Environmental Intersection by George Lindemann

Bruce Ritchie, 05/02/2012 - 04:04 PM

With the workload of developing new nutrient water quality rules seemingly in the rear view mirror, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection is moving forward on some other potentially controversial water quality issues.

DEP is responsible for protecting the quality of Florida’s drinking water as well as its rivers, lakes, wetlands and springs. The Federal Clean Water Act requires states to publicly review and update their water quality standards in what is called a "triennial review." 

The department has scheduled hearings for later this month in West Palm Beach, Orlando and Tallahassee to consider its "human health criteria" involving exposure to chemicals through fish consumption.

DEP was conducting a similar review in 2008 before some environmental groups filed a federal lawsuit challenging the state's lack of numeric limits for nitrogen and phosphorus. That lawsuit led the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to set limits for nitrogen and phosphorus in Florida waterways, which prompted DEP to adopt replacement rules.

"That just became all-consuming," said Drew Bartlett, director of DEP's Division of Environmental Assessment and Restoration. "Now that we put that to rest, we can shift those resources consumed by the numeric nutrient criteria back onto this issue. We decided to pick it straight right back up."

The Legislature waived approval of those rules in February and the state sent them to the EPA for review. Environmental groups including the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, the Florida Wildlife Federation and the Sierra Club have a legal challenge pending at the Division of Administrative Hearings.

In 2009, the Clean Water Network petitioned the federal EPA to set human health criteria for fish consumption. Other environmental groups had sued in 1995, arguing that previous human health criteria were based on low fish consumption rates by Floridians.

DEP has conducted studies and determined that Floridians do eat more fish than those in other states, so proposed new human health criteria will have to reflect that, Bartlett said.

"It is going to become more stringent than it is currently on the books for all of those (pollution) parameters," he said.

Although Bartlett said DEP is moving forward as planned, Clean Water Network's Linda Young said her group has warned it will sue if DEP delays action again.

"(The federal) EPA has to make sure the criteria adopted are protective of human health when those fish are consumed," said Young, the group's director.

After the hearings from May 15-17, DEP hopes to adopt updated rules by the end of the year, Bartlett said.

The department also is proposing limits for nitrogen and phosphorus in estuaries along the Florida Panhandle. And the department will consider setting new requirements for dissolved oxygen, which affects the amount of pollution that can be discharged into waterways.

Florida's dissolved oxygen criteria were based on national criteria from studies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s, Bartlett said.

He said in more recent years, DEP has invested in a "huge" monitoring system in Florida to determine what dissolved oxygen conditions exist naturally in Florida. That science also will be presented at the workshops.

The Conservancy of Southwest Florida is tracking the dissolved oxygen issue and has raised serious concerns with DEP, said Jennifer Hecker, the group's director of natural resource policy.

"Sometimes by changing the goal and standard you can create compliance," Hecker said. "It doesn't necessarily make anything better -- that is the concern. We want to see things truly improve. I think that is what Floridians want as well."

Young warned that industry groups are seeking to allow pollution to continue by reducing dissolved oxygen -- along with setting weak nitrogen and phosphorus limits and creating new designated uses for waterways with their own pollution limits.

Bartlett responded the science behind dissolved oxygen standard needs to be updated based on new science, just like with the nitrogen and phosphorus limits. And he said DEP will looking for feedback from the public at its upcoming workshops.

"We can't really do anything at DEP that is not truly and soundly rooted in the science," Bartlett said. "There is no other way to do it really."

Reporter Bruce Ritchie can be reached at britchie@thefloridacurrent.com.

BY CHARLES RABIN AND CURTIS MORGAN

CRABIN@MIAMIHERALD.COM
 

Almost two decades after the EPA imposed the biggest fine at the time on the county for ignoring the Clean Water Act, the feds are back and talking to Miami-Dade leaders, this time about repairing miles of faulty pipes that carry raw sewage.

In this file photo, a Miami-Dade County high-pressure vacuum truck works on the sewer system in Northwest Dade. MIAMI HERALD FILE

Miami-Dade County’s 7,500 miles of sewage lines are in such decrepit shape and rupture so frequently — sometimes spilling raw waste into waterways and Biscayne Bay — that federal environmental regulators are demanding repairs and upgrades that could cost upwards of a billion dollars.

