It is very interesting, that piped drinking water and proper sewage disposal in built up areas should apparently come for little cost or even free. "Who needs a pipeline" thinking belongs to the last century. With all the hype about climate change, the environment etc. home owners need to start thinking collectively about the ultimate health risks to themselfs and everyone else. If nothing is done to keep personal drinking water sources away from personal sewage disposal systems then most folks who live on such properties are sitting on a environmental time bomb.

Unless we behave uncharacteristically, break out of our reflex partisan habits and think outside the box a little.

Anyone remember Malthus? Sure, it was a scam, a pseudo-science scam aimed at usurping the public commons so as to hand the freely shared peasant pasture-land resources over to the exclusive control of the King of England, to be subsequently sold off to the highest bidder so as to finance the poor dear king's failing foreign escapades, but all that aside do we remember what Malthus famously said about production growing arithmetically while population grew exponentially?

He said, and I paraphrase, "Doom on you! Doom on you! Doom on you!"

And that Certain Doom, well, it never happened. The predictions of his critics on the collapse of English peasant economy happened, but Malthus, even with his new-found (and totally bogus phrenological 'economic theory') completely failed to predict the future.

saying the sooth

You see, Malthus was privy to the just-completed comprehensive world resources inventory that had just been compiled by no less than the Royal Navy, so he had the very best data. But while it was true that his current production would have been outstripped by his his contemporary population growth rates, the forest Malthus couldn't see was these many trees:

1. Production invariably takes massive quantum leaps upon the invention of new technologies, new alloys, new processes. Refrigeration-car railways suddenly meant food could travel arbitrarily far to get to markets, air-freight meant even the most perishable could be on the other side of the planet in time for breakfast. New alloys exploiting the inverse squared rule for atomic attraction meant ever larger, stronger, faster, cheaper transports and housing using less and less reasources to do it.
2. Population growth slows in areas with electrical power -- no one really knows why, lots of musing theories, but the fact remains, there is a direct correlation between kilowatt consumption and birth rates, something China and India are beginning to understand, and something maybe OPG might want to consider as they press us all to use less ;)
3. Economies of mass-market scale can be more efficient -- even if big-biz and government seem unable to realize this, oddly -- if you double the length of a ship, you increase the water resistance by a factor of 4, but you increase the carrying capacity by a factor of 8.
4. Synergies happen. completely unpredicted by the individual parts, emergent behaviours and new capabilities, new products, new methods spontaneously arise as systems get larger and more complex. Malthus could not have forseen how ceramics would transform the world through semiconductors.

the future is not what it was

I am endlessly entertained by the way the water debate stays so pit-bull focussed on only one of two possible scenarios. It is delightfully Keystone Kops rip roaring comedy. No one stops to ask, "Could the other side really have something to tell me?" and they bump heads again, all fall down. It's a hoot.

You see this in relationship therapy all the time, husband, wife, they lock heads over how to raise the kids never once, never even once considering that the workable solution is in the vast, vast, vast ground between and around their pet ideas.

"When people do something that works, they do it again. When it no longer works, they do it again, HARDER!" -- Richard Bandler

side-stepping the zax-think

Consider, if you dare, that Walt is right: we can't keep pissing in our pool unless we really like to bleach our eyes. Like economic growth and endless development, it is patently an unsustainable behaviour, and people need to know and own this as a common-sense fact.

Now, consider too that Sabrinus is also right: centralized (sewer,water..) systems are expensive, inefficient, notoriously poor quality, invite abuse and fall prone to all sorts of catastrophic natural, political and human failings -- not to mention that they are typically managed by government (see above regarding economies of scale) or by corporations who must place shareholder returns above actual service quality needs, a vicious cycle that spells certain death-by-quarterly-reports when the supplier is given monopoly status.

So there's the box -- North Going Zax meets South Going Zax!

