introduction
Having changed my direction from chemical to geoecology, I hoped to justify my idea that environmental pollution can be prevented and this is just a relic of the past. But everything turned out to be much more complicated. We cannot exist without having any impact on the environment. And almost always it turns out to be negative. Therefore, we can only try to find some kind of compromise. But for this it is necessary to sacrifice something. Time, resources, amenities.... I hope that in the future we will be able to come to a compromise with the nature around us, that we can find a way to preserve it for future generations, and not leave them a legacy of problems that need to be solved. One of these solutions is described in this narrative on behalf of an ecologist, researcher and traveler.

the main part
11.05.2070 – "There is no clean natural water left in the world" - this news was broadcast for 4 months on all news channels/information sources.
06/16/2070 – "The last source of drinking water was contaminated with toxic compounds due to natural processes: atmospheric transport and underground transport of polluting compounds through aquifers. How did it happen? Why have attempts to prevent this failed?" - all because of the cost of the projects being implemented. It was too expensive to try to protect a natural source from pollution. It turned out to be much cheaper to purify the least polluted or contaminated with less dangerous compounds in the amount necessary only to ensure optimal human life.
Environmental scientists and technologists have been trying for 15 years to stop the sudden crisis of "clean water", which began in 2068. And it turned out to be sudden only because many states gradually raised the permissible pollution standards, trying to ward off aggression from other countries, saying that their water meets all the required indicators. Meanwhile, irreversible processes took place in the depths of the earth, far from the eyes of observers. Like a cancer, they affected the main organs of the earth, eating cell by cell, spreading with incredible speed, this cancer satisfied its immense hunger. And when the ecosystems got out of balance, and the changes became irreversible, the first symptoms of the disease appeared. Not only has the composition of water changed all over the planet, but plant communities have also changed. Slowly, but with irreversible persistence, the more valuable and "fastidious" plants for humans began to get sick, wither and die, their place was taken by more adapted and unpretentious settlers, not so bright and beautiful, but faded and prickly. So whole communities changed, where there was a spruce forest, a pine forest appeared, where oaks grew, grassy fields remained.
It would seem that only a few years of struggle have passed, and we have not been able to move a step forward. All our knowledge and technologies could not compete with the creator nature, a much more powerful force, and we, enthusiasts and optimists unsuccessfully fought with realists and the economies of countries.
11.06.2072 – "The composition of the water of the world ocean has changed" - previously it was believed that this giant, under the influence of microscopic human activity, will forever exist in the form in which we all knew it, but the composition of its waters has changed, and the diluting ability of the ocean could not dilute such a number of extraneous pollutants that as new colonists, the discoverers of the territory, populated it and changed it for themselves.
I wasn't born then.
All my life I have seen only dark brown, greenish and close to black water in all lakes, rivers, seas and oceans. I have never swam outdoors on a hot summer day in warm or slightly cool water. But she always beckoned me. She beckoned with her serenity and violent temper, strength and fragility. When I was a child, my parents often went out of town, to relax in nature, to walk through the forest, to observe how it changes. My parents were nerds, and I often heard them regret what was happening to the world around us. But then I didn't understand much and mostly just enjoyed life, ran after insects, watched the water rushing rapidly through a cascade of waterfalls, and then peacefully floats in a blooming lake and again violently breaks through holes in an abandoned dam.
Diligently drawing the lake, I dangled my legs sitting on a rock a meter from the cliff. I sat there a hundred times, but it was on that day that the stone trembled and fell down, taking me with it along with a pile of earth and other stones. I fell into the lake. That moment has remained forever in my memory. Even now, 20 years later, I remember it as if it was yesterday. I didn't know how to swim, I always splashed in shallow pools, so I quickly went to the bottom without having time to shout or take a breath of air, and after a few seconds I couldn't see anything. No light, no silhouettes, only darkness surrounded me. I tried to swim, paddling with my feet and hands in all directions and was already beginning to choke when I reached the bottom. Now I remember it as slimy because of algae and settled suspended solids. At some point I just stopped moving, and the water pushed me out, then they could find me. I was in intensive care for a long time, as my lungs had time to fill with water, and it had time to affect the whole body. I still see a doctor regularly. It was then, lying in the ward surrounded by nurses, that I decided to learn to swim and develop a way to purify natural waters.
In 2073, scientists and politicians agreed on the world convention on pollution of natural waters, ways to solve the problem of "black water" and methods of its purification, called "Poseidon", held in the water city of Russia, where it was decided to found a world organization engaged in the development of technologies that could help restore the environment and make it suitable for human and animal life. The organization was named after the convention that gave it life "Poseidon", it included 17 countries whose resources could allow the development of such technologies, while the rest of the countries signed up to pay an acceptable tax and agreed to the timely application of the proposed technology.
What influenced such a shift in the state of soils, underground and surface waters and atmospheric air around the world? The answer itself asks for the mind – the human activity of the past centuries and the present. But the essence of the ongoing transformations of compounds and their distribution is so complex that it is impossible to keep track of it, and we can only guess what became the trigger.
We can only name what contributed to the overall picture and for some it was a big brush stroke, and for some it was a small thin line, but no less important. It's like comparing emissions of sulfur dioxide and DDT, as a result of human activity in the 20th century, millions of tons of sulfur dioxide were released into the atmosphere on average, but the environment coped with this, if the same amount of DDT got into the environment, we would all have died long ago.
Let's start with the fact that humanity has been influencing the environment since its very appearance and gradually, as human needs have grown, so has its impact on the environment. Every breakthrough in technology and science has significantly increased the negative footprint of man on the face of the Earth. We buried waste in the world ocean, in the underground horizon, dumped toxic substances into water, soil and atmospheric air, but for a long time the environment coped with this. The state of the environment has always been somewhat worried about, but only from the side of human benefit. This was expressed in the restriction of deforestation, mining, abstraction of surface and groundwater, limited emissions into the atmosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere, prohibited the production and use of certain substances (for example, POPS, which included many pesticides, dioxins and furans). But there were organizations that violated the regulations.
A separate place can be allocated to wars, every century of humanity's existence has been saturated with small and large wars. The largest in history from the side of influence on the natural environment was the "War of Giants", which subsequently involved the whole world and affected the whole Earth. The catastrophe did not happen, we, plants, animals survived. But it wasn't long… The war echoed decades later.
Since many countries abandoned environmentally friendly fuel due to military operations, they used what was easily available, wood fuel, coal. Our greedy, cynical and arrogant nature has destroyed all sustainable ecosystems, everything that was not created by us. And over time, pollutants seeped into the soil, poisoned the groundwater, spread through the atmospheric air throughout the Earth.
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The Poseidon Convention has untied the hands of environmentalists. We received permission to use robotics in our research and, it would seem, smart, rapidly developing robots that are potentially dangerous to humans, but it was thanks to the synthesis of human creativity and intuition, and the expanded mathematical and mechanical capabilities of robots, that we created a mechanism for activating controlled chain reactions, which were later called the "Sea Dragon". It was a relatively dangerous way to clean surface waters, but we took a chance. Microscopic nanorobots were programmed to change the structure of molecules. They were embedded in their crystal lattices, destroyed the bonds between atoms, connected them into simpler molecules.
Currently, our nanorobots, unfortunately, can only work with substances in the liquid state, where their concentration and crystal lattices are not so dense and strong compared to substances in the solid state. In addition, nanorobots cannot work with a gaseous medium where the molecules are in a too mobile state. But it's only today....
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