When it comes to agriculture and for that matter life in general as we know it on this planet, water is critical.
So as a farm writer and as a citizen in general, I attended the recent Saskatchewan Association of Watersheds Conference held in Yorkton.
Increasingly we hear about futurists with a less than glowing vision of our future talking about wars over not religion, not over territory, not over oil, but instead over water. Whether that dark scenario will come to pass will of course only be determined by history, but the mere consideration of such an eventuality speaks to the obvious importance of water.
A bit more in the now of course are recent situations which have brought how great an impact a disruption in water can have.
Closest to home there was the 2001 situation in North Battleford when 700 people became ill after drinking tap water contaminated with a parasite.
A year earlier, in 2000, seven people died, and more than 2,300 became ill, in Walkerton, ON., when E. coli contaminated the water supply.
You might think those twin incidents would have sent up the red flag, and such problems would not still be an issue.
But, it is.
Jump ahead a bit more than a decade to Flint, Michigan in 2014.
After Flint changed its water source from treated Detroit Water and Sewerage Department water (which was sourced from Lake Huron as well as the Detroit River) to the Flint River (to which officials had failed to apply corrosion inhibitors), its drinking water had a series of problems that culminated with lead contamination, creating a serious public health danger.
Of course water can have an impact on a far larger scale too.
The drought in California has made headlines of course, and while no one wanted to see such an event, it has made a broader cross-section of people in North America aware of exactly the impact a lack of rain can have.
In Saskatchewan that of course is something we are still aware of given the history on the drought of the 1930s. Yes the same drought hit the United States — The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck became famous because of it — but perhaps because we are still closer to agriculture we seem more in-tune with that era than California did before the reoccurrence of drought.
Of course too much rain can be just as dramatic in its effect as drought.
Saskatchewan has been hit twice in less than a decade with huge rain events which have caused widespread damage to farm fields and urban homes.
And therein lies one of the core truths of the issue of water it is an issue which must be of importance to everyone. The broader society / government have to put water protection at the top of any list dealing with environmental protection because we are already keenly aware of what source water contamination can cause.
That is why the Saskatchewan Association of Watersheds, and the regional watershed authorities under the SAW umbrella, are so important. They are effectively the bridge between the on-the-ground reality of water management, and government, and while those connections may require strengthening, there is a conduit for water policy to be created, implemented and monitored.
Calvin Daniels is Assistant Editor with Yorkton This Week.