So, to take on the topic of right-wing thinking, where exactly is the free-market entrepreneurial spirit in a grey dull centralized water management corporation? It's nowhere to be found, because that's old-school East-Berlin socialist thinking, one for all, all for one ... or else! kind of thinking. And where is that spirit in an arm's length list of rules and regulations and inspections and home-intrusions to enforce Total Water Quality Awareness? Nowhere likewise, mon frère

the undiscovered country

So one lands upon this spot outside the box: What would be the logical free-enterprise market-driven alternative? and what I especially like about that line of thinking is how it is also coincidentally the natural approach, what we in information theory call the genetic approach and what Richard Bandler says is just good solid genius strategy thinking for situations of deadlock:

1. generate as many new alternative solution ideas as fast as you can
2. ecology-test each against the world-system where it must sit; don't just sit and arm-chair swiss-cheese it to death, but ask the reality and don't accept no second hand God. Get out, get in there, and go do it:
   1. set one up
   2. try it
   3. make mistakes, small scale, contained, controlled
   4. learn from those mistakes! share what you learn, start a blog, sponsor conventions and symposiums, squeeze the last drop out of any and all results. As Alton Abraham said,
      

      "It is always better to 'know' than to 'no'"

   5. Take the next idea ...
   6. repeat

   this advice has been on shampoo bottles forever!

3. IMPORTANT: When we find one solution, keep going -- there may be more even better solutions right around the next corner.

Those very best ideas, those that fit their paricular local ecologies, will thrive; encourage them. Those that don't, they whither and wane; that is the way of the world, accept this.

the art of prospecting

This is what I was getting at, in my own naive way, in that famous Sauble Bulletin ad from long long ago, the one pompously proclaiming how Waste Water is not a Problem, it is a Solution -- the progressive investigation into all that unknown space surrounding the water problem is rife with paths to Shangi-Las, deep veins of endless El Dorados and I see new discoveries pop up in my news files every day, often from very humble starts, simple journeys of a thousand miles started from just one small mindful step. There is nothing 'special' about us that keeps us economically broken and there are oodles of free enterprise dollars out there just waiting for some concerted effort to focus in, dig them out and refine them.

Notice, for a clear analogy, how precisely that sort of plan is how we dug ourselves out of our Bandwidth Poverty. Genetic Algorithm strikes again, free-enterprise, encouraged and fostered, beat the Big Corporate Big Daddy hands down ... but not on the first try. Prospectors fan out across the hills, each digging their claim in their own way, and it is typically only the few who find the motherlode, but that is how the gold-rush starts.

visualize municipal peace

I was recently reviewing our town's Economic Development Plan from 2005, but I had to put it down, because the answers were there staring me in the face, that we needed to encourage new light industries, stable and sustainable economic growth in that greater vaster massive Universe Out There, we need jobs, reasons for our kids to stay, reasons for young families to want to live here, or we are headed for disaster.

Let's repeat that: Or we are headed for disaster -- I like the Malthusian tone of that :)

And yet ... what is the advice that was picked up and run with from that report? "Milk the groundhog for everything its worth" And people wonder why I don't have a lot of faith in the committee-think that passes for government in these parts.

It is true: If we want clean water, it is going to cost more than we know -- because it is going to require us to change our way of thinking and that's a price that some days seems astronomically out of reach.

FUD /fuhd/ n. -- Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company: "FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products." The idea, of course, was to persuade them to go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors' equipment. This was traditionally done by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors' equipment or software.

It's a term we in the free-software biz know only too well; if you've been to just about any Linux website, you've probably seen the "Get the facts" (sic) trolls among the adverts, a really lame attack launched years ago by Microsoft, still carried on to this day by Microsoft Canada. But that's another story.

Sabrinus, your water may be beautiful, and my water is only a tad on the hard side, but rest assured there are folks out there with water that may be technically potable, but it stinks. When we lived in that little A-Frame on D-line, the (municipal!) water was so bad I'd wait until trips to Toronto to bathe! It was oily, and ugly. May is from HK, and their culture has long ago so ruined the water supply that no one there dare ever trust un-boiled and un-filtred (municipal!) tap-water, and while May finds that just common sense, I find it sad. It reflects poorly on our status as the creature given this planet to husband it. It represents our failure to keep our nest clean. We're supposed to be the smart ape.

