"a bi-monthly journal of environmental news and commentary..."

Mike Layton

Ward Lake, in southeast Olympia, is a pretty body of water, surrounded by homes, trees and lawns. Clean looking. Note those lawns, well tended, fertilized, bug free.

Pristine is the word most frequently used about Ward Lake. But the South End Neighborhood Association, suspecting that was a misnomer, hired a consultant to learn what was under that inviting 65-acre surface.

"Arsenic was found in lake bottom sediments at levels considered likely to have severe impacts on benthic (bottom-dwelling critters and plants) organisms," Lisa Palazzi, a soil specialist, reported.

Other "metal contaminants" such as lead, copper, nickel, zinc, chromium and cadmium, showed up in Department of Ecology studies from which Palazzi's report is derived.

Also present in the bottom mud, and in the tissues of bass and trout, are chemicals once used in pesticides.

She places no blame and, indeed, speculates that some contaminants are lingering residues from pesticides now outlawed and no longer used. Further testing is warranted, she says.

Regardless of whether the undisturbed mud is a current threat, the thought that pesticide residues remain from prior to 1972, when DDT was outlawed, should be a warning to all of us.

Water is earth's most resilient resource. Given half a chance it cleanses itself. But there's a limit, even for water.

Only 25 years ago, when I was climbing mountains and backpacking, it was natural to drink from streams melting off glaciers or trickling down cliffsides. Shuck your pack and lower your face like a cat to drink cold, clean water.

No more. He or she who drinks from mountain or forest streams now without first boiling the water, pumping it through a purifier or steeping iodine pills in the jug for hours, risks weeks of Giardia, gut-wrenching heaves and diarrhea.

You could blame it on the pika, cuddly-looking alpine cousin to the gerbil, or the marmot, over-dressed in a skin twice too big for him, who whistles at you from high in glacier-tumbled rock piles.

But weren't the pika and marmot also crapping near the water 25 years ago when we safely drank it? Reach into your backpack for the steel mirror and look, scientist. There is your answer; there are too many of you.

And not just in the mountains-everywhere.

How many people can the world's fixed gallonage of water support?

The way it's rained this spring you'd think a water shortage would be last on our list of nits to worry about.

But here we are in 1997 in a complex court battle over water rights, a situation right out of the 1870s West when the Winchester rifle was as much a water rights tool as a legal brief. It's all legality this time, so far.

Not least of the puzzles is the wonder that there is still unallocated water to fight over. Mostly, for the time being, this is a problem of arid Eastern Washington. But population growth will soon bring the issue to the west side where rain comes down in buckets.

The wrangle is too complex to spell out here, but basically it involves farmers who want to expand their irrigation lands and are being held up by the permit process, conducted by the Department of Ecology.

DOE's mandate is to make sure that water is allotted equitably and that before granting a water right there is water to grant.

Studying river flows and underground aquifers takes time. Will a new well deplete a neighbor's prior water right? Eastern Washington legislators, many of them water users and all with user constituents, accuse DOE of dragging its feet.

Their solution? Cut the agency's budget for water rights specialists. That'll learn em.

Now some 5,000 permit applications are on hold and the issue is in court. A judgment won't solve the underlying problem. Only a clear-eyed Legislature can revise the laws so common sense and equity have at least equal balance with ignorance, spite and greed.

Apart from drinking, farming is the most beneficial use of water. The farmers are correct; we must have food to survive.

But farming must share with other needs, among them fisheries, beset by the same failure to understand Mother Nature's (or God's) way of dealing with the arrogant and willfully ignorant.

We leave it to the salmon to subsidize our power and lights, disposal of our human wastes and chicken guts and our greedy forest practices. But the mighty salmon is losing the battle.

Water cleanses itself faster than the land does. And a good thing, else we would have poisoned ourselves long ago.

But even water needs time and gravel or plant roots to wash itself of the crud humans dump into it. When the time for cleansing takes longer than the time for fouling, the conclusion is foregone.

Mike Layton is a staff writer for the Green Pages.

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