The Pharmaceutical Journal Vol 266 No 7154 p868
June 30, 2001

Vital resource
Heavy responsibility
Tang of bureaucracy

Vital resource

Water is one of the essentials of life, but we tend to neglect its importance to our daily existence. The growing decline in ready availability of water supplies, and deterioration of aquatic biodiversity in many parts of the world, is glaring evidence of our criminal neglect of an ever-imminent threat that hangs over us and the plants and animals with which we share the earth’s surface. A comment in Science for May 11, by scientists at the World Resources Institute in Washington, emphasises the urgency of the need to manage water and condemns our neglect of the situation over recent years.

Freshwater ecosystems, the authors of the paper assert, occupy less than 1 per cent of the earth’s surface, but deliver goods and services of enormous global value. Inland fisheries contribute some 12 per cent of all fish consumed by humans, and irrigated agriculture supplies about 40 per cent of the world’s food crops. Hydropower provides nearly 20 per cent of the world’s electricity. An estimated 12 per cent of all animal species live within freshwater ecosystems, and most other species depend for survival on such systems.

It is alarming to note that during the last half-century the number of dams exceeding 15m in height has increased world-wide from 5,700 to 41,000. The result has been extensive habitat fragmentation in some 60 per cent of major river basins. A few major rivers no longer reach the sea during the dry season. Of surface waters used for agriculture about 70 per cent are tapped, although less than half the quantity actually reaches the crops. Today, 2.3 billion people live in river basins, which are under stress.

In addition to diminishing supplies, higher pollution levels and habitat degradation are contributing to water scarcity. Some 1.5 billion people rely on ground-water sources for drinking, but these too may be polluted and diminished by demands on surface water. Aquatic biodiversity is more adversely affected than that of forests and grasslands. Indeed, during the past few decades more than 20 per cent of the world’s freshwater fish species have become either extinct or endangered.

In general, water is greatly undervalued by the governments of the world. Measures to combat pollution are ineffective, and industrial polluters rarely pay for the damage they cause.

An important step forward would be to improve efficiency by setting realistic prices for the supply and distribution of water. In Chile and Indonesia, for example, increased water charges have considerably reduced water demand. Higher prices are accepted provided consumers can be assured of a more reliable service.

The cost of integrated watershed management should be included in the price charged for water. Watersheds are at present neglected as part of the strategy for managing water more effectively. Natural forest and wetland habitats must be conserved, with buffer zones along rivers and streams protected from farming and road construction. Polluters must be charged realistically for any effluents they produce. Water monitoring must not be relaxed, and more basic and applied research must be carried out into the quantity and quality of water available to living things.

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Heavy responsibility

The future of life on earth, barring a visit by an asteroid, will depend much more on the vagaries of humanity than on anything else, according to a comment by Gretchen Daily of Stanford University in Nature for May 17. Human beings alone or in concert have it in their power to extinguish most macroscopic animals and plants, and to make drastic changes in the ecological and evolutionary milieu in which they have to exist, she writes.

Human influence is particularly concentrated on agricultural plots, gardens, pastures and managed forests. However, surprisingly little is really known about the detailed biogeography of our countryside, particularly that of tropical regions, where environmental changes may be rapid. As the wilderness on the earth’s surface contracts it is reasonable to ask ourselves what creatures and ecosystems will survive into future decades and centuries. Important considerations requiring our investigation include making decisions over what species are advantageous to the countryside and what role they are likely to play in the purification of our water, control of floods, and pollination of our crops.

Biodiversity conservation depends to some degree on knowing how to restrict the size of our cultivated plots. Conservation may sometimes be more effective when applied to deforested than forested habitats, and some farming landscapes retain more diverse and valuable ecosystems than do others that might appear at first sight equally valid. Farmers, foresters, and society in general need to be made aware by communications from scientists of the different options that are presented, so that the choices made by individuals concerned may be based on sound knowledge and not guesswork. “Nothing less than life is at stake” comes as a sobering conclusion.

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Tang of bureaucracy

In perusing a science journal recently I was alarmed to come across a word I had never encountered before — accessorise. I took it to mean to convert something into an accessory, though whether before or after the fact is not clear. On pursuing the word in my dictionary I discovered a whole host of derivatives of the simple noun access — they include accessorial, accessorily, and accessoriness. The word accessorise is defined as “to provide or furnish with an accessory or accessories.” The barbaric term that troubled me, it seems, was adopted, with the variant spelling accessorize, from the United States in 1939, together with an even worse word, accessorizing. The last term was invented by an advertising agency to describe the acquisition of trinkets to be worn in connection with larger articles of personal adornment. In my opinion, it does not adorn the English language.

The problem of ruining the native tongue by clever agglutinations is far from easy to avoid. We should, I feel, restrict ourselves to honest nouns and verbs, extended where desirable into adjectives and adverbs, but not taken to the stage where, as in German, we can glue elements of speech together without end.

Of course, the bureaucrats and politicians who thrive on gobbledegook and rely upon it to conceal any simple meaning, delight in producing ever new terms in their spin factories. I am sure we pharmacists could, if we had a mind, manufacture a fine crop of barbarisms by expanding some of the names of our drugs. From the class of antidepressants, for example, we could manufacture antidepressantisation to denote therapy with an antidepressant, and even antidepressionisational to cover a whole gamut of pharmacological outcomes. And, in the wider world, what about immunosuppressology and urinary tractarianism? I shall take refuge in a spot of propranololisation if it comes to the push.

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