Because it isn't 'common-sense'. It simply shouldn't be that way, and if people must boil and filtre, what then should the birds, racoons and bears do?

Bottom line, I think we have to accept that there are people who find their water worrisome, whether or not they have cause to, and any proposed resolution to this question must reassure both sides. We need to assure folks who want better water, whether that's now or in the future, and we need to assure folks who already have good water that we're not going to take it from them or force them pay to 'clean' it.

Here's my (lame) attempt at just such a resolution ...

crisis, what crisis?

What Sabrinus says is very true: there is no water crisis, the Sauble water, even where it is icky, is still safe, and I have proof, proof from the very hands who had been spreading the FUD about our watershed: Sauble Beach now flies the Blue Flag!

Whatever you might say about the organization that endorses that flag or its criteria for awarding it, the simple fact of the matter is, the very people who were chanting Doom On You over bad water were the very same folks who had us Certified as a land of clean and healthy water! Q.E.D.

wait, there's more ...

FUD wars /fuhd worz/ n. -- [from {FUD}] Political posturing engaged in by hardware and software vendors ostensibly committed to standardization but actually willing to fragment the market to protect their own shares.

Here's the sad part: as we've seen here before, there are all sorts of alternatives for both water filtering and waste water disposal, proven and affordable, many of them homegrown and some of them even finding local entrepreneurial adventurers who have already taken that plunge to bet the farm on them. Only, you may wonder, if they are so great then why don't we see their ads in the Echo and Sauble Bulletin? Because they are spooked! War is not good for children and other living things. You all had that poster.

This past decade of pipeline FUD means no one wants to invest in alternatives when there's a spectre of municipally enforced additional costs looming on an always inflated false sense of immediacy. Anyone who'd installed Living Machines in 1995 could have paid them off by now, maybe several times, but they didn't do it out of fear they'd have to pay twice for the same service. Some of those folks are out of business now, closed up or sold off because they could never expand their shop, all for the want of water.

You want to know what is stifling development? I can spell it out: Fear, Uncertanty and Doubt! -- what Sabrinus says is nonetheless true, how once we supply that industrial infrastructure, development will follow only that kind of gangbuster development is the sort that trampled Unionville; like suburban living, no one who has lived through it will endorse wanting it.

a recipe for development

An organic growth, the natural growth of what is needed, as it is needed, that sort of small is beautiful growth which grows communities, that kind of growth can happen, and it could happen starting today if we could give enterprising adventurers an assurance they will not be wasting their time and money.

What's the use of a rant without at least one crazy idea, so here's one: could we enshrine an OPT-OUT tax clause, granting a transferable tax break for those properties who prefer alternative water management systems (including simple sandpoint/septic) to guarantee a permanent tax-exemption from any and all potential future municipal water system surcharges?

After all, iff the municipal option, when it happens, is truly so much better in every way, then intelligent people will choose it, right? Stands to reason, doesn't it? They'd line up to opt-in! And for those who don't, for those who like it the way it was, we get politically bold and simply guarantee them a Walden Pond Status that permanently recognizes their obstinance ;) -- so long as they stand apart

And I mean permanently, signed sealed and granting them and their heirs that exception, and not permanent like a wobbily clause in your will that asks that the parkland you've donated remain forever parkland ...

hmmmm...most people i know that have chlorinated municipal water drink bottled water. why not just deliver bottled water to everyone? it may be cheaper than building a pipeline, would support local business and maybe create more jobs. or, what about getting the saugeen nation to extend their pipeline to service the 200 cottages at the beach that need servicing? what about enforcing our existing septic bylaws and shutting the polluters down? how many readers here normally drink bottled water vs those who consume municipal or personal (well) water? garym, can you do surveys on this site?
kltpzyxm

quote:garym - Sabrinus, your water may be beautiful

garym, our water is far from "beautiful", it has a sulphur taste to it, and undissolved solids no doubt, but it is contaminant-free from a human health perspective and that is OK with me. Some cottagers don't like the taste, so get a Brita filter. Why kill the mouse with the elephant gun?