Even if we’ve suspected it for years, it still came as horrifying news this month that the US Geological Survey (USGS) has found that the Rio Grande is polluted with so-called “forever chemicals.” These are toxic manmade substances known as PFAS, or Per-and Polyfluoroalkyl compounds, that are used in myriad industrial, military and household items, from non-stick pots and food packaging to fire retardants and fertilizer.
Not only that, we learned definitively in the same week that that PFAS in our groundwater are joined by plutonium, one of the most dangerous of all radioactive substances. Writing for Searchlight New Mexico, investigative reporter Alicia Inez Guzman tells us that recently Nuclear Watch New Mexico published a map, based on government records, that shows some 12,730 locations in northern New Mexico where rivers, soil and groundwater are polluted by plutonium from the national weapons labs at Los Alamos.
We’ve known for a long time that groundwater in New Mexico and around the country can also be polluted by leaking petroleum storage tanks, septic systems, an enormous number of nonnuclear hazardous waste sites, landfills, mining and drilling toxic waste, urban runoff and road salts, air force bases, and atmospheric contaminants that are part of the hydrologic cycle.
Learning now, however, that plutonium and PFAS are in our rivers and groundwater gives a new immediacy to the dangers of pollution. In fact, it’s now glaringly apparent that New Mexico has a public health emergency on its hands. Our water is poisoned. Much of the world’s water must be too. And it’s our way of life that’s doing it, and the engineering that makes it possible.
Modern life is defined by what people a hundred years ago would have considered fantastic luxuries, produced and consumed in vast quantities and taken for granted by billions of people in the 80 or so countries that make up the growth-frenzied, more or less well-to-do, developed and developing industrialized world.
How could all those cars, all the fossil fuels that propel them, all those brilliant lights of all those cities, all the galaxies of consumer goods, all the housing, all the military-industrial products, all the chemical marvels that go into all manufactured goods all over the world, how could all that not have an environmental downside?
It’s taken a long time, but now an ever-growing number of us know for sure that pollution is the massive debt we’ve incurred from the miracles of progress. No place on earth is spared from its insidious poisonings. Global warming comes directly, of course, from the byproducts of the ease and comforts of our fast-paced, go-anywhere, do-anything magic world of speed and gadgets. Water pollution is apparently everywhere too. It’s not only the Rio Grande in New Mexico that’s polluted. The USGS tells us that every other river system in the state is contaminated as well, along with most of our groundwater.
Pollution isn’t the “fault” of products and their consumers. Pollution is created directly by military and industrial engineering, as well as extractive technologies, and negligent waste management that ignores the hazardous side effects of their practices. This is true for chemical engineering, which generates tens of thousands of new chemicals a year. If you read chemical engineering text books, however, you see that the discipline itself places a high priority on using nonhazardous engineering methods to make just about any product you can imagine. It’s clear that pollution is not a necessity. It is a choice. With proper corporate and military mandates, engineering could well have created a world of wonders that didn’t poison the environment. Instead, the success of almost every industry, and every industrialized country, is driven by massive, undeclared and unpaid for pollution on a worldwide scale. For polluters to clean up their mess, or stop it before it’s created, incurs costs that undermine profits and five-year plans. That’s still a no-no everywhere, a nihilistic denial that has to stop.
In New Mexico, it has to stop now. Almost all of us live on groundwater attached to surface water systems. For that water to be polluted by plutonium and PFAS, not to mention all the other potential contaminants, including jet fuel, is a disaster of potentially catastrophic proportions. It’s time for the New Mexico congressional delegation, and every sensible person in the state, to come together and call for a drastic, all-out effort, on a scale of the Manhattan Project, to clean up our water and make that most precious of substances safe for us to drink. It’s a crime against us all to ignore it any longer.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Excellent article. The truth is finally being revealed to the public. Alicia Guzman is one of New Mexico’s best, most professional journalists today. Her research, writing, and interviews are meticulous. She gets to the heart of issues that are often ignored, but are of great importance to New Mexicans. Thank you for acknowledging her work. You might remember the chapter in NM Scrapbook (Between Two Worlds) Her family has a long history in NM.