Dinner with Wine and Water

 While continuing to explore the issues of water in this country I was very disappointed to learn that this liberal environmental state that I live in has the worst water pollution in the country! Thirty-three percent of our sources have some pollution.  I guess I am going to have to start some letter writing on that.  Years ago when rivers outside of Cleveland would catch on fire due to pollution we had no regulations on what and how much disgusting byproduct that could be dumped into them.  They were gigantic toilets that became someone's problem downstream...we naively thought.  Under Richard Nixon's administration, Congress passed the Clean Water Act which  began the slow uphill climb to make industry and agriculture take notice of how they were treating our waters.  Then as the years passed we learned that we as individuals also bore the guilt of this and had to change our lifestyle.

When you are focused on an issue it creeps into your conversations with others.  Hubby had done some connection recently across space and time and this connection resulted in a last minute dinner guest the other day, which throws this anal retentive into a bit of a tizzy.  I was busy reading up on my state's water plans instead of cleaning house.

Anyway, as usually happens it all worked out very well in the end.  The elderly gentlemen brought both white and red wine!  We had fried oysters from the dock, bruschetta on French bread and roasted summer vegetables with herbs.  I made an easy strawberry cream cheese pie with fresh strawberries from the garden for dessert. We drank lots of water and wine.

Our guest was a business man whose main focus in life was using some scientific biochemical technology he developed to help people in both our country and through-out the world to filter things on surfaces and through substances, including water!  He might be an idealist without a chance in hell or he might be a man with a viable mission in life, I really could not tell.  He seemed very nice, straightforward and honorable...a deacon in not one but two churches!

He had recently returned from Poland where he was working but also assisting with a high school science fair outside the city of Krakow.  He had been assigned several children who were working on a water filtering project.  They were trying to filter radioisotopes from drinking water.  When he asked why they had selected this project, they explained that their drinking water was making their people sick from the radioactive particles in it!  He was shocked and also greatly saddened to see these young scientists working on such a tragic problem.   Then as a scientist he had to explain that filtering the drinking water was one small step as they were showering their bodies in this same water and it would be absorbed through the skin as well.  This was not Japan after a tragic earthquake, but Poland where the former footprint of the USSR is still ugly and the black market is more than healthy.  In Japan they are monitoring the radioactivity from the earthquake, but in Poland it is from the lack of regulation from their old power plants.

As a liberal voter I am big on environmental regulation, and I know that means a greater cost in whatever I buy to offset the greater burden to the business owner, but at least it is a transparent choice and I accept, that with our growing population, it will become a more expensive way forward.  We may own less fancy technology and less of it, but our eyes will be open, our lungs will be clear and our organs will be healthy and our children will thank us.