The Guardian discusses How Americans stopped trusting their water. Many residents of Martin county, Kentucky, won’t drink their tap water, a legacy of years of mismanagement. She’s not alone: 96% of residents rely primarily on bottled water for drinking, and only 56% use tap water for cooking, according to a recent study by the University of Kentucky.
Circle of Blue discusses how One Michigan County Tells the Story of a Nation Plagued By Water Pollution. Borrello has been monitoring the Pine River for nearly two decades, so he is attuned to the marks of a healthy ecosystem. He and his team of students and community members test water samples from the 103-mile-long river and its tributaries for an array of pollution indicators: nitrogen and phosphorus, bacteria and dissolved oxygen. Since he began the project in 2003, Borrello said contamination in the watershed has only gotten worse. To Borrello, the source of the problem seems obvious. “The river is loaded with nutrients, it’s loaded with bacteria,” he told Circle of Blue. “We see it upstream and downstream, we can look at where it’s coming from. It’s coming from application sites of manure, and it’s coming from Concentrated Agricultural Feeding Operations (CAFOs) themselves.”