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https://reasonstobecheerful.world/paris-organic-farming-clean-water-supply/>
"The bright, late morning sun lights up the wooded hills and swooping valleys
of the Pays d’Othe, a bucolic farming region about 100 miles southeast of
Paris. In the foreground, a charming stone aqueduct cuts across the green
fields in this snapshot of early summer.
“That’s the Aqueduct of the Vanne,” says Zoltan Kahn, gesturing over to what is
a small portion of the 156-kilometer network built by Baron Haussman, the
former prefect of Paris, in the late 19th century. “It carries water all the
way to Paris.”
The Vanne, which supplies a fifth of Paris’s tap water, is fed by the water
sources in these parts. Home to one of the largest forests in France, the
region is rich in biodiversity and has been a key drinking water catchment area
for centuries.
Yet with France’s growing intensification of farming in the 1960s — making it
today the leading European agricultural producer, with about 18 percent of the
continent’s output — that changed. To ramp up productivity, French farmers
began to use more chemicals on their crops. Those fertilizers and pesticides in
turn made it into major water supplies, in particular the watersheds that
eventually would flow to Paris.
For many years, that was accepted as the norm. Costly water-processing plants
were built to clean up the water in cities across the region and in the French
capital so that it was safe enough to be used for drinking by large urban
populations.
But with the rapid onset of climate change, which is tightening use of water
reserves and triggering droughts in France and across the world, that approach
is no longer seen as viable. Instead, the city now believes that water supplies
must be protected at the source.
“We have to take a more sober approach to water use,” says Dan Lert, deputy
mayor of Paris in charge of the ecological transition, climate plan, water and
energy. “We cannot afford to be wasteful and polluting in the time of a climate
crisis.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
