Evidently, the rain is not safe to drink over the course of a lifetime.
In June, the United States Environmental Protection Agency lowered its guidelines for safe levels of four per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). Specifically, the agency issued a Lifetime Drinking Water Health Advisory:
EPA’s lifetime health advisories identify levels to protect all people, including sensitive populations and life stages, from adverse health effects resulting from a lifetime of exposure to these PFAS in drinking water. EPA’s lifetime health advisories also take into account other potential sources of exposure to these PFAS beyond drinking water (for example, food, air, consumer products, etc.), which provides an additional layer of protection.
What does this mean? People who regularly drink water contaminated with PFAS are likely to face adverse health effects in their lifetimes. This announcement lowered the PFAS level at which we understand there to be a risk; the experts are now saying that PFAS are more toxic than we thought before.
The insight of the Stockholm University study—linked above—is that rainwater now exceeds these government guidelines almost everywhere on Earth. This is also true of Danish guidelines for PFAS in drinking water, and the EU Environmental Quality Standard.
Our society makes the outdoors dangerous. It makes the alternative of wild living less possible. In doing so, it makes us less free. All the years we spend trying to survive in sedentary society, growing more frustrated, that very society is also walling off lively possibilities, salting the earth of our wildest dreams. Do you want to walk across the continent? Careful on the highways and barbed wire. Do you want to live off the land? Mind the soil quality where you sow. When industrial-scale feeding operations make a river unswimmable, the world becomes more hostile. When we cultivate yards of European turfgrass and apply synthetic pesticides, the world becomes more hostile. This encourages us not to explore the lands around us, but to hole up in our apartments or mcmansions, vehicles, and workplaces where we can control the climate and count on the water from the filter.
Furthermore, this is genocide of indigenous ("fourth world") peoples. The fraction of humans still living outdoors in hunter-gatherer and nomadic-pastoral lifestyles have faced an array of existential threats since sedentary cultures began to form ten thousand years ago. We like to think of our modern societies as morally enlightened and respectful of these groups, but indigenous genocide and worldwide cultural extermination continues. You can see it in the pipelines over waterways sacred to the Sioux. You can see it in Bolsonaro's opening of the Amazon to more drilling and mining, in China's forced assimilations in Tibet and Xinjiang, and in encroachments on Hadza territory in Tanzania. And now we have poisoned the water for every last person without access to a filter. If you are one of the Awá people hunting and gathering in the Amazon rain forest, you do not get a water softener or a refrigerator with a spigot. These circumstances are not mere National Geographic Channel® mission moments telling tales of a lost innocence or nobility. Each of the limited number of cultures on Earth tells us about ourselves and holds unique knowledge. Each living member of another culture offers a window into how your life might have been different if you had been born a world away.
I always trusted rainwater. Maybe that is why this headline hurts. I knew that evaporation left dissolved salts behind; i assumed it would leave almost all impurities behind (though i understood it could pick up gaseous, atmospheric molecules like carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide [becoming acid rain]). If it were any different—if it did not crystallize as it froze, if it did not have a slight Van der Waals force—life as we know it could not have existed. Water is life? We have adulterated the thing synonymous with life—and indeed, the overwhelming essence of ourselves—into yet another duplicity, dependent on context, simultaneously granting life in the immediate and deliberate, creeping death.
—Lucas