Quotes & Sayings About Groundwater

In 1971, the Bureau of Reclamation released a plan to divert six million acre-feet from the lower Mississippi River and create a river in reverse, pumping the water up a staircase of reservoirs to the high plains in order to save the irrigation economy of West Texas and eastern New Mexico, utterly dependent on groundwater, from collapse. — Marc Reisner

God doesn't just miraculously and physically intervene in the whole process, so if I just go and drop a bunch of chemicals and herbicides that leach into the groundwater, I can pray all day to keep my child healthy, but if the herbicides gone into the groundwater come up my well, my child's going to drink that water. — Joel Salatin

This junkyard is an environmental nightmare, strewn with tree stumps, old tires, derelict vehicles, scrap metal and other waste. This owner may be failing to properly dispose of vehicle fluids and other contaminating chemical-laden trash, possibly imperiling groundwater and wells. He is junking the law as well as the environment. — Richard Blumenthal

I have always been a big advocate of tap water-not because I think it harmless but because the idea of purchasing water extracted from some remote watershed and then hauled halfway round the world bothers me. Drinking bottled water relieves people of their concern about ecological threats to the river they live by or to the basins of groundwater they live over. It's the same kind of thinking that leads some to the complacent conclusion that if things on earth get bad enough, well, we'll just blast off to a space station somewhere else. — Sandra Steingraber

That is the normal succession of things in this part of the world; you can see the various stages all over Scratch Flat. There is, for example, a small red maple swamp above my house on the northwest side of the drumlin. The swamp was probably a pond sixty years ago, but now in summer, unless you know your trees, you cannot distinguish it from the surrounding woodlands. It is only in spring, when the groundwater levels are high, that the remnant of the ice sheet makes itself apparent. Then the waters rise around the trunks of the red maple trees and, after reaching a critical level, run down across the small meadow to the north of my house. — John Hanson Mitchell

We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. — John Green

That's a parents' job, isn't it? To raise a child strong enough to leave and break our hearts? — Beth Groundwater

Laws governing pollution tend to move pollutants from one medium to another. So, for example, we scrub SO2 from power plants only to dispose toxic sludge on land. We "clean" water only to disperse toxic-laced solids on farmland or landfills. Pollution control becomes a kind of giant shell game by which we move pollutants between air, water, groundwater, and land. — David W. Orr

The situation is quite serious - groundwater is important source for water use, including drinking water, and if it gets contaminated, it's very costly and difficult to clean. — Ma Jun

There are scarcities in drinking water when you pollute the groundwater with nitrates. There is a scarcity in diversity when you create huge cornfields with the same strain of corn so that when one disease strikes - which happened in the United States in the 70s - all the cornfields in the country are wiped out. That was the first time the U.S. realized the value of diversity in agriculture and began to discuss genetic resources and their conservation. — Vandana Shiva

If surface water can be compared with interest income, and non-renewable groundwater with capital, then much of the West was living mainly on interest income. California was milking interest and capital in about equal proportion. The plains states, however, were devouring capital as a gang of spendthrift heirs might squander a great capitalist's fortune. — Marc Reisner

The usual way of growing cotton is highly petrochemical-intensive, requiring 110 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer per acre. Some of the fertilizer is broken down by soil bacteria into nitrate, a toxic and highly soluble chemical that can leach into groundwater or get washed into lakes, creating oxygenless dead zones. — Alex Shoumatoff

A great thing about these trees is that they are excellent for cleaning, both groundwater, and of course, air. — Mike Lowry

He said, Americans look upon water as an inexhaustible resource. It's not, if you're mining it. Arizona is mining groundwater. — John McPhee

Without global human rights, labor and environmental movements, companies would still be hiring 12-year-olds as a matter of course and poisoning our groundwater without batting an eyelid. — Rebecca MacKinnon

Globalized industrialized food is not cheap: it is too costly for the Earth, for the farmers, for our health. The Earth can no longer carry the burden of groundwater mining, pesticide pollution, disappearance of species and destabilization of the climate. Farmers can no longer carry the burden of debt, which is inevitable in industrial farming with its high costs of production. It is incapable of producing safe, culturally appropriate, tasty, quality food. And it is incapable of producing enough food for all because it is wasteful of land, water and energy. Industrial agriculture uses ten times more energy than it produces. It is thus ten times less efficient. — Vandana Shiva

Everything that I'm seeing in America, when it comes to the groundwater contamination and the poisoning of people I see, it's a moral issue. Nobody's ever gonna convince me that a CEO wouldn't care if his own child was poisoned. — Erin Brockovich

The farmer and the farm, like "the environment," are looked upon, for example, as means to offset trade deficits. The farm is a place where we can externalize costs. The cost of pesticides to the farmer and the cost of the pesticides to the soil and groundwater are regarded similarly by the public: "a serious problem that something ought to be done about." But the problem is more fundamental than this glib statement would indicate, for soil pollution is an expense of production. So are pesticides and nitrates in our farm wells. So is the loss of farmers from the land. — Wes Jackson

When it comes to acid rain or oil spills or depleted fisheries or tainted groundwater or fluorocarbon propellants or radiation leaks or sexually transmitted diseases, national frontiers are simple irrelevant. Toxins don't stop for customs inspections and microbes don't carry passports. North America became a water and free-trade zone long before NAFTA loosened up the market in goods. — Benjamin Barber

The logical extension of a burgeoning population and urbanization is the conversion of open spaces into paved ground. This has resulted in flooding of cities as well as water scarcity due to groundwater depletion and the lack of rainwater harvesting. — Anonymous

Environmentalists should like fracking for its relative cleanliness. But they don't. They have made a bugaboo out of the chemicals in fracking fluids, which supposedly can leach into groundwater sources. I'm convinced they're dead wrong. Ultimately, good technology with a cost advantage will win out over paranoia. — Kenneth Fisher

Until sunlight came bleeding up over the horizon, like more acid blood oozing out of his sick ruptured heart, which felt - not that anybody cared - like a rotten drum of biohazardous waste at the very bottom of a landfill, leaching poison into the groundwater, enough poison to kill an entire suburb full of innocent and unsuspecting children. — Lev Grossman

Being vegan or vegetarian isn't just about compassion for animals. Most of the destruction of the planet is the result of all the clear-cutting, groundwater contamination, grain production, fuel consumption, greenhouse gas, viral proliferation - the direct result of livestock production. — William McNamara

There is a preliminary belief that Tuolumne River water could be captured by other reservoirs that are downstream from Hetch Hetchy, the Cherry and Don Pedro reservoirs for instance. Furthermore, any shortfalls could be supplied via greater conservation efforts, newly discovered groundwater supplies, and water purchases when necessary. — Matt Gonzalez