Our Poisoned World

Toay and yesterday (March 26 and 27) we had telephone and e-mail alerts about our drinking water. It turns out a manufacturer upstream on the Delaware River had a chemical spill and the waterways in the estuary of the Delaware River are compromised. My phone message said "Burlington and Camden Counties are put on restriction alert" and we are not to use our potable water for anything but drinking. I have always been against watering lawns anyhow - it has alway seemed a terrible waste of water. And I am a modest launderer and showerer as well. People seem to have lost the art of washing themselves and feel they need to shower to wake up as well as get clean.

Well, not to pat myself on the back, but, I will - I have multiple notices from Public Service Electric and Gas commending me on being more environmentally responsible than the best in my town! They have little colored houses on a rating sheet that show the average consumption, the most environmentally conservative, and then there is my little house, smallest of them all. I have NO lawn, so there is no watering there, and I don't launder as much as average either. Again, I wash myself so my clothes dont get as dirty or smell bad and I can wear them more than once. Same for my bed linens. I am clean and my bed is clean. My dog has her own bed and isn't allowed to sleep on mine and I cover my bed with rubber backed protective covers during the day when the cats nap on it.

Anyway to get back to the water. I always drink Poland Springs water which comes from natural springs in Maine, not from anywhere around here. I have been to Poland Springs, Maine because there was a Shaker village there and one summer, my friend, Tom Clapton, my daughter, Lavinia and I drove to all the New England Shaker communities, both still extant and those closed and only remembered by a sign or a building. One plain little yellow building in Connecticut was on a prison property that we could only see from a distance behind a tall chain link fence and a sign that warned against trespass.

Anyhow Poland Springs water is always rated high in tests of bottled water, and it smells and tastes clean and refreshing unlike the tap water in Camden County. I need to look up where our water comes from.

I had just been shopping so I already had a case of water bottles and two gallon jugs of water but I went back today to Shop Rite and bought two more cases and two bottles of another kind of water. Shop Rite was almost sold out. People had three and four cases of water in their shopping carts. My sister told me people were coming from Philadelphia because all the stores there were sold out. They are the most hard hit.

There have been so many water and spill disasters recently - just the past month there was the train derailment and chemical spill in New Palestine, Ohio that made the residents sick and killed animals, and before that the water disaster in Mississippi and of course, Flint, Michigan. Locally, we have had three train derailment spills in local waterways in Paulsboro, Gloucester County. One of them made the air stink for miles around for two weeks.

And if that isn't bad enough, Pennsylvania wants to send hundreds of rail cars and trucks through the urban surroundings to New Jersey, through Camden, Woodbury and into Gibbstown, to ship Liquid Natural Gas from fracking in Pa. to Europe for profit! It isn't even for local consumption but to be sold to Europe. And Liquid Natural Gas is terribly flammable. All it would take is a spark, a bullet, a derailment to unleash a Dresden like firestorm in this highly populated urban/suburband environment. It is insane.

One of the people from my Woodbury Friends Meeting has been an environmental activist, Marilyn Quinn, and she has been protesting and making as many people as possible aware of this LNG danger.

So now it is here, we are the ones with tainted and dangerous water. I am extra anxious about such things because of the year I almost died when the Pennsauken Creek was polluted with raw sewage from an overextended local sewage plant which sent a cloud of poisonous mosquitoes into our neghborhoods and made over a dozen children (including me) sick with hepititis. I was in the hospital for weeks, at home in bed for weeks and missed my 9th grade year of school (Happily). and was left with a permanently compromised liver because no one realized how sick I was until I was unable to sit or stand up any more. When I complained about feeling sick, My mother thought I was malingering because I hated school so much I was always trying to stay home where the fun was. Finally, exasperated she took me to the doctors and he said, "Mary did you not notice your daughter was yellow?" She had not. But in her defense I hadn't noticed either. But there I was, skin and bones and yellow from the whites of my eyes down. I had to go into the hospitl because I had been sick for so long I had liver damage and was in danger. I was warned never to drink alcohol and never to give blood to the Red Cross. I never did either. And from then on I have been acutely aware of the unseen dangers lurking in water, insects, and invisible entities like bacteria and virus.

There was a mysterious art installation at the University of the Arts once, a long snaking line of plastic coctail cups, the kind they gave out at cocktail parties at gallery openings. Each cup was half full of water. No one could figure it out until one day I SAW it - It was the shape of the Delaware River in water cups! I have always been interested in the shapes of rivers. They are so much the same as our arterial and veinous systems, and our nervous systems.

Also the Delaware River has played a big part in my life as I was raised so close to it and have lived within blocks of it most of my life. It pains me to think of the careless negiglence that poisoned this river, our main artery of survival, and all the creatures who depend on it, fish, birds, wild animals, that will be sickened and die because of this spill. I am heartsick at the greed and ignorance that is poisoning our world, our fragile planet. I can only hope that somehow a kind of transcendant awareness will come along and make people care about their world and their bodies, and all the creatures who share our world. But I don't know. My brother was talking about how he likes to visit the cows when he walks the dog and how he feeds them grass and they know him and come to visit and I said it makes me sad because they trust and they don't have any idea what people are going to do to them. My brother just doesn't think of it. Sorry about this sad post. But do what you can to conserve - don't water a lawn or poison it with roundup to get rid of little yellow flowers (it's our drinking water). Become a vegetarian. Use and reuse before you replace. Here's a good one: "Use it up, Wear it out, Make it do, do without." Try to conserve wherever and whatever you can. Be MINDFUL.

Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com (don't forget - comments is also polluted like the river so contact my e-mail if you want to chat, not the comments function.)