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Earth Matters : Forests to faucets: Protecting drinking water for everyone

By Bridget Likely and Kari Blood

Autumn in the Valley has been a stunning parade of color this year. That’s a dramatic shift from just a few months ago, when dull brown seemed like the dominant hue. A lack of rain that began in June baked lawns into crunchy straw, withered crops in local farm fields, and transformed normally free-flowing streams into mud puddles where small fish struggled to survive. A changing global climate made the summer of 2022 one of the hottest and driest on record in Massachusetts. The state declared a “Level 3-Critical” drought in the Connecticut River Valley in early August. Drought not only ruins landscaping, reduces crop yields and stresses wildlife, but it also threatens a fundamental resource that we often take for granted: our drinking water.