Logical Ecology

Last week, Florida’s Governor, Charlie Christ, unveiled a strategy to provide the missing link to restoring Florida’s River of Grass. A plan for a $1.75 billion purchase of U.S. Sugar Corporation’s property - up to 187,000 acres of agricultural land that can be used to re-establish the connection between Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades with a system of managed storage and treatment. 

Today, the South Florida Water Management District took the next step towards one of the largest environmental land purchases in Florida’s history by ratifying the “Statement of Principles” that was signed with U.S. Sugar Corporation.  This allows the detailed and confidential purchase negotiations to begin.

As proposed, U.S. Sugar will have the right to continue farming the land for the next 6 years.

The acquisition of the property will reduce harmful freshwater discharges from Lake Okeechobee to Florida’s coastal rivers and estuaries while reducing phosphorus and improving water quality entering the Everglades.

As always, there are trade-offs with the deal. Some important water storage projects along the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers will be delayed.  And the residents of Palm Beach County will lose $5.4 million in property taxes when U.S. Sugar’s property goes to the State–at a time when revenues are already taking a hit due to tax reform and a drop in tourism. 

Here in the United States, we take clean drinking water for granted.  But in other areas of the world, over 1.1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water.  And 2.6 billion have inadequate sanitation facilities.  Water-related illnesses still kill almost 6,000 people every day.

Water for People supports the development of sustainable water resources in developing countries, while improving sanitation facilities and setting up health education programs. 

On August 14 - 19th, 2008 two Bolivian-American brothers, Alex and Christoper Jahn, will attempt to summit Bolivia’s tallest mountain–Mount Sajama–in the driest conditions on the planet.  The 21,457-foot tall extinct volcano lies at the edge of the Atacama Desert, where less than 1 mm of rain falls each year.

The brothers are making the trek to raise their goal of $10,000 for Water for People projects.  Requested donations range from the Base Camp Level of $5 to the Summit Level of $500.

The Florida Section of American Water Works Association challenges their members to help the cause.  If any of you could help with a Base Camp Level contribution, that would be great, too. 

The Demon in the Freezer:  A True Story is exactly that–a true story–which makes it especially terrifying.  Author Richard Preston, who also wrote The Hot Zone and a novel calledThe Cobra Event could not have written a scarier tale if he was trying to pen a horror story.

The story begins in Boca Raton, where a man named Robert Stevens began feeling ill on October 2, 2001–and died of inhalation anthrax on October 5th.  As it turns out, this was the beginning of the anthrax threat that was never solved.  The anthrax was military grade . . . weapons grade material.

The tale turns to the smallpox virus, variola, eradicated in December, 1979.  Though smallpox no longer existed in nature, it still lived in freezers at two locations–the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, and in Vector, Siberia’s Maximum Containment Laboratory. 

Preston is not only an excellent writer, but he does his homework.  The Demon in the Freezer is based on numerous interviews with health experts, researchers, and U.S. Intelligence agents.  Frighteningly, variola was brought back to life on both continents–in the U.S., to develop improved vaccines, and in Russia, to develop a biological weapon. 

Contention rages among scientists, some of whom believe smallpox should be eliminated from the face of the earth and others who believe we need to keep some on hand for vaccine development and research. 

Smallpox is the most dreadful disease, making even ebola look like a walk in the park.  To think the virus could get in the wrong hands . . . let’s just not think about it. 

The Wall Street Journal recently posted an article in their Real Estate section titled, “Sewer to Spigot: Recycled Water.” Los Angeles, San Diego and Miami-Dade all plan to recycling billions of gallons wastewater to use for drinking water.

As someone who’s been working with wastewater treatment for years, I’ve long known that it’s doable to turn treated wastewater effluent to drinking water. Believe me, if Mississippi River water can be treated to drinking water levels, getting treated wastewater to meet drinking water standards should be a piece of cake.

Cities haven’t moved forward with direct potable recycling in the past for two major reasons. First, the cost has been prohibitive. But increased population combined with water shortages, and improved technology have brought costs more in line. Second, the “yuck” factor made it politically impossible to fund a direct potable reuse project. People just didn’t want to drink that stuff.

