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| Groundwater and Drinking Water |
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Without water there would be no life on earth and our planet would be an uninhabited desert. Water is the basis of a high biodiversity on earth. Water is also an essential means of nutrition which has to be drunk every day. Water is a pre-requisite for all processes of life outside as well as inside the organisms. Plants and animals – and also the human being – consist of water to a degree of 50 to 80 percent. Therefore: there can be no healthy future without water in sufficient quantity and quality.
Only 0.77 percent of the water resources on earth exists in the form of liquid fresh water. And these supplies are also very unevenly distributed throughout the world. Here in Central Europe, we still have an abundance of fresh water and use approximately 150 litres of it per person, per day. The highest levels of water consumption in our area of the world, however, are in agriculture: in this context 17 million hectares of agricultural surface area in Germany are fertilised for this purpose, very often far in excess of requirements. Here the slurry sprinkling, particularly on the sandy soils of North Western Europe, plays a particularly serious and detrimental role. The soil's natural ecological systems become permanently overloaded with nitrogen and irreparably damaged. And furthermore – these nitrate-excesses are even encouraged by the availability of EU funding – a grave error for which our children and grandchildren will have to pay. The ongoing and sustainable contamination of clean groundwater, which is such an invaluable natural resource, is the consequence. Simply on account of short-term financial profit – and even with official authorisation of the legislator – our essential natural resources and in particular our water are being damaged and destroyed.
We should not just submissively hand over this natural inheritance, which belongs to the whole of humanity, to a political system with its rural henchmen, for whom a sustainable natural environment does not play any significant role whatsoever.
July 2004
Prof. Dr. Richard Pott, Hannover
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