The Weight of Water: Part Three
Nicole Civita is the Vice President for Strategic Initiatives at Sterling College and volunteer member of the Craftsbury Fire District #2’s Board of Commissioners. The views expressed in this piece are her own.
When you visit an environmental college, the last thing you expect to see are plastic bottles of water everywhere. But right now (and for some time), that’s exactly what you’ll find at Sterling and all across Craftsbury Common. Three and five gallon jugs of water line the edge of the dining hall, sit atop the stainless steel work tables in our kitchen, and are found in every dorm and classroom building. We drink, cook, and brush our teeth with the precious water they hold.
Experiencing a water crisis is not something that most colleges would highlight on their blog or promote on social media. But Sterling isn’t like all the others. We don’t see the value in obscuring our very real experience of living on a planet that has been deeply wounded by shortsighted actions. To the contrary, we think it is our obligation to name and honestly discuss what it is like for an institution and a community to cope with a contaminated water supply. Although we gather at Sterling to live with (not just on) the Earth, our intentions cannot insulate us from the impacts of extraction and pollution. They do, however, help us to appraise causes and effects of environmental recklessness. And they fortify us as we try to live in ways that do more good than harm to ourselves and others.
Too many members of our species think they are more clever, more ingenious than nature. This particular form of hubris was especially prevalent in the 20th-century era of supposedly “better living through chemistry,” when chemists synthesized perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances – now more commonly known as PFAS. At first, these wonder-chemicals seemed so useful: They resist heat! They block chemical reactions! They repel water, oil, grease, and stains! So more humans made more of them – a whole lot more of them – and started using them in all kinds of industrial and consumer products. There are now over 9,000 PFAS chemicals, which can be found in everything from brake fluid to body lotion, ski wax to solar panels.
As it turns out, PFAS can also make humans and animals who ingest enough of them seriously ill. This group of chemicals has been linked to cancer, Parkinson’s disease, reproductive and immune system harms, and a wide range of other negative health effects that we are only beginning to appreciate. And PFAS don’t stay where they are put. Instead, they prefer to migrate into water and lodge in living tissues. The price for non-stick pans turned out to be pervasive and invasive contaminants that stick around forever in the tissues of our bodies and the Earth’s soils.
It is now estimated that most people have these very unnatural substances circulating in their blood and that more than 200 Million Americans (out of 336 Million) have detectable PFAS in their drinking water, with contamination documented across all 50 states. The residents of Craftsbury Common and members of the Sterling College community are among that majority.
Some would say that our town and community are terribly unfortunate to have PFAS in our water. But when I look at the prevalence estimates, I think our experience will soon be the norm, not the exception. Indeed, I can’t help but feel fortunate that we live in a safer state that took a fairly proactive, precautionary approach to PFAS when evidence of their risks became widely known. At present, there is no national drinking water safety standard for PFAS, just non-binding EPA guidance suggesting that drinking water should have less than 70ppt of two specific chemicals, PFOA and PFOS, combined. By contrast, since 2018, Vermont has set and enforced limits for five PFAS substances in public water systems. In 2021, Vermont even made a bipartisan effort to enact a nation-leading law that restricts the sale of consumer products containing several PFAS substances. Some other states have also been responsive, but in most of the country, people are unknowingly consuming PFAS-laden water and continuing to purchase PFAS-containing products. Without mandatory testing and enforceable limits for this particular class of contaminants, they don’t have the information they need to undertake to make informed risk assessments, engage in the long, increasingly difficult work of developing alternative water sources or raising funds for the expensive task of implementing advanced filtration systems.
Concerned about your potential exposure?
It can help to review the U.S. EPA’s
Current Understanding of the Human Health
and Environmental Risks of PFAS.
Thankfully, the EPA is finally getting closer to setting an updated national drinking water standard pertaining to PFAS – and one that looks like it may be even more stringent than Vermont’s – and to designating PFAS as a hazardous substance under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (also known as CERCLA or Superfund). EPA is several years behind states that chose to prioritize public and environmental health, but it is finally poised to take decisive action to both regulate PFAS in water supplies and fund remediation.
PFAS substances threaten the common good. They have become a terrible common burden. Collectively, we will need to use an array of tools to try to repair the harm:
Laws, regulations, enforceable standards;
Litigation to hold those who profited from unleashing toxic forever chemicals into the environment;
Lots of public funding to support clean up, filtration, and access to clean water in communities all across the country;
Community collaboration and people willing to donate their time to find solutions (especially in places like rural Vermont, where small water systems are largely volunteer led) and to care for those among us who may have been injured by these chemicals;
More research into how we can filter, remediate, and breakdown PFAS substances safely; and
A much more precautionary approach when introducing synthetic substances into our environment and our bodies.