Heroes Not Zombies

In the natural spring across the road from my house the water is crystal clear. During the summer drought the level dropped so it wasn’t pouring into the old Roman aqueduct for a while, but mostly it’s high enough to spill over the edge all the time.

There are plants which grow under the water in the pool. All year long. Sometimes they reach the surface and spread across it, but mostly they seem content to survive and thrive below. You can see them so clearly.

As I was contemplating this scene I thought of the old saying that fish are not aware of the medium they are swimming in. I must say I don’t know if that’s true. They may be acutely aware of it, able to detect all kinds of differences within it which we can’t see. Just because we can’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s either not there, or it’s irrelevant.

A big study of drinking water quality in France was reported this week and it showed that over half the samples, taken from all round the country, revealed traces of a dangerous fungicide, one which was banned a few years ago, showing us how long these chemical pollutants can hang around. In fact, several chemicals are called “forever chemicals” because they never seem to disappear. The study also revealed around 157 different pesticides in the water. Truly, we have dumped, and continue to dump, an awful lot of potentially harmful stuff into our water.

But then we do the same with the air, and with the soil.

How aware are we of these pollutants? Not very. We don’t look for them very much. How aware are we of the effects they might have in our health and the health of our loved ones? Not very. We don’t really know. Typically we know many of these chemicals are toxic when taken in large amounts but we are really not good at the lire joined up thinking kind of research – we find it harder to show cause and effect when substances are around in lower levels over longer periods, and we are very, very bad at discovering the effects of multiple substances present concurrently – the so called “cocktail effect”.

Maybe as technology and knowledge increase we’ll learn to solve those problems and demonstrate the real world effects of the complex chemical cocktails which are present in all our water, all our air, and all our soil.

Meanwhile, maybe it’s a good idea to try a bit harder to prevent all kinds of pollution in the first place. Like the water in the “source”, that seems clear to me.