Heads of the working class in the U.S. and Europe safely turned towards a repeated financial meltdown, another disaster looms on the back burner, one with which inhabitants of the Global South are all too familiar. A world food crisis underscored by unpredictable "super storms" and rapidly changing weather patterns should now be seen in the context of the scarcity of safe and clean water right here in the United States.
Fracking, the process of using high-pressure water and chemicals to rupture hard rock to release and retrieve the gas hidden under the Earth's surface, is now the darling of energy companies and supportive politicians who stand to make large sums of money from the process. Asserted to be a cleaner and safer way of retrieving gas by Fracfocus.org, a site dedicated to fracking transparency, fracking has been accused of poisoning the water supply and allegations of livestock poisoning, greatly concerning local populations. What once was a local issue has become federal: the U.S. government may now be seen as propping up the unproven and potentially dangerous practice.
Federal officials have given energy and mining companies permission to pollute aquifers in more than 1,500 places across the country, releasing toxic material into underground reservoirs that help supply more than half of the nation's drinking water (Scientific American).
The food justice movement, concerned with sustainable, local, and healthy food sources for all people, sometimes accompanied by a political agenda such as
Patriot Gardens or
Food Not Bombs, has arrived in the nick of time to respond to these looming crises. As I write this, we head into 2013, a year expected to bear witness to skyrocketing food prices, plummeting corn and rice stockpiles, and unforeseen weather patterns. We now are expected to step aside to allow corporations to play Russian Roulette with our water supply.
Though hundreds of [federal] exemptions are for lower-quality water of questionable use, many allow grantees to contaminate water so pure it would barely need filtration, or that is treatable using modern technology (Scientific American).
Yet, one need not be overly political to be concerned with feeding the family and the prospect of a clean water supply for future populations. Collective political action in direct response to threatening corporate colonization of the world food and water supply cannot come soon enough. The sustainability of the human population depends upon our actions to recover our sustainable tradition of maintaining a diverse, native seed supply and halting all actions to pollute aquifers, whether they be local or remote.