Authorities from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Justice and Florida Department of Environmental Protection met Wednesday morning with leaders at County Hall to begin what figures to be a lengthy and expensive negotiation for Miami-Dade.

John Renfrow, director of Miami-Dade’s Water and Sewer Department, acknowledged the string of major ruptures that have plagued the county’s sewage system in recent years, saying the aging network is “being held together by chewing gum.” He added he has sought more money to fix the leaks for a long time.

The price tag, though still uncertain, will easily reach the hundreds of millions and could top $1 billion based on past repair projects. The massive overhaul almost certainly will mean rate hikes for hundreds of thousands of residents who have historically paid some of the lowest fees in the state.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/02/v-fullstory/2779936/feds-file-complaint...

“We would like to think there’s state and federal assistance,” said Doug Yoder, Water and Sewer deputy director for regional compliance. “But this is ultimately going to come back to rates. It will require our rates go up, either to generate cash or to pay bonds back.”

The federal complaints are sketched out in a 78-page draft consent decree claiming Miami-Dade County has violated sections of the Clean Water Act, along with terms and conditions of its National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits. The report doesn’t detail specific failures, but said state and federal environmental protection agencies “have inspected Miami-Dade’s WCTS [wastewater collection treatment system] and WWTPs [wastewater treatment plants] and have discovered a number of improper management, operations, and maintenance practices.”

Miami-Dade has suffered at least three major sewer pipe breaks the past three years, and a recent internal report shows that three sections of 54-inch pipe under the bay, leading to the Virginia Key water treatment plant, are so brittle they could rupture at any time. Renfrow told The Miami Herald earlier this year that a break in that pipe, which carries 25 million gallons of raw sewage each day from Surfside, Miami Beach, and Bal Harbour, could be “catastrophic.”

He said it would mean “you’d have to close down the beaches and it would be an environmental mess.”

Aging sewer lines are not a problem unique to Miami-Dade. The EPA estimates there are 240,000 line breaks across the country each year as governments struggle to find revenue to repair sewage systems that in some cases are 100 years old. Fixing the nation’s sewer line ills could exceed $100 billion, the EPA noted.

Though the EPA wouldn’t comment directly on the complaint, the agency seems to be focusing on the Virginia Key line and several other pipe lines that have broken the past few years. The county’s system, built in the 1920s, last underwent major repairs in the 1970s.

The last time Miami-Dade was hit with a consent decree in 1996, it paid a $2 million fine, at the time the largest penalty paid to the EPA for Clean Water Act violations. Unlike the current decree, which is looking at old faulty pipes, the previous probe focused on the county’s lack of capacity to drain water overflows. In the 1990s, overflows and spills into the Miami River, Biscayne Bay and canals were mostly due to the system’s inability to handle big rainstorms.

Since then, the county has spent nearly $2 billion upgrading its system, from a $600 million overhaul of the water treatment facility in South Dade, to repairing more than 500 pump stations, to retrofitting thousands of homes with low-flush toilets. Water flow has been reduced by about 12 percent, or close to 100 million gallons a day.

Yet, the federal government maintains, Miami-Dade must spend billions more because over the past decade miles of aging pipeline crisscrossing the county are breaking with increasing frequency.

“The system is getting old,” said Bertha Goldenberg, the water and sewer department’s assistant director.

Adding to the worries, engineers have linked many of the worst breaks to defective pipe built by Interpace, a now-defunct company whose products were widely used in the 1970s. Now, some are failing decades earlier than expected. Over time, steel reinforcement wires inside the concrete pipes have corroded, broken and failed.

Recent breakdowns have occurred in Hialeah — where a 54-inch main break left a giant sinkhole — in Northwest Dade, where a 72-inch pipe burst and leaked almost 20 million gallons of sewage into a canal leading to Biscayne Bay, and in Miami Lakes, where a bus got stuck in a sinkhole after a 12-inch pipe broke. Fixing the system can be taxing, as groups of workers head out at night to one of the county’s 1,041 pump stations, then insert machines with mini cameras to run through the pipes in search of cracks or tears.

Perhaps the most infamous sewage rupture in recent memory occurred in 2000, when the line from Government Cut to Virginia Key was accidentally ruptured when contractors installing new boatlifts at Miami Beach Marina drilled through it. The resulting gusher of raw sewage cost $2.5 million to repair and the stinking slick closed surrounding waters for days.

