Is water quality protection only worthwhile where humans are involved?

This link from the Oregonian highlights a conundrum that I have often pondered.  (EPA may fund mine cleanup)  While this particular situation appears to be getting a fix, there are so many others that are not being fixed because there is not that grand conjunction between an environmental crime and impacts on humans.   At what point is it stupid to say that, just because humans aren't immediately affected, we shouldn't fix a problem?  Hmmmm, I have to admit, on retrospect, that my own question smacks of one of those legendary stupid questions in light of all the problems that do have an effect on humans that don't get fixed.

For example, check out the red dots on the map on this site:  http://www.deq.state.or.us/wq/onsite/nitrate.htm.  While this particular web page focuses on the headwaters of the Deschutes River, the map is a statewide view of groundwater contamination in the state by one contaminant, nitrate, for which there is a federally established drinking water standard of 10 mg/L nitrate as N.  All the little red dots show where groundwater resources exceed that standard.  I know of the voluntary groundwater management programs that Oregon DEQ has undertaken in the southern Willamette, Umatilla and Malheur regions  (see the map at:  http://www.deq.state.or.us/wq/groundwater/gwmas.htm) and am somewhat skeptical of real progress in those areas, but at least there is DEQ attention.  After all this is our state agency that is concerned about environmental protection.  But what about all the other clusters of red dots in Oregon?  Many of these dots are are located in areas of much higher population densities than where GWMAs have been designated and, by extension of the line of reasoning with which I began this post, there would be a greater conjunction between environmental contamination and impacts on humans.

But of course, more humans means more politics and we have witnessed the politicizing of DEQ over many, many years.  To be fair, I will point out that the story with which I began this post related to the EPA's Superfund program to deal with hazardous waste and the red dot map relates to nitrates and not toxic substances.  However, it is interesting to note that EPA gives priority where there is the contamination/human impact conjunction, whereas in a very broad brush look, it appears, merely based on active groundwater management programs, that DEQ's first priority is vague to say the least.  And while I do not say that DEQ acting on groundwater issues in less densely populated regions is a measure of their backbone in protecting the environment in general, I would have to poke a thorn firmly in the side of the DEQ for not taking action on these other areas of the state, particularly in those areas where the problem has been studied for decades.

From Toilet to Tap

Yes, I am slow at getting around to posting/commenting.  Get over it.  Some things, like fine wines, take time to gel.  I post the following link under the label of water reuse, with the introduction, to quote a colleague who beat me to a great sound bite, that we're all drinking dinosaur pee.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/02/from-the-toilet-to-t.html

Comments on a Graywater Reuse Demonstration in Bangalore

I stole this link from the Rainbow Water Coalition site (thanks to Todd Jarvis).  It is a great little demonstration of how easily kitchen sink water can be reused.  If my math is correct this will treat up to about 30 gallons per day, easily accommodating what comes from a typical single family residence.  How many of you know people with water features in the back yard?

Bangalore graywater reuse video

There are a couple of things to think about here depending on if you are in a big municipal sewer context or in the little septic system context.  The big municipal sewer might really like these diversions because in the sense of total volume these kinds of installations will "buy" them sewer treatment plant capacity, probably at no cost to the municipality (assuming that homeowners install them on their own dime).  The other issue that municipalities may face if there is a very large proportion of graywater flow being redirected is a change in the quality of the sewage reaching the plant.  Depending on the proportion of commercial/industrial/residential contributions in the community waste stream, changes in the sewage quality may cause a change in the treatment process.  Not necessarily in all cases, and the change may be so gradual that little tweaks to the system can accommodate the change in incoming quality to still meet discharge standards.

In terms of small septic systems, particularly those that serve one house, the change in water quantity through the system can have a significant impact, positive and negative, depending on the kind of system in use.  A simple septic tank and trench kind of system will probably benefit from having graywater removed from the flow going to the septic tank because the remaining blackwater will be retained in the septic tank (primary digester) for a longer period, allowing more anaerobic digestion to take place.  In addition, the flow going to the trenches that distribute the water to the environment have to take less water and therefore, the life of the trenches is prolonged.  And that leads to lower costs to the homeowner, etc. etc.

