Drinking water - the most important food - irreplaceable!

  • Written by Portal Editor

The scholar, a natural scientist, was far more than just a bit distraught at the sight of his home. Where once forests were greening the hills, long-naked rocks sticked out of the ground.

Villages and villous settlements grew rampant on the coasts and river banks. In the waters, rubbish, fish and birds had become scarce.

"What is the end of the exploitation of our earth in all future centuries," the friend of nature wondered? Where is our greed to go? "

The man who was disturbed by environmental concerns, Pliny was his name, just lived almost 2000 years ago in ancient Rome, a seething giant city with about one million inhabitants. On sultry days, the metropolis lay under a dim haze, which made people breathing heavily, quite apart from the worries of supplying clean drinking water. Until today the elaborate constructions of Roman engineers on pipelines and viaducts for the water supply are still well-known.

Explanation: Drinking water is generally fresh water with such a high degree of purity that it is suitable for human use, in particular for drinking and for the preparation of food. Drinking water must not contain any disease-causing micro-organisms, should contain a minimum concentration of minerals. Water is not a scarce commodity in Northern and Western Europe, in the south it already looks completely different.
 
The Mediterranean peoples still suffer from the consequences of the ecological damage that Rome once caused. But four centuries before the complaints of the critic of Pliny, the disturbances of the environment in Greece had reached a serious level: the philosopher Plato wrote that the country was the same as the "skeleton of a body consumed by a disease" "only a meager skeleton anymore" remained.

At first they created space for fields and fruit gardens, later they beat timber for Athens. Above all, the fleet of the Attic sea power consumed vast amounts of wood. In the Peloponnesian War, which lasted for 27 years, whole forests were sinking, because continually new ships for the oppressed navy were launched. At the end of the war Attica's mountains were almost bare; From then on, shipbuilding timber had to be imported from Thrace, Macedonia or even from Lebanon.

What the Greeks had begun, the Romans continued, which finally brought the firewood for the heating systems of their luxury baths from Africa. Rome's branding legions accelerated the ancient forest dying.

Ecocritics such as Pliny and Plato, who warned of soil erosion, the pollution of drinking water, the extinction of the forest, and the unhealthy urban life, continued to exist in ancient times. But their mostly moralizing sermons remained almost uninformed. Only once, in 15 AD, when two Roman senators wanted to regulate the floods of the Tiber through a canal system, the conservative opponents of the project went through: At a senate hearing, experts and citizens discussed possible environmental damage riskously discarded.

The architect Vitruvius, who warned the emperor Augustus of the lead pipes, received less interest in the drinking of water from the Romans. Lead, Vitruv wrote, "is to be harmful to the human body." Up to 60,000 tons of lead, as much as around 1850, were transported every year in the Augustus empire and processed into pipelines, but also to plates and drinking cups.

A "pandemic lead poisoning" with symptoms such as blood poverty, paralysis, premature babies and chronic fatigue has, in the opinion of many historians, made the Roman gentlemen gradually wearied.

Unlike other natural resources, however, water is not consumed, since water is only used and possibly contaminated with pollutants. The total water volume of the earth in all aggregate states remains approximately the same, only the distribution between the environmental compartments changes. Only a very small quantity of the water escapes from the airspout into the universe as water vapor.

The water requirements of humans vary according to physical condition, body mass, activity and climate. The human being takes water in the form of drinks and food and gives it with urine, feces, sweat and breath. Water is also produced in the body during oxidative degradation of organic food.

So there are many different reasons for the water and its purity and cleanliness.

Please read as well:

Bear tracks in Jablanica Mountains above Lake Ohrid

The Ohrid Lake and its bubbling underground springs

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