 

The Everglades, our life-sustaining River of Grass, needs every friend it can get. And it’s getting a real whopper of an advocate in Erik Eikenberg, who was named chief executive of the Everglades Foundation this week.

The Foundation is a politically influential, well-funded organization committed to Everglades restoration. Its board found Mr. Eikenberg to be the perfect fit for the lead position. His background backs up that thinking: Now a Tallahassee lobbyist, Mr. Eikenberg is a politically astute former chief aide to Gov. Charlie Crist. He’s well-connected in both Tallahassee and Washington and championed the 2008 Everglades-restoration land deal that Mr. Crist advocated with the U.S. Sugar Corp. Years before, he was chief of staff in to U.S. Rep. E. Clay Shaw, a Fort Lauderdale Republican who was a strong supporter of the landmark $12.4 billion Everglades restoration plan. And how’s this for serendipity? Mr. Eikenberg, a native of Coral Springs, is a graduate of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

The Everglades warrants every bit of political muscle Mr. Eikenberg can flex. It is not only an essential ecosystem, delivering water to South Florida from Lake Okeechobee. In just the past three years, restoration projects have created more than 10,000 jobs — and that was in the midst of a recession. Yet hundreds of thousands of jobs depend on the water system. A healthy Everglades spurs recreational tourism, another moneymaker for the state.

Despite this vital role that the Everglades plays in our lives, it has, over too many years, been abused by polluted runoff from farming areas and homes, gouged by development and, of course, had its funds drained to help balance the state budget. Last year, Gov. Scott and the Legislature decimated funds for Everglades restoration projects. Short-sighted, to say the least. This year, $30 million was restored for projects.

Everglades restoration needs sustained and consistent funding.

In Mr. Eikenberg, the River of Grass appears to have a sustained and consistent voice advocating for its good health.

The deal struck by Miami-Dade County and state and federal agencies with environmentalists to proceed with the “Deep Dredge” project — instrumental for PortMiami’s growth and this area’s economic future — is a victory for Biscayne Bay’s sea life and every resident and visitor to our area.

It allows the port to keep to the dredge schedule so that it will be ready by 2014 to receive new super-sized cargo ships coming through the Panama Canal that need 50-feet deep waters to dock in Miami. How the agreement was reached was not ideal, however.

Environmentalists’ appeals were rushed within a 30-day deadline imposed by Tallahassee legislators and supported by county officials. Tropical Audobon Society, commercial fishermen and other groups concerned that the drilling blasts would destroy coral, kill sea life and muck up the bay’s pristine turquoise waters agreed to drop an administrative challenge if the county provided $2.3 million more than previously budgeted for restoration and monitoring projects that will save or restore corals, sea grass beds and other sealife.

As Laura Reynolds, executive director of the Tropical Audubon Society, noted, the deal “raised the bar” for environmental protection.

The Army Corps of Engineers, meanwhile, has experience in the bay, having successfully dredged there before. That bodes well for Biscayne Bay’s marine life, including turtles, dolphin and snook as the agreement limits the time frame of the blasts to better protect fish during times of day (dawn and dusk) when they become more active. It also bans blasting along the northern jetty of Government Cut during snook spawning season.

About eight acres of sea grass beds and seven acres of reefs (most at the entrance of the channel) will be lost to the dredge, which includes widening the port’s offshore entrance to the main channel by some 300 feet and deepening the port to 50 or 52 feet from the current 42 feet of depth.

Under the settlement reached during mediation with the state Department of Environmental Protection, the county and the Corps, two more acres of new sea grass areas will be added for mitigation, resulting in 16.6 acres. Small corals would also be moved to a new artificial reef or brought to other natural ones in the bay not affected by the blasting. Also, money will be spent to restore coastal dunes on north Virginia Key and two mangrove and wetlands projects at Oleta River State Park in North Miami.

The Miami-Dade County Commission likely will approve the settlement next week. But that still leaves one big environmental issue unresolved: an old and potentially defective sewer pipe that runs under the shipping channel and must be replaced. It carries 25 million gallons of raw sewage a day from Bal Harbour, Miami Beach and other beach towns to the county sewage treatment plant on Virginia Key.

The county is working on a fix, which will require burying a new pipe deep enough to be safe from the blasting for the dredge. There is no room for error. Residents and beach-goers’ health and safety are at stake.

