written 12 August 2023
published 20 August 2023
Last week, Reutlingen, Germany experienced a foot of hail. A glacial lake outburst flood destroyed homes in Alaska, and flooding impacted parts of central Europe, Slovenia, Norway, and Sweden. Strong storms hit eastern US, with wide spread damage, and hundreds of thousands without power, including flash floods and a tornado in Massachusetts. Fire devastated western Maui, destroying at least 2,200 buildings, including historic downtown Lahaina, driven by 80 mph wind gusts. The official count is currently 93 dead, which is expected to rise significantly. Siberian fires are larger than the rest of the world combined. In Iran, the heat index hit 158°F.
"The Marsh Builders", by Sharon Levy, describes historic human impact on water quality, and the struggle by Arcata to build alternative sewage treatment in Humboldt Bay.
Booming post war industrial growth left American's waterways in terrible condition. Capitalism treats the natural world as a consumable resource, or a trash dump. Money is made by ignoring toxic waste. Consequently, most people were forced to drink polluted water, rivers burned periodically, and lakes became lethal to fish. Public outrage eventually forced a federal response. Nixon signed the Clean Water Act in 1972, and created the Environmental Protection Agency to enforce it.
As urban densities increase, sewage disposal becomes a significant human impact on water quality. For centuries, untreated sewage was dumped into rivers or oceans, with the philosophy that "pollution dilution is the solution". Over time, the "dilution" became inadequate, and actual treatment became essential. The primary phase is physical removal of chunks and trash, leaving a hazardous sludge. Secondary treatment cultivates bacteria to digests everything organic, beginning to work with other life forms.
By the 70's, the accepted method was activated sludge, an energy intensive process forcing oxygen into the sludge, stimulating rapid bacteria growth, resulting in cleaner water. Under the Clean Water Act, federal grants help communities build centralized sewage systems, and engineering companies flourished by charging a percentage of the huge project cost.
California had set water quality standards not met by the numerous aging sewer systems around the Humboldt Bay. The Humboldt Bay Wastewater Authority planned a regional sewer system which would gather all the effluent, pipe it under the Bay, treat it in a central plant on the western edge, and dump the output into deep ocean water. This expensive system, very energy intensive at a time of increasing awareness of the need for energy conservation, had a vulnerable under-bay pipe, and would open vast areas to suburban sprawl.
Arcata, which had just elected a progressive majority to the City Council, proposed an alternative treatment method, using engineered marsh construction to clean the water sufficiently to be beneficially dumped in the Bay, not piped to the ocean for disposal. This enlisted more life forms than simple bacteria, mimicking how nature cleans water. It was much less energy intensive, scaled to suit the local needs, and would create rich local biodiversity, replacing some of the diminishing marshlands.
After years of effort, the State eventually allowed Arcata to remove themselves from the regional wastewater plan, and build their biodynamic system. The result not only succeeded, but thrived, expanding to become more than a sewage treatment system: a birder's paradise with thriving biodiversity. It became a model for thousands of systems all over the planet, especially relevant in low-income areas of the world.
What I found interesting in this story was how an environmentally good goal, clean water, became limited by institutionalized scientific dogma, regulatory inertia, and the economic blinkers of entrenched construction industrialization, to stymy an even better environmental goal of using living systems to sustain human health.
The book also helped explain why the Republican party, and big businesses that fund it, hates the EPA. Corporate capitalism, as practiced these days, depends on not taking responsibility for the messes created in the industrial process. They expect to profit from the product, but require "others" to pay for the cleanup, ignoring that we are all in this together. As companies have gotten larger, only the federal government has the financial and legal clout to force accountability. But rather than take responsibility, corporations cry "regulatory burden".
In the 60's, the crisis was pollution in the water, and national public pressure forced governmental response. Today's climate crisis is atmospheric carbon pollution. As the world heating accelerates, the only question is: how much has to be destroyed before a global response says ENOUGH!
