The current issue of BioCycle offers an eloquent and thought-provocating article by Sally Brown, Research Associate Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. I've included a few of the great quotes from the article and a link to BioCycle to read more.
"But we aren't talking about streams. The question was about irrigating crops. I told the reporter about a new publication on the safety of reclaimed water put out by the WateReuse Research Federation that places risks into prespective. An agricultural laborer - someone who would be considered a highly exposed person to this synthetic estrogen - in a field irrigated with reclaimed water would need to spend 16,000 years working in the field to get the same exposure to the estrogen as you find in one birth control pill."
"Instead he asked about plant update. The straightforward answer would have been to continue with the comparison, i.e., that plants take up very little if any of these compounds and that they will degrade in soils, and that you would have to eat nothing but those plants (e.g., salads) for decades and decades to get one birth control pill. But instead, I told him about studies we've done showing no plant update and I did talk to him about that one paper out of Toldedo where they had to add chemicals to the water to get concentrations high enough to even see them in plants."
"There is consenus, certainty, within the scientific community on climate change - manmade climage change. For the general public though, more are worried about that part per trillion in reclaimed water than the catastrphic flooding, droughts, and so on."
Read more of Sally's " Keep Talking" ( Subscription required )
BioCycle July 2011, Vol. 52, No. 7, p. 42
Climate Change Connections, Sally Brown
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