The Water Fight©

Chairman

Welcome to the Water Fight, a debate on water pollution. Our two guests, Freshwater and Ocean Water, are here to debate which has suffered more from the effects of water pollution. We’ll start with Freshwater to open the Forum.

Freshwater

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. First let me say how excited I am to be here. We all know that people and other animals need freshwater to live. Rivers, lakes, and streams are examples of freshwater sources. The earth is covered with more water than land, but only 3% of all the water on the planet is freshwater, according to the website ecology.com. And most of that is in the ice caps or in glaciers, so the actual amount of fresh drinking water is much less. Any pollution of our scarce freshwater resources will have a major effect on the survival of humans and animals. Don’t you agree that freshwater pollution is of the utmost importance?

Ocean Water

I agree that water pollution is critically important. However, I do not agree that pollution has had the most profound effect on freshwater. On the contrary, pollution of our seas and oceans is having a much bigger impact because of the size of our oceans. Certainly, all people need fresh water to live, but people and animals also need ocean water to live. The oceans are home to 80% of all life on the earth, according to the Greenpeace web site. Pollution of the oceans affects the survival of the earth.

Freshwater

I don’t know how you can say that pollution has a larger effect on oceans than on freshwater. According to ecology.com, there are only 30,000 cubic miles of lakes and 300 cubic miles of rivers, where most humans get their drinking water. Compare that to the 317 MILLION cubic miles of oceans! That is 10,000 times as much volume. No matter how much pollution people put into the ocean, it would take a much, much smaller amount to do the same damage to freshwater rivers and lakes. Are you saying that oceans have had 10,000 times as much pollution as the freshwater sources?

Ocean Water

You seem to be focused on having enough drinking water for people. Even with polluted freshwater, there are sewage treatment plants that filter the water and clean it up for people to drink. Also, people are drinking more bottled water that ever before. According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, the global consumption of bottled water has grown from about 29 billion gallons in 1999 to about 41 billion gallons at the end of 2004. That’s over a 9% increase per year! If pollution was a problem for freshwater, then we wouldn’t be seeing such an increase. In fact, we’d probably see a decrease because it would be so hard to find clean, freshwater. It appears that freshwater pollution doesn’t really affect having enough drinking water.

Freshwater

The reason people are switching to bottled water is because they can’t get good freshwater from the tap at home. The sewage plants can’t filter out all the toxins, or poisons, that have polluted the freshwater supply. Pesticides from farms and orchards are a major pollutant. These cancer-causing chemicals soak into the soil and end up in the ground water, eventually poisoning the lakes and rivers which make up the drinking water supply. There also are high concentrations of lead in the water supply, poisoning 30 million Americans, according to Jim Slama of the Wellness Goods web site. The sewage treatment plants also have to add chemicals such as chlorine to kill the bacteria. This makes the water not only taste bad, but unhealthy to drink. A report from CNN showed a study that chlorination of water has been linked to cancer. So, because of pollution of freshwater, people are drinking more bottled water.

Ocean Water

Yes, and that leads to another source of pollution of the oceans. A lot of the pollution found in the oceans originally came from the land. Plus, people feel they can throw their garbage into the ocean because it appears to have unlimited capacity to humans. What people don’t realize is that this garbage has built up over hundreds of years. If you combine what people put into the oceans with what gets washed off the land into the oceans, we all should be concerned. Much of the garbage is not biodegradable, such as plastic. That means it won’t break down easily, so we end up with many toxins killing the fish and the plant life in the ocean. According to the Greenpeace web site, it takes a thousand years for plastic to break down and sometimes up to two years for even a cigarette to finally break down!

Freshwater

People have done a lot of work to try to control point-source pollution, where the pollutants can be tracked to a single source. An example of this is a factory waste pipe that dumps poisons into the river. This was common before the Environmental Protection Agency, also called the EPA, was formed in 1970, but you don’t see that anymore in the United States. Not all countries have an EPA, so point-source dumping into freshwater still goes on. Controlling the point-sources helps reduce the pollution in certain areas where the government has made it illegal, but it is impossible to control the non-point-source pollution in any country. That is the cause of most of the freshwater pollution. Fertilizers, pesticides, lead, chromium and other poisonous materials seep into the water supply from everywhere. Even people spilling oil on the ground from their cars eventually pollutes the freshwater supply. The ocean is so huge that non-point-source pollution would not be as big of a problem.

Ocean Water

It is easier to control point-source polluters in the freshwater sources than ocean waters because of our vast size. In the oceans, it is hard to stop both point-source and non-point-source polluters. I’m sure you know how devastating oil spills are when an oil tanker drops millions of gallons of oil into the oceans, killing fish and birds that depend on the ocean. The phytoplankton, microscopic, one-celled plants that live in the ocean, produce 50% of the oxygen in our atmosphere, according to National Geographic News. People can survive drinking bottled water, but they can’t survive without oxygen. That is why the affect of pollution in the oceans has a bigger impact on all people.