With the deeper port, thousands of new good-paying jobs will result, combined with a new rail system that will move cargo directly from the port, saving time and local roadways from heavy truck traffic. Port Director Bill Johnson says the deeper channel could double the port’s container shipping business. That’s why reaching an agreement was so important to South Florida’s future.

 

The “Deep Dredge” project, a critical and controversial key to PortMiami’s ambitious $2 billion expansion plan, is back on schedule after a legal settlement announced on Wednesday.

Environmentalists, who had argued that two years of blasting and digging in the port’s main channel would leave long-lasting scars in Biscayne Bay, agreed to drop an administrative challenge that threatened to delay the work for months or longer.

In exchange, Miami-Dade County has agreed to an additional $2.3 million in restoration and monitoring projects and other tweaks, such as a narrower daily blasting window, intended to enhance protection for corals, sea grass beds and other marine life.

“This is a win-win for the entire community,” Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez said in a release. “The agreement provides additional funding for important environmental projects while at the same time allowing for the timely completion of the dredge project.”

Laura Reynolds, executive director of the Tropical Audubon Society, said the settlement didn’t address all of environmentalists’ concerns but had “raised the bar’’ on protecting the bay’s surrounding, fish-rich waters.

“What we’ve been able to do is make the permit a lot stronger,” said Reynolds, whose organization joined with Biscayne Bay Waterkeeper and local fishing captain Dan Kipnis last November in filing a legal challenge to a Florida Department of Environmental Protection permit issued for the project.

The deal, expected to be approved by the Miami-Dade County Commission on May 1, clears the way for work to begin as early as this summer.

For port managers, keeping to that schedule is important. With a truck tunnel under Government Cut in the works and a new freight rail system also coming on line, the plan was to complete the dredging in 2014, putting Miami in position to lure a new class of mega-size cargo ships at the same time an overhaul is completed at the Panama Canal. Port Director Bill Johnson has projected the deeper channel could double the seaport’s container shipping business and spawn thousands of jobs in coming years.

The work — widening the port’s offshore entrance to the main channel by some 300 feet and deepening much of the port to 52 feet by scooping out about eight feet of rock, sand and rubble — would also consume some eight acres of sea grass beds and seven acres of reefs, including about five acres of previously undisturbed reef at the channel’s mouth.

Environmentalists had argued that the DEP and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers didn’t include enough “mitigation” to offset the loss of reefs and sea grass beds or set strict enough water quality standards to minimize silting damage to surrounding areas. They also warned that blasting during the two-year-long project could harm or kill marine life from snook to dolphin.

Port managers, backed by state and federal agencies, insisted most impacts will be minimal and short-lived, pointing out a smaller dredging project a few years ago that left no lingering scars to surrounding areas.

Under the terms of the settlement, reached after three days of mediation involving environmental groups, the county, the DEP and the Corps, the seaport will transfer $1.3 million into a Miami-Dade trust fund for environmental enhancement projects.

Eric Eikenberg, chief of staff to former Gov. Charlie Crist and a seasoned Republican strategist, has landed one of the state’s most influential environmental advocacy jobs.

The Everglades Foundation, a Palmetto Bay-based group whose membership boasts deep pockets and political clout, will announce Wednesday that Eikenberg will become its new chief executive.

Eikenberg has experience and connections in both Tallahassee and Washington and championed the Everglades restoration land deal Crist pitched in 2008 with the U.S. Sugar Corp., a controversial project strongly supported by the foundation and other environmental groups.

“Eric impressed us from the first moment we met,’’ foundation Chairman Paul Tudor Jones II said in a release. “He has a deep understanding of what it takes to achieve success both in Washington and Tallahassee and he has the leadership skills that will help the foundation continue to be at the forefront of Everglades restoration.’’

Eikenberg, 36, a Coral Springs native and graduate of Majory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland who will leave his current job as a Tallahassee lobbyist, said he looked forward to leading an organization he called “the premier voice when it comes to Everglades restoration.’’

With a well-heeled, well-connected board led by Jones — a billionaire hedge fund manager and avid fly-fisher who owns an Islamorada home — the foundation has significantly raised its profile and influence in shaping Everglades policies in the past few years.

