Freedom Socialist • Vol. 28, No. 2 • April-May 2007

Radical Women
Troubled waters
Women rise up globally against toxic industries

by Erin Mustain

This woman in Banaskantha, India, makes a long trek to provide her home with usable water. Around the world, industrial pollution has made the search for clean water an arduous one. Credit images.wri.org

Across the globe, according to the United Nations, 1.2 billion people lack access to clean water. An estimated 10 million die each year from diseases due to polluted water. The majority of victims are impoverished women and children.

This crisis is only growing as industrial pollutants, sewage, pesticides and fertilizers are dumped, both intentionally and unintentionally, into our oceans, streams, and lakes. With water already scarce for many of the world's people, a problem worsened by privatization, clean water has become an even more precious resource — and the need to prevent its destruction even more urgent.

What gets in the water? Corporations are the major culprit in water pollution, with industrial farming producing 70 percent of river and stream contamination in the United States. Agribusiness also adds excessive amounts of fertilizer, which nurtures algal blooms that take up oxygen ordinarily available for other plant and animal life. This process, known as eutrophication, is particularly alarming in Maryland's Chesapeake Bay, a vast economic and environmental treasure.

Also threatened are the U.S. Great Lakes, which contain 21 percent of the Earth's fresh surface water. The lakes provide water for drinking, fishing, recreation, and the transportation of products from farms, mines, and factories. However, they have become heavily polluted by the industries that ring their shores.

War is another major cause of tainted water. Three conflicts — the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, the 1991 Gulf War, and the ongoing U.S. invasion of Iraq — have filled northern gulf waters with sunken ships that still hold petroleum products, unexploded weaponry, and possibly rocket fuel, propellants, and toxic chemicals. Many of the ships are leaking.

Further, the vessels' fuel tanks are loaded with crude, bunker, and diesel-grade oil. These oils contain benzene, propane, acetylene, naphtha, and kerosene, all of which can injure health. Benzene, a carcinogen, causes dizziness, tremors, anemia, and leukemia.

In less developed countries, lack of sanitation, First World dumping, and unregulated industry lead to immense suffering and death. At the Ivory Coast city of Abidjan in August 2006, the scandalous dumping of 400-600 tons of petrochemical waste, probably European, sickened 50,000 people. The toxins have now spread to the city's lagoon and possibly into the drinking water and farm lands; the toll on long-term health is expected to be severe.

Unequal effects. Women suffer a wider variety of health problems linked to the fouling of the environment, and more serious ones, than do men. An unpublished study by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences indicates that the odds for cancer, endometriosis, fibroids, osteoporosis, and cardiovascular disease from exposure to heavy metals and other toxins rise due to women's greater percentage of body fat and use of oral contraceptives and estrogen replacement therapy.

Some water contaminants, such as heavy metals, are ingested by aquatic organisms that are then consumed by larger marine life. When these animals are eaten in turn by humans, even fetuses and newborns can be affected — fetuses through the placenta and newborns through breastfeeding. Mercury in fish can harm a fetus's neurological development.

In a village in China's Gansu province, discharges from a fertilizer factory have been connected to a high number of stillbirths and miscarriages. Water pollution in three Russian rivers is a factor in the doubling of bladder and kidney disorders in pregnant women.

Clearly, the right wing isn't the only enemy to reproductive rights: exposure to environmental contaminants may be subtly undermining the ability to bear children. According to a December 2005 report of the Center for Disease Control's National Survey on Family Growth, women under 25 are the fastest-growing segment of U.S. women with impaired reproductive ability.

And, in many parts of the world, women are responsible for the arduous work of fetching and carrying water from wells or streams. Pollution of these sources means longer hikes to obtain safe water, when it can be found at all, and increased daily exposure to unclean water while doing household chores.

Sister resisters vs. the mining industry. The mining industry is a major water polluter, contributing metals that commonly include cyanide. From Argentina to South Africa, however, women are fighting back.

The Choropampa Defense Front, a Peruvian organization led by Juana Martínez, rallied and demanded the cleanup of a disastrous mercury spill and filed a lawsuit against Newmont, the U.S.-based corporation responsible.

Carrie Dann and her late sister Mary Dann of the Western Shoshone Nation have not only battled to save traditional territory from a federal land grab, but they have also taken on the mining giants. The U.S. government handed over huge tracts of Shoshone land to mining companies including Newmont, Placer Dome, Barrick, and Kennecott. Under the national mining law, these corporations don't pay a dime to the Shoshones or the U.S. public for royalties or for mitigating the consequences of their destructive practices.

In Plachimada, India, indigenous women organized a sit-in outside the factory gates of Coca-Cola after the company heavily depleted the groundwater and then began contaminating the aquifers by pumping polluted water into boreholes designed for solid waste.

The sit-in attracted international solidarity and forced the local plant to close. And the struggle has spread to other areas of India where Coke and Pepsi are depleting and polluting the aquifers.

Defend Mother Earth! The 1998 U.N. International Conference on Water and Sustainable Development predicted that by 2050, two-thirds of the world's people will not have clean water. This must not be allowed to come to pass! Fortunately, water users and workers around the globe are rising up. With women in front, they are fighting back, meeting the poisoners head on, and making connections between poverty, environmental injustice, neoliberalism, and the privatization of public resources.

Like Rachel Carson, whose Silent Spring illuminated pesticide dangers and inspired a generation of environmental activists and eco-feminists, the women defending the lifeblood of the planet will not be silenced.

Erin Mustain is an environmental engineer, a water quality specialist, and a feminist activist who lives in California's Central Valley.