Freshwater

When you talk about killing fish, I think you have to consider the effect pollution has had on the freshwater fishing and other freshwater recreation. This would include swimming, too. People don’t want to go swim in a lake or a river that is full of garbage, sludge, or deadly chemicals from pesticides or fertilizer. If you catch fish from a polluted lake, do you really want to touch it, let alone eat it? This has a major impact on the amount of freshwater fish available, like bass and trout. It also has a major impact on people’s lifestyle and family time outside.

Ocean Water

Yes, I agree with you. But you’re missing out on something important. Where do most people swim for enjoyment or for vacation? They swim in the ocean. More people live near the sea coasts than near freshwater lakes around the world, and there is a lot of commercial and recreational fishing in the oceans. As far as fishing impacts, don’t you realize that the majority of the fish and seafood that you buy in the market or at restaurants come from the ocean environment? I’m sure you’ve heard the warnings from the Environmental Protection Agency about mercury in tuna fish. Polluting the oceans is a sure way to poison people who eat seafood.

Freshwater

Pollution from mercury isn’t limited to fish in the ocean. The EPA said there is mercury in some freshwater fish, also. As far as recreation, there are many man-made and natural lakes used for recreation. You can visualize fishing boats, motorboats, and people having a good time swimming and riding on the boats. Maybe more people live near the sea coasts, but many people swim and enjoy freshwater recreation. Lots of people don’t have time to travel all the way to the coast of their country to swim in the ocean water. What I really want to get across is that there are many boats on freshwaters, and these boats distribute a lot of pollution into the lakes and rivers. Even ten times as many boaters wouldn’t have as much impact, since ocean water is so vast.

Ocean Water

Someday, Freshwater, you have to wake up and smell the oxygen that I supply. You think since my waters are so big it doesn’t matter how many boats are on my waters? Well, that is exactly what many industries, trash haulers, and most citizens thought. Until enough different kinds of environmental water protection acts were passed, my waters and shores were a mess. There is one thing that happens in my waters more often than they happen in yours. Those are oil spills from oil tankers. Five percent of the oil dumped in my waters comes from oil spills, according to Ocean Planet. Just one oil spill can destroy an important habitat. Do you remember the Exxon Valdez in 1989? This one oil spill from that oil tanker damaged over 2300 square kilometers of the beautiful Alaskan coastline. It took four years and 10,000 people to clean it up!

Freshwater

Freshwater has had great impacts from pollution as well. Do you remember the horrible pollution in the 1960s of Lake Erie, one of the five Great Lakes? This is a very large body of freshwater. The only living thing in the lake was algae. How did Lake Erie get so polluted? Because of the phosphorus from fertilizers and detergents that many people used. With the industries pouring their heavy metal pollution into the lake as well, soon there was no oxygen in the water and the lake was dead. It took almost 10 years to clean it up! This happened more than once to more than one freshwater source. For example, the Cuyahoga river in Ohio was so polluted that it caught fire! These examples indicate that pollution is a much more serious problem in freshwater than ocean water.

Ocean Water

I understand that polluting either freshwater or ocean water damages the quality of life. The belief that oceans are endless dumping grounds is catching up with mankind. Pollution has damaged sea life, impacted oxygen-producing plankton, and destroyed the habitat of countless ocean plants, fish, mammals and sea birds. Ocean pollution has ruined beautiful beaches, affected tourism and caused changes in peoples’ recreational activities. Finally, people are being poisoned by the chemical pollutants, such as mercury, that are in the ocean fish they like to eat. In conclusion, I believe that pollution has had a more significant effect on ocean water than freshwater.

Freshwater

Freshwater makes up only 3% of all the water on the earth. Damaging freshwater sources by polluting them further reduces that small amount of freshwater available for humans to drink. Cleaning the water to have it available in homes has other negative effects on people due to the chlorine required in purification. Pollution also has damaged the beaches at the lakes and rivers used for swimming, boating, and other recreational activities. Despite the efforts of the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Agency, pollution continues to be a problem. Freshwater fish are now being tested because of contamination from pollutants such as mercury. In conclusion, because people need fresh water to live, I believe that pollution has had a more significant impact on freshwater than ocean water.

Chairman

Thank you Freshwater and Ocean Water for taking the time out of your busy day to divulge how concerned you are about the heavy amount of pollution in both of your environments. For our public, this is a lesson to support environmental efforts to clean up our freshwater and ocean water, and to keep disasters like Lake Erie and the Exxon Valdez, from ever happening again.

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