A lot of focus with the Summer Olympics has been on the Seine River.
The river has played a key role in European history from ancient times. Long before Île de la Cité – an island in the middle of the river – was the location of the spectacular Notre-Dame cathedral – it was home to Neolithic tribesmen.
Some say they chose the location for safety. Others acknowledge that the tribe inhabiting the area when the Romans arrived, the Parisii, controlled a flourishing trading network, with the island being a convenient place to cross the river. However, there is evidence the island has long been a place of worship.
The Seine River, after all, was named for the Gallo-Roman goddess of the river, Sequana. In early times, a river deity did not so much inhabit a river, but was the personification of the river.
So how did a river that was worshipped as a goddess in early times, and revered by artists and romantics well into the modern age, become so polluted?
Despite the $1.5 billion cleanup project aimed at making the river safe for Olympic swimmers, the river is indeed polluted – perhaps not as much as it was, but enough to interfere with some Olympic plans. Swimming was banned in the Seine in 1923, and a good many people, likely including athletes competing in triathlon and decathlon events, have voiced the opinion it still should be.
The fact is, the pollution in the Seine is neither new nor unique. Every major urban river has been used as an open sewer as populations and industries grew – inevitably faster than the ability to safely and sustainably deal with waste.
According to the BBC, those Impressionist paintings of the romantic Seine showed a river that was ecologically in bad shape. By 1970s, the Seine downstream from Paris was considered ecologically dead. With more than half of Paris’ wastewater going into the Seine untreated, the oxygen levels in the water (to be more precise, the toxic soup flowing between the banks) could not support fish. The same BBC article noted that by the 1990s, wastewater treatment plants were having a positive impact – in some places, fish were coming back.
However, it seems they will likely be the only creatures swimming on a regular basis in the Seine for the time being.
We need to take a close look at our own rivers. We have been doing the same thing the Europeans did to their rivers, only for a much shorter time and on a smaller scale.
We know that sewage systems with antiquated, leaking pipes cause problems with local waterways. We also know that older systems tend to have stormwater and wastewater in the same pipes, meaning a sudden, intense rainfall will literally flush everything into the waterways.
Nature’s way of cleaning water – wetlands – continue to be drained and destroyed.
We still have some of the cleanest rivers in the world – teeming with aquatic life and sparkling clear. We can swim in them, at least most of the time, as well as go boating, tubing, kayaking and fishing.
We also have functioning wetlands, home to hundreds of species of flora and fauna, everything from carnivorous flowers to rare reptiles to migrating birds to large animals.
Maintenance is always easier and more effective than a complete make-over. The harder we work now at keeping our still-pretty-clean rivers safe for everything and everyone in, on and near them, the more likely it will be that our children and grandchildren will experience the delight of diving into a crystal-clear river or lake on a hot summer day.
In the meantime, bravo to the French leaders who took the proverbial (and in a couple of cases, literal) plunge and invested a huge amount of money into cleaning up and sharing with the world something they treasure – their magnificent Seine River. There is still much to do, and we can only hope the day will come when swimmers – even Olympians – will be able to plunge into the waters of the Seine without trepidation or Pepto-Bismol.
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Pauline Kerr is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter with Midwestern Newspapers. She can be reached at pkerr@midwesternnewspapers.com.