With more mechanized (i.e. pumped) systems, you would hope and pray that the homeowner is working with a professional to make sure that the pumping cycles are lowered in this system to account for the lowered flow to the septic system because the septic tank will have a higher concentration of solids that could start moving towards the trenches.  These kinds of systems are supposed to have water levels sensors and alarms on them that help protect the system and alert the homeowner to the presence of a problem, but homeowners have been known to quietly cut the electrical connection to the alarm.  If this is done before the graywater diversion is installed or if the mechanized system is otherwise malfunctioning, then the effects on the treatment systems could be bad.

There are new kinds of septic systems permitted by the DEQ currently and some of these produce very high quality effluent, which is worthy of its own reuse discussion.  In these cases, why take only part of the water when all of it is potentially reusable?  This presents another opportunity to "buy" municipal treatment system capacity:  allow homes in urban areas to install an individual system and reuse the water on site.  Each home taken off the grid in this manner means treatment capacity to the city treatment works.

Climate Change - part 3

I got these comments from a colleague and thought I would post them here in response to my previous postings:

I don't think it is fear. My impression is that Global warming denial has become a kind of conservative fashion statement. Its conservative chic. Its effectively the same thing as thinking that Sarah Palin is hot and cool, and shoots big animals and Liberals are a bunch of panty waists - nyah nyah nyah.

The only problem with treating pressing global environmental issues as a political fashion accessory is that ignoring the problems will not mitigate the real consequences. In this case pulling the covers over our heads won't save us. In fact, a critical mass of people being willing to play dumb has kept timely action from being taken up until now.

Let me explain "playing dumb". In reality some of the deniers really are just stupid. Dumb as rocks... They at least have that excuse. But I can't believe that this is the majority. Maybe I am optimistic?

For others, those of average intelligence for whom denial is like a stone wall, they cannot possibly be unaware at this point of a couple of simple facts.

1) All the real science supports the basic idea of anthropogenic global warming. Basically human produced CO2 changing the climate. That is all the real science. Done by scientists, peer reviewed by other scientists, and published in scientific journals, with full disclosure of data and method. There is no actual descent among climate scientists who study this.

2) The basic theory is supported by real observations in the real world - CO2 data, Ar temperature time series data, measurements of glaciers etc.

3) The points of actual debate among scientists are limited to details of how the effects will play out - rapidity, effects on specific weather patterns.

At this late date if you have a brain, and 2 ears and 2 eyes and any power of critical judgement you know these things.

So to continue to deny the warming actually require active intellectual gymnastics. To pretend to believe the counter arguments requires a willfully ignorant conflation of climate a weather ("its snowing outside I guess global warming doesn't work) - willfully conflating scientific journal articles with OpEd's in the popular press ("I read an article in Enquirer that said global warming is bunk!") - Or postulating a global conspiracy among governments and scientists to perpetrate a fraud that would be in absolutely no one's interest.

The last one, if it was anything besides climate change, to propose this kind of conspiracy would put you in the ranks of the people in cellars with aluminum foil on their heads. For climate change apparently its still socially acceptable.

My position is that it should not be. There no excuse for playing at being stupid. Its not conservative. Its immoral. Real people are going to suffer. Real damage will be done. Its not about scoring political points. Its about the science, a real challenge we need to be on the right side of and the real down side if we fail.

Water and Martin Luther King

I was re-reading a transcription of Martin Luther King's speech because I was a bit embarrassed that I could only remember the sound bites.  What a tremendous piece of oration.  Despite its dated language it still resonates and serves to highlight how far we are from equality still, over forty-five years later.  There is still racism of the type that spurred King to make this speech, but now we also have covert -isms that perpetuate inequality in often more subtle ways:  the low income housing next to industry that is more or less careful about its emissions, the menial, dirty jobs that no one but the poor are willing to do, the energy efficiency programs that only help folks that have the disposable income to participate.  I also keep getting confronted by environmental issues on a daily basis, especially those related to climate change and pollution in general.  Long, slow developing issues that will have big consequences in a hurry by accounts I see reported in the general science press.  So perhaps you will be as struck as I was by this quote from Martin Luther King:  "We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now.  This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism."

Delusion and the American Way

I just returned from a weekend away, and by away, I mean not just away from my place of residence or work, but away from the internet, TV, e-mail.  While I had plenty that I was itching to blog about to the void, I had the opportunity to be in the now, in the present, to think and ponder as I am wont to do.  While my electronic connections were severed I spent time observing connections to the naturosphere in the place where I was.  Thousands of connections to the hydrosphere hitting me as I walked from inn to state park to store to community center.  I was on an island surrounded by water, being dumped on by water and walking across soft ground saturated by water.  Not a bad state of affairs, all in all.  This experience was made the more interesting by getting a small taste of a community that, as one mainlander put it, hasn't fundamentally changed in the past 50 years.

