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During summer 2024, Louisiana State Government undertook with a third-party cybersecurity contractor, Cloudflare. Following this move, searches originating from outside the USA were blocked from access. Louisiana Department of Health Drinking Water Facilities records became inaccessible, along with the Department of Environmental Quality database of spill incidents and records associated with hazardous spills. WT worked to successfully resolve the matter with IT staff of the Louisiana government to restore access to these vital records, not only for our media to continue to tell the story of water on the North American continent, but for students, researchers and educators that need access to vital information. WaterToday reached out to Dr. Peter Leavitt, a prolific researcher in water, located in the upper Mississippi River drainage basin in Central Canada.


WaterToday: Dr. Leavitt, thank you for being here. WT is concerned with factors that impact drinking water quality in Canada, USA and Mexico. Why do we need a continental perspective on water?

Dr. Peter Leavitt: The drivers for changes in water quality occur on the that scale, most things known to cause really serious problems with water quality are at least sub-continental if not actually continental. Land use, agriculture, if you paint North America with the ag map, you pretty much overlay that perfectly on the excess nutrient inputs and the harmful algal blooms. Same thing for climate, you can basically tell where the water is coming from, from atmospheric circulation or what we call climate models. It's pretty easy to predict where you are going to have highs and lows of water. These are things occurring on a planetary scale, we just bring them right down to the continent.

There are interesting examples on why you would want to manage on this scale. I am working with Chinese National Academy of Sciences on a paper looking at the recovery of lakes. A lot of lakes are losing oxygen. De-oxygenation is quite an issue, except in China. In China the oxygen levels are going up, because they have spent one trillion dollars a year for 20 years to basically build out the wastewater and ag nutrient infrastructure to capture the nutrients. They are now seeing, throughout the third largest country in the world by area, increases in water quality, not every lake, but at the broad scale. Can we do it? Absolutely, but obviously we have to do it at a much larger scale.

The other thing, this affects near shore regions particularly, rivers run throughout much of the continent, they are integrating material from Canada down to the Gulf of Mexico, from the east slope of the Rockies out to the Great Lakes. With that kind of integrated area, it's probably not just one thing that causes the problems, but the aggregate of things. If you want to fix the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, you have to start by asking "where do the nutrients come from?" They come from the upper Midwest, into Canada, from Ohio, they come from all over.

WT: There is an interesting picture of water quality emerging on our maps, compare WTNY.us to WTLA.us, you can see the current BWA's in Louisiana, the water operators in Louisiana have their hands full, being at the very end of the longest river run on the continent. Is this an issue?

Leavitt Yes. Yes. There are certain jurisdictions that are not particularly progressive in their water management strategies, including (Central Canada Province of) Saskatchewan, where there is a plan to drain 75% of the remaining wetlands. That's on top of the 50 to 60% drained in the mid 20th century. There are scientific reports, a 700 page blue-ribbon panel report that says this is a bad idea, from top to bottom. Government published it, and then said, "Ok, now how are we going to go ahead and do this?" This is consultation theatre rather than consultation. What are our constraints, what are our options for using the water? Do we want to use it for resource extraction, do we want to use it for industrial support or domestic uses? It has all the appearances of consultation, but it doesn't actually occur.

We had an election (Oct 28, 2024), the party causing the problems got back in. They won nothing in the urban centers, the population distribution in Saskatchewan has a lot of smaller centers and rural centers, so they still won the popular vote, a fairly strong majority. The wetland drainage will affect (water quality in) Buffalo Pound Lake which is the drinking water reservoir for half the population. The rest get their water from what is let through (Buffalo Pound).

WT: Water policy, water investment, infrastructure investment up where you are impacts Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico and a lot of places along the way. You have said the water quality issue can be resolved with policy and investment in infrastructure and technology. What would you say to mining, to all industry players, to governments, can we solve water problems?

Leavitt: I would say that everyone benefits from improved water quality. I mean, do you really want to be drinking Evian water from France in a plastic bottle? Does that even make any amount of sense at all? No, you would rather open the tap and have really nice tasting water come out. This is practical across the continent.

Most water problems are tractable, this is not rocket science. This is not overly complicated, we know the causes. The complication comes on the social side of things. What are we willing to do as a society? If the will is there, the technology is imminently available and easily applied. If you want (to secure water quality), it's there.

The China example is a good model going forward for the more complicated things, like climate change. There is always a hand waving to say "Oh my, it's too expensive, we cannot possibly do it." The thing is, the cost to recover from damage gets more expensive through time. The longer we wait, the more expensive it gets. So have at 'er, wait if you want but it's only going to cost more in the future, it's a compound interest problem. (Alternatively), if you look at the historical records, you can see that most water bodies will recover themselves, it's the nature of the hydrological cycle that the system will eventually cleanse itself. We see this in Europe, when the Black Plague went through, where it shut down a town the water quality in the lake got better. This did not happen all of a sudden, it took decades, or centuries.

WT: How much of the issue with lack of action to address source water quality has to do with people outright denying the problem exists?

Leavitt: I don't know that people deny the problems with water quality, it's more that it's out of sight, out of mind. Where does the water come from? If you ask, most people say, "It comes from the tap". Where does it go? "We flush it and it goes away". The ecosystem itself, wetlands for example, clean the water to give good groundwater quality, so you can have a well and drink from the well. If you think only of the immediately adjacent source, it's really easy to get disconnected from what's going on. Look at the distribution of population, if you live in a big city you forget there are things going on upstream and downstream that affect both the amount and the quality of water.

WT: Even the engineers in the water plants don't necessarily know the entire context of where the water comes from and all the impacts to the source water. How can we bring the big picture in focus?

Leavitt: The disconnect is real. Just to go back to the Saskatchewan example with wetland drainage, the way they plan to drain the wetlands is to channelize the landscape and put runoff into smaller creeks that aggregate. Water runs downhill, and at the bottom of the hill is a larger river or a lake. So this is an absolute guarantee that we are going to pollute the water that we base our industry, our domestic uses our public drinking water consumption on. For what purpose?

It could even, in theory, affect the climate systems because the water you need to get the late summer rains is convectively driven. You've got to have water on the landscape to evaporate and condense to come back down again as rain, that's the local hydrologic cycle. If you drain the water from the wetlands into a creek, it just goes, and keeps going, it will be in Hudson Bay and you won't have it to evaporate later.

The arguments against better water management are quite facile. I'm not in opposition to the agriculture community because it's not the broader community that is a problem. There is a certain subsection of the community that simply wants it their way or the highway, and they have the ear of politicians forcing this (wetland drainage). Very few people are benefitting from these policies applied writ-large.

See Peter Leavitt, FRSC, Professor at University of Regina, here.
Canada Research Chair in Environmental Change and Society
Co-Director, Institute of Environmental Change and Society
Oct 29 2024 440 pm EDT