لخّصلي

I live with my family in an almost 200-year-old house on the coast of Maine. Down a steep, wooded bank behind our house is
an Audubon sanctuary and two vulnerable ecosystems: a saltwater marsh surrounding a tidal salt river, and a freshwater stream
that travels through trees, over big granite rocks and finally through muddy banks covered with cattails and spartina grass to
meet the river. This wild land was the main reason my husband, Dan, and I bought the house: We wanted those trees, waters and
grasses to be our sons’ church.
Our water comes from a well under an old, grandmotherly spruce tree that presides over our front lawn.
But all is not as pristine as it initially appeared.
I have been preoccupied with water for several years now. From 2012 to 2016, I was researching a book on chemicals in
agriculture. That brought me, unsurprisingly, to water. Chemical pesticides, fertilizers and industrial chemicals — whole
cocktails of them — are making their way into sloughs, rivers, lakes, streams, aquifers, wells and even rain. These chemicals are
affecting wildlife and human health. And then, in 2014, Flint, Mich., was thrown into a water crisis. The more I learned, the
more I worried about my own family’s water quality and future water security.
Across the globe, the contamination of water through human carelessness, lack of knowledge or the insatiable desire to take
more than the earth can provide, is a new frontier of concern.
As Terry Tempest Williams wrote in her 2016 book, “The Hour of Land,” “Water wars will make oil wars obsolete.”
When we moved into this house in late 2015 with a new baby and a 6-year-old, water tests showed high levels of things like
iron, magnesium, sodium and calcium. We were told the rented tank system the previous owner had used would fix that.
For our drinking water, we already used a stainless steel and carbon countertop Berkey filter. So we felt relatively covered, for a
while.
Then I interviewed a scientist at the University of California at Irvine named Bruce Blumberg. Dr. Blumberg, author of the 2018
book “The Obesogen Effect,” was making a name for himself with his work on industrial chemicals, including the toxicants that
leach from vinyl and that may disrupt our hormonal systems. He told me that, “water will get dirtier and dirtier, and more and
more scarce as time moves ahead. There is no avoiding this as the population grows and we dump contaminants into the
environment — they eventually find their way into our water.” He went on, “Your biggest exposure is in the shower,” via
inhalation and dermal absorption.
I had a visceral moment of panic when he said those words: I was already keeping our food as clean as I could by buying from
local farms and cooking from scratch. I was filtering our drinking water through the Berkey. The idea that the water we were
bathing in at home and drinking out in the world might be laden with what my older son used to call “invisible monsters” got
under my skin.