Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [21]
The Wards Brook aquifer, which provides only a small portion of the water to Lovewell Pond relative to surface water input from Wards Brook and the Saco (which provides the lion’s share during spring flood) is perhaps the best-studied aquifer in Maine. Formed by an ancient glacial lake, the deep basin of sand and gravel is a factory for producing exquisitely filtered water: it has a storage capacity of eight billion gallons. But how much of that can be pumped before the ecosystem is changed? An early modeling study of the aquifer, funded by a group formed by the Fryeburg planning board, concluded that the current level of pumping—nearly eight hundred thousand gallons a day, between the town pump and two commercial extractors—was sustainable. Still, its authors recommended further study of the area’s hydrology. Next came a firm, hired by the town of Fryeburg, which at first proposed looking at both Wards Brook and the pond, but later removed all but a tiny part of Lovewell from its purview. Dearborn objected, the town shrugged, and Dearborn hired his own hydrogeologist.
It would be easy to dismiss Howard Dearborn as a crank—and some do. But the level of his well and the plant growth in his pond speak to far larger issues in Fryeburg and around the world. Are large-scale commercial extractors compromising the amount or the purity of water that’s left? And who will make that determination? Safe and clean water is a finite resource: the fact has hit us on the head throughout history, and it’s going to hit us even harder—and more frequently—as the world’s population grows, particularly in arid areas, as we pollute and mine more of the remaining freshwater, and as the climate heats up. Global warming will raise water and air temperatures, causing more water to evaporate, and it will affect the timing and distribution of rainfall, leading to both more flooding, in wet areas, and more drought, in dry areas.
“We are already at the limits of our resources,” Peter H. Gleick, a sustainable-water-use expert and cofounder of the Pacific Institute, says. “Look at Las Vegas, look at the drought in the Southeast, the contamination of water in the Northeast,” with gasoline additives, like methyl tertiary butyl ether, and other industrial chemicals. And so who controls what’s left of our freshwater—locals who depend on it for survival, or corporations that sell it for profit—matters a great deal, whether that water comes from an aquifer in western Maine, or an aquifer in the Philippines, Australia, or Indonesia, where companies have already privatized either supplies or delivery systems. Dearborn may seem focused only on his backyard, but he has an intuitive understanding that his situation is representative of the struggle over the global water commons.
Waite motors to the pond’s south end, collects more data, then makes his way back toward Dearborn’s place. In nearly seventeen feet of water, he cautiously tugs on a tether tied to a buoy. He pulls in handful after handful of line, a worried look on his face. When a slimy gray cylinder comes to rest on the boat deck, he sighs and says, “I’m glad that was still there. That’s a four-thousand-dollar piece of equipment.” Every forty-five minutes for six months, the cylinder recorded six different parameters. The data would give Waite a picture of the lake’s health—how it had changed over this study and, by comparing some of his data with information gleaned by a volunteer lakemonitoring program, over several years.
Back on land, Waite loads his truck with sample-filled coolers. He’s about to climb into the driver’s seat when Dearborn approaches and asks, “Do you want to see my well?” Hesitating for just a moment, Waite says, “Sure.” Dearborn mounts his tiny tractor and trundles into the woods. Waite and I follow on foot. At the well, which sticks up about three feet and has a concrete cover, Dearborn brushes off some pine needles,