Many people don’t realize that they are already drinking recycled wastewater. Most large cities have surface water sources–lakes and rivers. And most of these surface waters receive discharges from wastewater treatment plants. There might only be a short distance between the treated wastewater discharge and the drinking water intake.

Those who get their water from underground aquifers might have more to complain about. But we can only pull water from the aquifers for so long at increasing volumes before we’ll need to supplement that source.

I think we’ll all eventually be drinking some form of recycled wastewater–and we’ll have to trust the plant operators and the technology. Do you think we can get past “yuck?” We might have to.

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency(EPA) offers a free online Water Quality course.   

The following modules are included:

Introduction to EPA and the Clean Water Act,
• Waterbody Uses,
• Water Quality Criteria,
• Antidegradation,
• Standards Submittal and Approval, and
• Variances, Using Attainability Analyses, Mixing Zones and Other Flexibility Options

The course is interactive and includes links, video clips and quizzes.  It’s designed for people who are NOT water quality experts, though people in the field may find them a good refresher.

To sign up for the course click on EPA Water Science Academy. 

On May 30, 2008, some of the world’s top economists ( including five Nobel laureates) will finalize a prioritized list of some of the best and worst solutions for the world’s most pressing problems. 

The Copenhagen Consensus panel will look at the costs vs. benefits of almost 50 solutions to worldwide issues.  Bjorn Lomborg, organizer of the Copenhagen Consensus and author of Cool It:  The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming compares a dollar spent on heart disease in a developing nation that does $25 worth of good with the 90 cents worth of good for each dollar spent on carbon mitigation as an example.

Stay tuned as this group determines the best cost/benefit answers to problems ranging from air pollution to public health to trade barriers.  Economists might seem cold when they put a dollar figure on an emotional topic–but finding the best investments to help the planet is their goal.  And if those dollars aren’t spent well, we all lose.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency just released the 2008 Report on the Environment.  This 366-page document (printed on recycled paper–or downloadable as a pdf file) offers one-stop-shopping to answer questions about the nation’s environmental trends. 

EPA also provides reports on their various regions in the country. 

EPA explores environmental trends in Air, Water, Land, Human Exposure and Health, and our Ecological Condition.  The report answers 23 questions deemed critical to our nation’s environment–from the issue of greenhouse gas emissions to wetlands to consumable fish to human exposure to environmental contaminants and biological diversity.

Anyone interested in environmental issues should download this free report. 

I just returned from the Florida Water Resources Conference in Tampa.

Important water issues abound.  Everything from droughts and water shortages–to microconstituents–to nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus in the waterways–to sea water desalinization.

One of the first sessions I attended contested the theory that Florida is running out of fresh water.  Computer models predict declining levels in Florida’s underground aquifers.  But some of the actual data shows that water levels have stabilized.

Many Florida cities have water restrictions in place–and reclaimed water is used in many areas for both residential and agricultural irrigation.  So it makes sense that we might not be in as bad of shape as the models predict.

Regulatory agencies allocate water to users based on computer models, more so than current data.  After all, they are responsible for making sure we have water years into the future, not just today.  But are they “crying wolf?”  Or protecting us from ourselves?

I usually won’t read a book if I see the movie first.  But I was so touched by the movie version of Into the Wild that I pulled the book from my “not-yet-read” shelf.

Jon Krakauer, author of the spellbinding Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster, wrote Into the Wild, a true account of Christopher McCandless‘ trek across the country and into the Alaskan wilderness–where he died.

After graduating with honors from Emory University in 1990, McCandless disappeared from home and dropped his given name to become “Alexander Supertramp” as he headed west.  His ultimate goal–an Alaskan Odyssey–living off the land in the wild. 

McCandless gave his savings to charity, burned his remaining cash and abandoned his car after it was submerged in a flash flood.  Alexander Supertramp hitchhiked and jumped trains on a cross-country journey. He camped at Lake Mead, worked a farm in South Dakota, canoed the Colorado River all the way into Mexico where he got caught in a storm off the coast–then illegally crossed back into the states. 

