When the Best Water Filter Isn't Enough for Health

“We can’t change the world, but we can make personal choices to lead a healthy life.” For years, we've all heard it: Do all the right things for your health.

The right things. You know what they are. Eat healthy, natural food, manage your stress, drink water and maintain a positive state of mind.

But what gets left out of that self-help equation? It turns out, a whole lot.

You can’t eat healthy food unless you defend organic standards, assure humane treatment for animals, and fight for small farmers, farmer’s markets and the rights for all growers to diversify seeds.

It’s easier to manage stress levels when all of us have jobs, education, homes, health care, an honest media, a culture of caring and a sound democracy.

Well, you get the point. And that brings us to water. What is the best self-help tip for assuring clean water? Take a guess:

Is it -- a lifetime supply of Poland Springs? A Britta filter? A reverse osmosis filter? Collect rain water on urban rooftops? How about living in a remote rural area, and digging a really deep well?

Well, I’ve researched them all, and tried most of them, and I’m sorry to tell you that none is infallible.

The Poland Springs comes in a plastic bottle. Nix. The Britta, pretty good but not a cure-all if the water you start out with is funky. Urban rooftop collection -- good, if what rains down isn’t acid, or contaminated.

And look out where you dig your well. The rural area where I dug mine was over the most significant aquifer in the U.S.. With water so essential for life, health, food and the overall viability of the U.S., I’d assumed that everyone would recognize how crucial it is to protect that invaluable natural resource.

But no, it turns out that under that giant aquifer is a trillion dollars worth of shale gas — the next bottom line bonanza for the gas and oil industry.

They’ve been leasing land in over a dozen states to access that gas, with a new technology called “fracking,” that freely takes, uses and contaminates billions of gallons of public water, our water. Not to mention polluting the air, destroying agriculture, felling trees and forests, chewing up roads and creating a chemical/radioactive waste disposal nightmare.

As depicted in the brilliant film Gasland, wherever fracking has rendered people’s drinking water undrinkable, the gas companies truck in a monthly supply of water, in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement.

What’s in the water that is so bad? Well, one family portrayed in the film had a household wide, reverse osmosis filter installed. But the post-fracking water turned the filter and all of the pipes and plumbing to sludge. “It’s like peanut butter in there,” the man told Josh Fox, the film’s director.

If that’s what those chemicals can do to home piping, just imagine what they can do to you. Plus, it turns out that, according to endocrine disruption expert, Dr. Theo Colborn, even at one parts per trillion they can disregulate your body’s endocrine and neurological systems. The companies say the chemicals are safe, but they are not obliged to disclose them because Dick Cheney exempted them from the Safe Drinking Water Act and a lot more regulation via the Halliburton Loophole, enacted in 2005.

As we speak, gas companies are pushing government to approve fracking in Delaware River basin, which supplies water to New York City, and 5 percent of the U.S. It’s beginning right now -- unless we stop it.

Have your New York or Pennsylvanian friends told you about this? No? Well, please tell them.

Act now by asking the Delaware River Basin Commission to halt fracking until a planned study is done. And everyone, find out where your legislative candidates stand on water pollution, industrial agriculture and health care freedoms.

Here’s why: There’s nowhere to hide. Unless you change the world, you won’t be able to lead a healthy life. Today is Blog Action Day 2010 and the focus is on water. Because the best water filter has a three-part action: responsive elected officials, policies that protect our water and our health and citizens willing to take action for both.

Photo credit: darkpatator