I saw a distinct sense of caring in that community for the island and its way of life - cultural, historic, social preservation was obviously the norm rather than the exception.  Perhaps, preservation is the wrong term here.  Preservation connotes a sense of stasis, while the history, culture and social structure of this island seemed to be quite alive and vibrant.  Here was a palpable sense of conservation in a most constructive manner.

Contrast that with a community in the high desert of Oregon that fought tooth and nail for the right to continue polluting their drinking water.   Here I find a palpable effort to conserve the status quo in the most destructive sense.

You may recall that headline that caught my eye a couple weeks ago where Deschutes County was setting up a system to pay homeowners to, in short, protect their drinking water supply.  I was urged by a reader from that area to educate myself on the situation following my previous post.  I found a huge, and I mean huge, amount of information on the county website at www.deschutes.org/cdd/gpp/.

Conventional wisdom would say that a community in a region labeled "desert" and which gets very small amounts of precipitation a year would have a high level of stewardship for water resources.  That water would be highly valued and protected in an area where it is, by visual comparison with the Willamette Valley, scarce.  After all, this is a fundamental tenet of economic theory, that scarce resources are more valuable.  Well, after giving myself a relatively brief familiarization with the issue in Central Oregon, apparently scarcity does not always increase value or husbanding of a resource.  This community came out in arms to fight, through abuse, lawsuits, referendum, you name it, the county's efforts to clean up the communal act of polluting drinking water.  A short description of the problem is that the community there uses septic systems to somewhat treat sewage before it is discharged into the ground.  Once it's in the ground, this somewhat treated sewage travels to groundwater and, in case you haven't figured out what happens next, yessiree,  the locals pull out that groundwater for their residential supply by thousands of individual wells.

Big pause.  These people are pooping in their own water supply and fighting to continue the practice for the foreseeable future.  Pogo was right, we've seen the enemy and they is us.

Now I could make all sorts of comments poking fun at this situation and the caliber of people that this community harbors but that would distract from a more interesting topic.

What rationale spurs a community to bite the hand reached out to help?  What rationale causes a dog to bit a hand reached out to help?

I say this with some trepidation that I will sound like a broken record:  Fear.

I can picture it now.  The ivory tower intellectual scientists march in with all the evidence showing what's happening in the real world and what's going to happen in the future.  The problem can be fixed but it will take money, more money than can be had so, gee, the people causing the problem will have to pitch in.  Fear of money flowing out of the household is greater than fear of the sewage flowing out of the household and into the drinking water well.  The prospect is too horrible to believe, the more vehement types start trying to talk about "reasonable doubt" just like the tobacco companies, and a delusion is born.  It's too horrible to be real so it can't be real.  Delusion, straight up and unadulterated.  Delusion and denial, coupled with a determination to prove it, make a potent force for even the most brilliant minds on the planet.  Think about the parallels with the climate change issue.

What is interesting is that, in other social contexts, being delusional and/or in total denial of the facts is often a call for some kind of psychological help, particularly when your delusion presents a threat to yourself or others.  Having community members saying that a community shouldn't do anything for the time being about poop in the water supply is pretty self-destructive and irrational.   The threat to self and others is obvious and yet these delusional people are treated with the same respect as the rational.

Faith, belief and climate change - part 2

Well, for once my timing is impeccable.  I didn't actually see the headline in yesterday's Oregonian, "Pope denounces failure to forge new climate treaty,"  when I posted yesterday, but every once in a while I get lucky.  Here is a leader of one of the world's religions saying that we need to take care of the world now so we have a world in the future.  A religious leader saying,  don't just have blind faith, take responsibility for the effects of our actions and fix the problem.  Go figure.

The whole article is interesting and just for kicks and giggles, I took a look over the mountains at what the Bend Bulletin published.  Here is the sum total:

"VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI denounced the failure of world leaders to agree to a new climate change treaty in Copenhagen last month, saying Monday that world peace depends on safeguarding God’s creation.

He issued the admonition in a speech to ambassadors accredited to the Vatican, an annual appointment during which the pontiff reflects on issues the Vatican wants to highlight to the diplomatic corps.