Under previous chief executive Kirk Fordham — also a former Republican political aide in Washington who resigned in March to lead Gill Action, a Colorado-based gay advocacy organization — the foundation’s budget grew from $3.9 million in 2008 to nearly $7 million this year.

The foundation boasts a team of scientists and last year added three full-time lobbyists in Tallahassee. It’s also a major contributor to other environmental groups in the state, last year giving a total of $1.3 million to 15 other organizations.

Eikenberg comes with a similar political pedigree to Fordham but with far more Tallahassee connections.

He spent two years as Crist’s top aide. He also ran the former governor’s ill-fated Senate campaign before resigning in May 2010 when Crist, facing a certain loss to Marco Rubio, quit the Republican Party to run as an independent.

Earlier, Eikenberg spent four years in Washington as chief of staff to U.S. Rep. E. Clay Shaw, a Fort Lauderdale Republican who was a strong supporter of the landmark $12.4 billion Everglades restoration effort. Since June 2010, Eikenberg has worked for the Holland & Knight law firm in Tallahassee, co-chairing a lobbying team with former Florida Gov. Bob Martinez.

In a foundation release, Martinez and Shaw praised the choice.

“Eric has the ability to work with anybody and find solutions to difficult problems,’’ said Shaw, who called him “the perfect fit.’’

Eikenberg, who will move to Miami with his wife, Tonya, and four children, said he was looking forward to “re-engaging’’ on Everglades issues.

“The mission is simple: Save the Everglades,’’ he said.

The Colorado River Aqueduct, a lifeline to Southern California.

By ADAM NAGOURNEY and FELICITY BARRINGER

Published: April 23, 2012

SAN DIEGO — There are accusations of conspiracies, illegal secret meetings and double-dealing. Embarrassing documents and e-mails have been posted on an official Web site emblazoned with the words “Fact vs. Fiction.” Animosities have grown so deep that the players have resorted to exchanging lengthy, caustic letters, packed with charges of lying and distortion.

 And it is all about water.

Water is a perennial source of conflict and anxiety throughout the arid West, but it has a particular resonance here in the deserts of Southern California. This is a place where major thoroughfares are named after water engineers (Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles) and literary essays (“Holy Water” by Joan Didion, for instance) and films (“Chinatown”) have been devoted to its power and mystique.

Yet in the nearly 80 years since the Arizona National Guard was called out to defend state waters against dam-building Californians, there has been little to rival the feud now under way between San Diego’s water agency and the consortium of municipalities that provides water to 19 million customers in Southern California. This contentious and convoluted battle seems more akin to a tough political campaign than a fight between bureaucrats, albeit one with costly consequences.

At issue is San Diego’s longstanding contention that it has been bullied by a gang of its neighbors in the consortium, able by virtue of their number to force the county to pay exorbitant fees for water. The consortium two weeks ago imposed two back-to-back 5 percent annual water rate increases on San Diego — scaled down, after strong protests, from what were originally set to be back-to-back increases of 7.5 percent a year.

The battle is being fought in the courts — a judge in San Francisco is struggling to untangle a welter of conflicting claims from the two sides — but also on the Internet. San Diego officials have created a sleek Web site to carry their argument to the public, posting 500 pages of documents they obtained through public records requests to discredit the other side.

And they might have struck oil, as it were, unearthing documents and e-mails replete with references to the “anti-San Diego coalition” and “a Secret Society,” and no matter that the purported conspirators contend that they were just being jocular.

“There is a lot of frustration,” said Jerry Sanders, the mayor of San Diego, who has watched from the sidelines as the independent San Diego Water Authority waged its wars. “It’s been building over the years.”

Asked about the tactics, Mr. Sanders demurred. “Whether they are effective or not, I’ll leave that to other people to judge.”

If nothing else, the fight is an entertaining diversion from the kind of bland bureaucratic infighting that usually characterizes these kinds of disputes.

Dennis A. Cushman, the assistant general manager of the San Diego authority, said it posted the documents — and asked a judge to force the disclosure of a ream of other private e-mails and documents — so beleaguered water consumers “could see how the business of water in California is actually done.”

“We had suspicions about what was going on,” Mr. Cushman said. “We were shocked by the depth and scope and the level of sophistication of what was going on.”

“It’s not done in public,” he said. “It’s done out of public view. The meetings aren’t open. They are designed to expressly exclude the agency they are discriminating against.”

