Read about the dying lake, the biggest in the UK, suffering from lack of controls from agricultural and other pollution which has sounded the death knell for yet another vital freshwater supply in this troubled world.

https://www.rte.ie/news/ulster/2023/0917/1405756-lough-neagh

And/or read the perspective of the economic catastrophe this spells for the citizens of Northern Ireland:

https://www.economist.com/britain/2023/09/21/the-largest-freshwater-lake-in-the-british-isles-has-been-poisoned

Despite the major benefits of fertilizers, their use has caused excessive amounts of nutrients, particularly nitrogen (as shown in Figure 7.4) and phosphorus, to enter freshwater and coastal seas, damaging aquatic ecosystems via a process called eutrophication. This happens naturally when nutrients accumulate as lakes gradually age and become more productive; it usually takes thousands of years to progress. Anthropogenic eutrophication happens when excessive human-generated nutrients result in high growth rates in the algal population. When this algae dies, its decay depletes the water of oxygen. Such eutrophication may also give rise to toxic algal blooms. Both the low oxygen and toxicity cause animal and plant death rates to increase. At the coast, eutrophication can cause so-called dead-zones where little life survives. These near lifeless zones now span hundreds of locations and over 245,000 square kilometres of the world’s oceans.12 Aside from the numerous positive and negative impacts of the Haber–Bosch process, it is very energy intensive. Some 3 to 5 per cent of the world’s natural gas production, and around 1 to 2 per cent of the world’s annual energy supply, is consumed fixing atmospheric nitrogen for human use. This fossil fuel energy, with its effects on the global cycling of carbon, is also driving changes to the global cycling of nitrogen. The changes to the nitrogen cycle are arguably greater than our intervention in the carbon cycle: currently human activity fixes about the same amount of atmospheric nitrogen as all other natural processes put together. We have doubled the intensity of the nitrogen cycle.

The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene

Human activity is the only cause of this tragedy. My blogs have listed many such activities we have feverishly deployed as if anxious to accelerate the sixth extinction.