Benedict has been dubbed the “green pope” for his increasingly vocal concern about protect the environment."

Here is a newspaper that commonly takes government to task for falling down on the job and they're not taking an opportunity to take a potshot?  Of course having a notoriously conservative editorial board may have something to do with it or maybe they just don't care...

Faith, belief and climate change

I recently had an online "argument" with a friend of a friend.  This occurred in one of those ubiquitous social networking sites that can really suck you in if you let them.  I would not have continued engaging said friend of a friend without be egged on by my friend, but I do have to wonder if any progress was made.

In short, this was a discussion that encapsulated the climate change argument.  I argued on the side of science, this friend's friend argued on the side of "it's bogus."  Literally.  First it's bogus because it's not real.  Well, there is consensus amongst climate scientists.  That's bogus because they left out scientists that are skeptical.  Well, the discussion and skepticism currently focus on how much of an effect and how soon are things going to fall apart.  That's bogus because they are all computer models.  Well, there are measurements, real effects observed in nature....and on and on.  Finally we both got tired and seemed to agree to disagree although I am left with the feeling that, as with the debate fomented by religiosos about evolution, this was an exercise in butting my head against a faith-based wall.  But this person was not spouting your traditional faith-based rhetoric about how a deity will save us or that this is the end of the world.

So what is the faith that supports this unyielding belief that climate change is not real in spite of overwhelming evidence and in spite of brilliant people working hard to understand and communicate the issue?  My gut reaction is that it is fear.  Fear of change, fear of the unknown, fear of being helpless, fear of losing money, fear of losing jobs.  If I am right, and fear is the root motivator of the anti-climate change group, then isn't that ironic?   The way I understand it, it is also fear that motivates climate scientists and climate change actions.  Because what is more frightening than drowning a huge part of Bangladesh and having to figure out how to help all of those people?  What is more frightening than the prospect of many US coastal communities being affected?  What about water supplies shifting and moving?  If the prospect of climate change is too scary to even begin to believe, why doesn't that spur people to avoid the possibility of it coming to fruition?  Even if we ignore ecosystems, wildlife and ancient cultures that are extinguished, isn't the possibility of that kind of economic disaster a big enough motivator?

Questions, more questions...and I haven't even gotten to the point of my original title for this post.  I guess I'll save that for another time.

Underground Rivers - new book

 (Note from Thorn:  I have downloaded this but haven't gotten my teeth into it yet, but it looks interesting enough to pass on the word.)

Richard Heggen, Prof. Emeritus of Civil Engineering, University of New Mexico with a courtesy appointment to OSU's Institute for Water and Watersheds, has put on-line his book, Underground Rivers.

http://www.unm.edu/~rheggen/UndergroundRivers.html

It's a whole lot more than you think.

CHAPTERS
1  Greek Mythology
2  Greek Philosophers
3  Roman Encyclopedists
4  The Church, the Arabs, and Back to the Church
5  The Concept of Circulation
6  Subterranean Engines
7  Superterranean Metrics
8  Hydrotheology/Theohydrology
9  Hollow Earth Geophysics
10 Underground Rivers in Classic Fiction
11 Boys Club
12 Waters of the Hollow Earth
13 Underground Rivers in Metaphor and Poetry
14 Underground Rivers in the Fine Arts
15 Groundwater Science
16 Karstology
17 Lava Tubes
18 Subterranean Geophysics
19 Dowsing
20 The Biology of Underground Rivers
21 Plying the Waters from Above
22 Constructed Waterways
23 The Dangers
24 The Rio San Buenaventura

Economic Engines and Water Quality Protection

A headline caught my eye the other day....well, wait, before I go there, I should probably preface this by saying that I had the fortune, although at the time I thought it was the misfortune, to take 2 or 3 economics courses when I was in school.  My take away message from these classes was that the whole supply and demand thing is a sham.  The economy is not about providing what people want, it is about creating the want that makes people buy.  In my nutshell, the economy functions through incentives.  So back to what spurred this post. 

