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  • Title: Groundwater shock: the polluting of the world's major freshwater stores.
    Author: Sampat P.
    Journal: World Watch; 2000; ():10-22. PubMed ID: 12295803.
    Abstract:
    For most of human history groundwater was tapped mainly in arid regions where surface water was in short supply. Periscope-like conduits were used to funnel spring water from mountain slopes to nearby towns, a technology that allowed settlement to spread out from the major rivers. Over the centuries, as populations and cropland expanded, innovative well-digging techniques evolved in China, India, and Europe. As dependence on groundwater increased, the availability of the resource has become more limited. Numerous studies have tracked the extent to which increasing demand on water has made it the most valuable resource on Earth. However, it is also the resource most consistently overlooked. Years of irrigation using pesticides, nitrate pollution, presence of petrochemicals, and accumulated waste have damaged aquifers irreversibly. Given how much pollution will affect public health, the environment, and the economy once it impacts the water, it is critical that emphasis be shifted to filtering out the toxins. Such an approach requires looking at social, industrial, and agricultural systems; their ecological untenability is poisoning the world's water. Moreover, it requires the same fundamental restructuring of the global economy, as does the stabilizing of the climate and biosphere as a whole.
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