More than half the residents of New York State -- those who live in the Big Apple -- rely on a fabled watershed for their supply of pure, fresh water. Dotted with reservoirs, the watershed is so well protected that none of the water needs to be filtered -- it just cascades through aqueducts, gigantic underground tunnels, a network of mains and pipes and out of the faucets of the nine million residents in the city. That water supply is now in danger of contamination.

It turns out that a big chunk of something called the Marcellus Shale formation sits underneath the 2000 square mile watershed, and trapped inside the formation is a trillion dollars worth of natural gas. Farmers who used to lease the mineral rights to their land for a dollar an acre saw the price rise to $200 an acre, and then over the last year to $2500 an acre. With permits in hand from the state, energy companies are drilling the first wells in New York.

The Associated Press has recently conducted a five month survey of our nation's water systems, with some very unnerving results.  Normally, people don't think about the water that comes out of their faucets unless it's off-color or smells or tastes funny.  But then along comes an enterprising group of journalists and they make us all stop and think about what it is we're taking into our bodies, and worse, giving to our children.  In this case, it's prescription medications.  Everything from Tylenol to sex hormones.

A vast array of pharmaceuticals -- including antibiotics,
anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones -- have been found
in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an
Associated Press investigation shows.

I'm usually not the kind of person who gets overly worked up when I hear about minor contamination.  I don't like it, but I don't let it scare me like, say, a bomb under my house would.  But this... this scares me.

The Detroit Free Press today released a revealing story concerning an inadvertent release of a secret EPA memorandum on how Dow Chemical delayed cleanup of highly toxic chlorinated dibenzo-dioxin/furan contamination of Michigan's Tittabawassee  River and Saginaw River watersheds from Dow's Midland, MI facility.

As far as people know, chaos and entropy exist in the diminutive worlds of subatomic particles to the outer reaches of space. And it seems that life and the processes of the physical environment exchange their special brands of chaotic systems and events.

Watersheds
 are so cool. They are units of land which have a defined amount of surface area plus geologic (depth and density of sub-surface materials) and vegetative constraints  (plants use and conserve water) that determines....