Harrowsmith Summer 2019 | 29ENVIRONMENT: WATER WARSof a chemical spill, the radius of
protection expands with lessening
degrees of restrictions as the time
of travel lengthens to the well or
intake. Other threats, such as the
storage and spreading of road salt,
may require landowners to develop
a risk management plan. Defensive
of anyone telling them what they
can do on their land, some owners
erected signs stating “Government
Back Off.” But risk management
officials were provincially trained
and given the authority to enter
properties where a threat to the
municipal drinking water source
was identified, in order to negotiate
a risk management plan with the
landowner or renter to effectively
manage that threat.
A risk management official,
Amy Dickens is the project
coordinator for Quinte Source
Protection in Belleville, Ontario.
She says that public education
and outreach, combined with the
numerous opportunities for public
consultation, made the planning
process open and transparent,
resulting in greater landowner buy-
in to the program.
“I personally experienced
instances where landowners had
researched, consulted our outreach
materials and implemented
measures on their land to
manage risks prior to our initial
discussions,” she says.
Water quality and water quantity
are both considered in Ontario’s
source protection plan. Scientists at
each conservation authority collect
data and take measurements in the
field to create a “water budget.” This
is a ledger of how much precipitation
enters the watershed and how much
leaves. Stream flow, groundwater
levels, snowpacks and estimates
for vegetal transpiration go into
the equation. This helps predict
potential flooding and vulnerability
during periods of drought.
A watershed is the drainage basin
from the headwaters—highland
forests and marshes that purify and
store precipitation—to the mouth of
the rivers leading to the Great Lakes
and the oceans. Governments set
aside vast green spaces to remain
undeveloped because these wild
places produce our clean drinking
water. South of the border, New
York state declared the Adirondack
Forest Preserve “forever wild”
over a century ago, understanding
that the Big Apple, New York City,
could not thrive or survive without
the flow of fresh water from the
mountains. The Greater Toronto
Area’s Greenbelt is another example,
as is Gatineau Park in the National
Capital Region.
Even children understand this
principle of the hydrologic cycle.
In the video game Sim City, they
are the urban planners who have
to remember to plant trees on the
hillsides to raise the water level
in the reservoir as the population
increases in their fictional town.
But out in our real world, from a real
estate agent’s point of view, these
wilderness areas are “vacant lands”
just waiting to be sculpted into
housing plans and golf courses. To
the naturalist and hydrogeologist,
it’s plain to see that rooftops and
paved roads and grassy fairways
with chemical fertilizers and
herbicides are not compatible with
water security.
This is the challenge as
governments change and business
interests conflict with natural
resource management. The loss offorests and wetlands that produce
our water is insidious, happening
locally, parcel by parcel over time.
The accumulation of these losses
has reached a global scale
of concern.
According to the United
Nations, “Wetlands, amongst
the world’s most economically
valuable ecosystems and essential
regulators of the global climate,
are disappearing three times faster
than forests.”
Voices for conservation are
out there, but voices for economic
growth are usually louder and
too often mutually exclusive. In
December 2018, Ontario proposed
Bill 66, the Restoring Ontario’s
Competitiveness Act, better known
as the Open for Business Act. It
would give municipalities ways to
skate around the clean-water rules,
dismantling red-tape regulations
that were deemed impediments to
businesses but that are critical to
ensuring our water security.
And yet, our health and very
survival depend upon reliable
sources of clean water. Ordinary
citizens have to speak up at town
meetings in defence of conservation
values; farmers have to implement
practices for soil and water
conservation and sacrifice some
cropland to preserve forests and
wetlands; and municipal councils
have to mandate that certain green
spaces are left undeveloped when
approving subdivision plans. Our
clean and plentiful water future
depends on all of us. HThis is the challenge as governments change and
business interests conflict with natural resource
management. The loss of forests and wetlands that
produce our water is insidious, happening locally, parcel
by parcel over time. The accumulation of these losses
has reached a global scale of concern.