I remember learning about this in environmental science class in a Canadian university, that even though Canada has more drinkable water per capita than pretty much any country in the world, huge swaths of the Indigenous populations here are under boil water orders because their water supply is unsafe to drink directly (and there are obviously many doubts whether simply boiling it helps to any meaningful extent). This is what colonialism and systematic discrimination looks like and needless to say this stuck with the entire class, as was the realization that even though we all find it disgusting, none of us can meaningfully do anything about it in the current political climate (which is a pretty frequent realization in environmental science tbh).
If you look upstream of the reservations in Canada, more often than not you’ll find a chemical plant. Just saying
I remember learning about this in environmental science class in a Canadian university, that even though Canada has more drinkable water per capita than pretty much any country in the world, huge swaths of the Indigenous populations here are under boil water orders because their water supply is unsafe to drink directly (and there are obviously many doubts whether simply boiling it helps to any meaningful extent). This is what colonialism and systematic discrimination looks like and needless to say this stuck with the entire class, as was the realization that even though we all find it disgusting, none of us can meaningfully do anything about it in the current political climate (which is a pretty frequent realization in environmental science tbh).
It’s almost as if it was designed that way…