Chemicals and Water
Water is the lifeblood of nature. As Rachel Carson so eloquently points out in Silent Spring;
‘It is not possible to add pesticides to water anywhere without threatening the purity of water everywhere’
Water moves. In all its various guises it ebbs and flows and transforms. It rains and as droplets it travels through the cracks and pores within soil and rock. Some evaporates back into the atmosphere, most settles down to a very deep subsurface sea that we often term as groundwater. Even this underground sea moves, sometimes slow, sometimes fast until it again rises to become springs, well but it mostly joins up with streams that eventually becomes rivers.
Even more shocking than the fictional tale ‘fable for tomorrow’ are the real life stories detailing the unexpected and dangerous consequences of environmental pollution and water. One such story is that of the weed killer 2,4-D.
The weed killer 2,4-D, unexpected beginnings
In 1943 a manufacturing plant specializing in war materials was constructed in Colorado, near Denver. It was subsequently leased after the second world war to an oil company that produced insecticides.
But reports, from farmers several miles from the plant began to come through about a strange, unexplained sickness that befell their livestock. They were also observing that their crops were not growing well with many plants failing to grow at all.
So what was responsible?
Not surprisingly, an investigation in 1959 by state and federal agencies, proved that a concoction of chemicals present in the local groundwater was responsible for the damage. All the farms were irrigated with water from shallow wells that came from the same groundwater.
Among the assortment of chemicals was arsenic. Apparently it had taken the water eight years to travel the short three miles to the farms. The area that the groundwater covered was vast and there was no way to stop the contamination and halt its spread.
But there was more...
But the most interesting part of this story was the discovery of the weed killer 2,4-D. This was discovered in the holding pools of the manufacturing plant and must have seeped into the groundwater of the area resulting in the damage to the crops. But, mysteriously, no 2,4-D had ever been manufactured at the plant at any stage of the operations.
The scientists, after some intense investigation, had no option but to conclude that the 2,4-D must have been formed spontaneously in the pools. The combination of chemicals from the plants, combined with water, air and sunlight mixed together to create a new chemical. A chemical that could kill plant-life.
Lessons of 2,4-D
We know that a concoction of man-made chemicals can spontaneously combine to form a lethal life-killing broth, but what is the likely hood of this actually occurring?
The case of 2,4-D proves that it is in fact very likely . How many undocumented instances has this actually happened in nature?
What are we inadvertently doing? With the amount of chemicals we are releasing into the environment constantly are we creating a ticking biological time-bomb? It seems that we are turning parts of our environment into some wild, chemistry experiment. And if we are not careful, we are the ones that are going to be experimented on.