I was cruising news headlines in Oregon the other day and I came across one that piqued my interest:  "Rebates available for septic upgades."  Huh?  Well, I read the short bit (BTW, it was in the Bend Bulletin) and found that the county there wants to pay homeowners $3,750 to upgrade their septic systems to prevent groundwater contamination.  This sounds like a good thing to a person like me.  Some of the commons (public money) is being used to protect the commons (groundwater used for drinking water) and the public money is being directed straight at where the common resource is being threatened - the homes that are creating the pollution.  Simple.  I tend to think that the three thousand dollars will not cover the entire cost of the upgrade, but perhaps I think that because I like the idea of homeowners pitching in to help fix the problem as well - in any case the article didn't really say how much this was all going to cost. 

The article goes on to say that this rebate is part of a program to use money raised by developers to upgrade septic systems.  I read this as new development is paying to fix the pollution caused by old development.  Again, relatively simple.  The twist is that if developers can't somehow get homeowners to upgrade for the same $3,750 then they have to pay the county $7,500.  The $7,500 payments directly to the county go into a "financial assistance fund" which then can help people upgrade and the upgrades done by the homeowners prevent pollution and get checked off the list of homes needing upgrades.  I think the payment or upgrades somehow get the developers the right to build or some such thing.  I'll have to do more research if I want to understand this better in terms of the developers incentives. 

Meanwhile, I'm thinking about this scheme from the homeowner's perspective.  Right now, if I'm a homeowner, I've got a decent incentive (back to my intro) to upgrade.  Almost four thousand dollars is a healthy sum, especially if I'm faced with upgrading something that I really don't want to have to deal with.  What the county there has on the books will benefit about 80 homeowners.  I can't tell from the article what the total number of homeowners is that needs to upgrade but if it is even 500 homes, the county's funds are drop in the bucket.  The $7,500 payments from developers are intended to pump more cash into the process and generate more prevention of pollution.  Again, all this makes sense.  What I don't understand is the county commissioners wanting to lower the price paid by developers to $3,750 and thinking that will replenish their fund.   Who are the commissioners trying to help?  The developers, the homeowners, the drinking water supply?  It's pretty clear in the article that for the few upgrades the developers were able to purchase before the market crashed, the developers paid half the price they would have to pay the county.  If the county's price suddenly lowers, why would a developer pay more than half that new price?  There's no incentive for them to pay more.  If it were me, as a person concerned about water, how would I keep my eye on the prize?  I would keep the homeowner incentive as high as possible.  If I were a county commissioner that was stumping for re-election?  Again, I would keep the homeowner incentive as high as possible!  If I were somehow beholden to the development community?  Hmmmm.  I suppose someone would say that the developers are at the heart of a vibrant economy.   In response to that I say, have you  looked out the window lately?  The developers are not holding the cards right now, the buyers are.

Anyway, as a study in how the market can affect water resources, this is an interesting situation and I will have to do more learning to understand what's going on.  But on first glance, this is a situation where I would have to be a thorn in the side of the county commissioners and say, keep your eye on the prize and do what's right by the water and the homeowners.

Land use equals water use

I was thinking, yes, a dangerous thing for someone who has more questions than knowledge or answers, about a comment I heard Todd Jarvis give a long time ago about land use planning being water use planning.  I know enough to be dangerous about our land use system but from my personal history in Oregon I am aware of how my family's farms in the Hillsboro area were gobbled up by the tech industry when Tektronix moved in.  My childhood memories of berry field and fruit orchards are just that, memories.  I still grieve when I have the misfortune to travel those roads these days...but living in another part of Oregon now, I can move on.  I don't live a traditional agrarian lifestyle, I am very much an urbanite and relish the opportunities provided by that environment.  But, true to my forebears, I grow my tomatoes, potatoes and carrots...I have my laying hens...and I really enjoy my urban farmsteading and find that, pardon the pun, it grounds me.  So what does all this have to do with water?  I keep thinking about the environmental impacts of paving our farmlands and about providing all the things that development in suburban areas needs to continue...electricity, sewage management, trash (or more hopefully recycling) service, roads, schools, police, fire, and water.  While I list water last, so many of the previous things need water to exist or affect water: 

