable. According to the World Wildlife Foundation, "water pollution is one of the most serious threats we face today." Already we have seen in recent decades impoverished areas that have been abandoned in the fight for clean water. These communities have had water that was able to light on fire. More than a decade ago, Kalamazoo, Mich., was devastated with a tar sands oil spill that remains in the river today as well as its toxicity to animals and humans. I can't imagine a future where myself, nonetheless my children would never have access to a world with clean water. Numerous authors (Margaret Atwood, John Brunner, etc.) warn us about a future like this. For this reason I am calling on my elected officials to give the DNR the authority and resources necessary to protect our water.
- Jordann Hartzheim, Minocqua
Water is life and not only for the well-off
To the Editor:
The tap water had me attached to a toilet for a few hours. Somehow I thought Texas would be OK because it’s America. We have clean water here. A 24-pack of plastic water bottles say differently. My aunt in Matamoros, Mexico, drinks only from bottles of water.
Clean water is a precious resource, but you wouldn’t know that based on how we treat it. In Wisconsin, we overuse high-capacity wells, fertilizer and manure, drawing down our groundwater threshold and growing our nitrates that make a number of wells undrinkable.
We also fail to update our piping which gives us lead poisoning on par with those of Flint, Mich.
The Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has lost its edge to protect our drinking water due to politics and lowered government funding. Without them, we are doomed to expensive privatized water. We already see this happening to many parts of the United States and Mexico.
Drought-stricken states ask to pump water from the Great Lakes because they no longer have enough. Water is considered an unalienable right and yet thousands of people are having their water turned off for their bills gone unpaid. Water seems to be for the wealthy.
According to Sierra Club Wisconsin Water Sentinels’ Facebook page, “The DNR’s pollutant regulators failed to follow their own policies regarding violators of water pollution laws more than 90 percent of the time.”
It is about time we hold the DNR accountable for the ongoing poisoning of our water.
Ours is a blue planet with lush life innumerable, and it’s time to start treating it like the key to life that it is. The ocean is here for us; it has been saving us already but its forgiveness is finite, and it will not ask permission to take back what is owed.
- Jazmine Bevers, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point senior
Want to take futher action? Sign our petition to the EPA!