McCandless lived on the fringes of society–but he deeply affected people he met along his way.  Wayne Westerberg, for whom he worked on a farm.  Jan Burres and her boyfriend, Bob, who travelled around selling used books at flea markets.  Ronald Franz, who lost his wife and child by way of a drunk driver and wanted to adopt McCandless. 

Almost two years later, on April 28, 1992, an electrician named Jim Gallien dropped McCandless at the head of the Stampede Trail in the Alaska Interior.  McCandless walked “into the wild” carrying a 10-pound bag of rice, a 22 rifle, ammunition and some camping supplies.  He survived 112 days as a hunter/gatherer alone near the Alaska Range.  He died, probably from starvation–after eating potentially toxic wild potato seeds that left him ill and too weak to hunt, on August 18.

Emile Hirsch does a wonderful job of portraying McCandless in the movie, Into the Wild, directed by Sean Penn.  The movie really brings the irony of McCandless’ journey into focus. 

Yearning for ultimate freedom, McCandless essentially becomes trapped in the wild.  He crosses the mostly frozen Teklanika River on foot to arrive at the abandoned Fairbanks Bus No. 142 that becomes his campsite.  In July he decides to reenter civilization–but the Teklanika, swollen by rain and snow-melt, has become a raging rapid.  (Sadly, had McCandless brought a map to his wilderness, he would have seen that there was a gauging station within hiking distance, complete with a manual tram for crossing the river). 

Looking for complete independence, McCandless later notes in his journal, “HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.” 

This story is so much more than just a tragic tale of a young man who made a fatal error.  The search for excitement, adventure and meaning in life.  The pull of nature–how nature is not always gentle and does not suffer fools lightly.   McCandless’ final photo is a self-portrait, holding a brief note and smiling into the camera:

“I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD.  GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!”

Not everyone agrees with Jon Krakauer’s interpretation of events and sympathy for McCandless.  Many Alaskans believe McCandless was either mentally ill or just foolhardy and unprepared.  And they don’t appreciate Krakauer and Hollywood romanticizing a tragedy–and attracting others to follow in McCandless footsteps. 

Regardles, I was transfixed.  Watch the movie.  Read the book.  Or like me, do both.

Six wastewater treatment facilities (Publicly Owned Treatment Works) in South Florida have been discharging an average of about 360 million gallons per day of treated wastewater to the ocean for decades.  The outfall pipes discharge from one to three miles offshore.

The Florida Senate has passed a bill that would shut down these ocean outfalls by 2025.  Governor Charlie Crist supports the bill.

Interim measures to reduce the outfalls’ effects would be upgrading treatment plants to advanced treatment and constructing plants to reuse at least 60% of the plants’ effluent.

The six plants include those owned by Miami Dade Central, Miami Dade North, City of Hollywood, Broward County, Delray Beach and Boca Raton.  Residents and businesses can prepare to open their wallets, because a rough estimate of the cost is over $3 billion, most of which will be passed on to the rate payers.

When people read about sewage outfalls, they immediately think of raw, untreated sewage or septage.  Raw sewage is NOT being discharged to the ocean.  The wastewater is treated to “secondary” levels.  In Florida, that means the treatment plants must remove at least 90% of the pollutants from the wastewater before it goes out to the ocean.  Most treatment plants remove even more than the minimum requirement.  And the water is disinfected as well. 

If I poured wastewater effluent from a plant with secondary treatment into a glass, in most cases it would be hard to tell it from drinking water.

EPA has a report on the Florida ocean outfalls that outlines the extensive scientific analysis and modeling that determined the risk from discharging effluent to the ocean was very low, though some questions still need answering. 

My opinion is that requiring future upgrades for additional treatment–and increasing the amount of wastewater reused is a good solution.  Prohibiting future ocean outfalls is OK.  But requiring these cities and counties to completely stop their ocean outfall is just not necessary.  The cost will be overwhelming–will the benefit really match it?  Effluent has to go somewhere, whether reused for irrigation, or discharged to a river or the ocean. 

Some marine scientists and environmental groups, like Earthjustice and the National Resources Defense Council  would disagree with me.  Noting concerns with the nitrogen and phosphorus causing red tides . . . the effects of pharmaceuticals and endocrine disrupters on wildlife . . . and human health risks. 

I’d like to know what you think about this issue.