108 page, 3.625×5.5, perfect bound book.
This is a story of chemically contaminated drinking water in my Wisconsin hometown. Such stories are not hard to come by; in fact, it’s stupid easy to find an environmental disaster near you. The hard part is responding to such stories, changing our behavior on such a scale that we actually challenge systemic environmental devastation. This zine is my grapple with such things: the notion of environmental revolution, our modern ways of living, and my own feelings of powerlessness. Much of this comes filtered through the lens of my experience working as a ramp agent at the local airport, a happenstance that eventually coincided with the fact that the airport is largely responsible for the PFAs water contamination. And while aspects of this narrative are certainly intended to inform, the larger story is the emotional toll of connection: to the land, to capitalism, to each other. We are our giant corporations, we are the poisons in our water, we are the rivers we love, and we are the stories we tell. This zine is a capture of that moment in time, a time when I thought about water more than I thought about anything. Because water is life.