• sewage wouldn't exist if we didn't have flush toilets, although I think that having indoor running water at sinks and showers is probably a really good public health deal ... so we need at least some kind of sewage management
• a lot of our electricity comes from hydroelectric sources ... how different would it be if all the big boxes had solar arrays covering their flat tops?
• trash maybe doesn't take a lot of water to deal with but I have read that there can be nasty stuff leaching out of landfills
• recycling probably takes water to clean materials or reprocess them - I posted the little report from DEQ of the lifecycle costs of recycling vs. reusing water bottles.  Interesting stuff and it makes you wonder if that is a good example of other parts of the recycling industry.  The gut says it probably is...
• roads are interesting to think about - not knowing a whole lot about how they are constructed I will hazard a guess that the water related impacts come after they are there - rain runs off them and picks up whatever cars, animals or leaking trash trucks leave behind.  I've heard of roads causing local changes to groundwater flow by creating an underground dam - all of a sudden, someone floods that never flooded before... 
• schools and police equal people in my mind and people are, to pull a quote from a Star Trek episode "bags of mostly water."  We need water to survive, duh.  But do we take more than we need?
• fire services are also people but the service, by definition, uses water but probably not something I begrudge.

I think the bone I'm picking is the "bags of mostly water" part of the equation.  People have to live somewhere and work somewhere and here, in the opulent, plush, US of A, people always assume they will have water when they turn on the tap or flush the toilet.  And because of that assumption, yes, land uses that support people, homes, businesses, roads, schools, sewage services, electricity services, ad nauseum, are water uses...farms are water uses....but what's the life cycle cost of paving farmland and growing people instead of berries?  I don't know.  Yet again, I think about things and am left with more questions than ever.

New! Open-access, online journal: Water

We are pleased to announce the publication of the inaugural issue of
Water (http://www.mdpi.com/journal/water/, ISSN 2073-4441), a new
international, peer-reviewed Open Access journal on water science and
technology, including the ecology and management of water resources.
Water is published by MDPI online quarterly.

Water, Volume 1, Issue 1 (December 2009), Pages 1-79 can be found at
http://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/1/1/

To receive notifications about future issues of Water, please simply
add your e-mail address at http://www.mdpi.com/journal/water/toc-alert
and click on ‘Subscribe’.

When It Comes to Drinking Water, DEQ Confirms: 'Reduce First, then Recycle'

Here is the latest from Oregon DEQ on bottled water versus reusable/refillable bottles.  

(Note from Thorn:  I found this to be somewhat of a "duh" moment but the "controversy" was that it was more resource intensive to manufacture, wash and refill a reusable bottle than to use a single use bottle and recycle it.  In technical parlance, DEQ has performed a life-cycle analysis and found the life-cycle costs of reusable bottles are significantly lower than bottled water bottles.  Folks may think that they can reuse the bottle that bottled water comes in but I caution those persons that there are studies showing that these bottles do start leaching petrochemicals into the water after being washed, frozen, etc.)

If you think it makes more sense to drink tap water in reusable bottles rather than to keep buying bottled water and recycling the containers, you’re absolutely right.

A recent DEQ analysis of drinking water delivery systems confirms that it’s best to reduce or reuse first, then recycle.

The DEQ study compared dozens of scenarios and examined a range of environmental effects across the entire life cycle of single-use, five-gallon reusable and tap water delivery methods.

Among the conclusions:

• Buying and then recycling a typical bottle of water reduces energy consumption by 24 percent and greenhouse gas emissions by 16 percent over the entire life cycle, compared to buying then throwing way the same water bottle.

• However, consuming the same quantity of water from the tap in a reusable bottle reduces energy consumption by 85 percent and greenhouse gases by 79 percent (compared to buying bottled water and disposing of each bottle).

“The most important message for consumers is: reduce first, then recycle,” says DEQ solid waste policy analyst David Allaway.

“Drinking tap water and recycling single-use bottles are equally effective ways of keeping waste out of landfills and incinerators, but DEQ’s study shows that most effects on the environment from bottled water occur from manufacturing and transportation, not disposal … If you have single-use water bottles, please recycle them. But it’s better to avoid them in the first place."

Why the Water Thorn?

I have been watching the news in Oregon, actually nationally, and our water resource issues are mounting. The current and historic disregard shown by agencies and the public for protecting, stewarding, and enhancing our water resources is disturbing. Particularly disturbing is the kowtowing to pressure from members of the public who are self-aggrandizing naysayers who do not have a clue as to what is going on. Some of the water pollution that is occurring now can be stopped now with knowledge and tools that exist and, more importantly, are available now. Why has there been no action taken?

I am willing to be the voice for those people who cannot raise these questions themselves because of their job, backlash, or other constraints.  Feel free to send your thoughts my direction:  oregonwaterthorn@gmail.com.