Jeffrey Kightlinger, the general manager of the regional water consortium, described the charges as “nonsense,” saying that the meetings that Mr. Cushman had deemed illegal did not fall under the state’s open meetings laws. He described the campaign against his organization — the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, also known by the acronym M.W.D. — as unlike anything he had seen.

“It sounds like a political campaign, and hiring political consultants to run it for them strikes me as a new level of activity I haven’t seen before in public service,” he said.

“It just seems to me to have a different tenor and tone than before,” he said. “The idea of bandying about secret-society issues, talking about ‘the truth about M.W.D.’ strikes me as unprofessional and does a disservice to the public.”

Kevin P. Hunt, the general manager of the water district of Orange County, said he was taken aback at the suggestion that some kind of plot was afoot. “It would be funny if it hadn’t created such a furor,” he said. “It was a bunch of guys and gals getting together to do their work. It’s all in the spin you put on it — calling it a ‘secret society’ and making it sound like a cabal. I didn’t even know what a cabal was.”

The case ultimately will be determined in a state court in San Francisco. At issue is how much the district should be charging San Diego to use the district’s pipes to transport water the county bought elsewhere. (San Diego officials have made a concerted effort to expand the sources of their water over the years — including a long-contested, substantial transfer of Colorado River water from inland farmers — so they are not as reliant on the district as they once were).

San Diego has four seats on the district’s 37-member board, and there is little incentive for other communities to entertain San Diego’s argument: When San Diego pays less, everyone else pays more.

Mr. Cushman said that the district had come to view San Diego as “its golden egg.”

Still, even supporters of San Diego’s actions suggest that all accusations may ultimately be little more than a sideshow.

“It just doesn’t feel right,” said Lani Lutar, the president of the San Diego County Taxpayers Association. “They are already pursuing the lawsuit. Those are ratepayer dollars being spent and all of the advertising. Is that necessary? The lawsuit is going to resolve the matter. The P.R. stunt has taken it too far.”

San Diego is the eighth-largest city in the country, and this part of California gets 10 inches of rain a year, on average. And this city is at the end of two long water transport systems.

“We’ve always had end-of-pipeline paranoia,” said Lester Snow, the executive director of the California Water Foundation and a former head of both the San Diego and state water agencies. “It is often just physical — the pipeline crosses earthquake faults and anything that happens bad anywhere can affect us.”

The long history has left San Diego with what seems to be a permanent sense of grievance. But Mr. Snow said that this represented a new level of animosity. “The current dispute has gone way beyond a rate-increase dispute,” he said.

 

By JENNIFER KAY, Associated Press – 17 hours ago   

EVERGLADES NATIONAL PARK, Fla. (AP) — Vice President Joe Biden has taken what he says was his first airboat ride, touring a swath of the Everglades while touting the benefits of a federally funded restoration project to restore the flow of water.

Biden boated past a bridge project west of Miami that will elevate a cross-Everglades highway that long dammed water flowing through Everglades National Park. Environmentalists say the project will improve wetlands habitat for alligators, wading birds and other wildlife.

The project was approved in 2000 but construction was only expedited after years of legal challenges using stimulus money under President Barack Obama's administration, park officials say.

Biden brought his granddaughter along on the airboat tour and also was joined by U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson and U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings, two Florida Democrats.

Copyright © 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Fourteen states suffering under drought. Water use in Southwest heads for day of reckoning. Water-pollution laws violated more than 500,000 times in five years. Ruptures in aging water systems cause pollutants to seep into water supplies.

 The above reporting from The Times speaks to a growing reality: the United States faces a water crisis. In making the feature documentary “Last Call at the Oasis,” I found the flow of evidence bracing in its breadth and acceleration, but the underlying dynamics are not new: we use more water than the system can naturally replenish, and we abuse the supply we have. During, say, periods of drought, we might fitfully curtail our consumption habits, but when it comes to long-term management strategies requiring long-term sacrifices, we balk. Isn’t clean and abundant water a basic right? We just need to find more water!

While we can’t “make” more water, there is one solution to water shortage problems that addresses issues of both quality and supply. Without mining an ancient aquifer, draining a natural spring or piping in the pricey harvest from a greenhouse-gas-and-brine-generating desalination plant, there is a solution to provide a valuable source of extremely pure water: reclaim it from sewage. The stuff from our showers, sinks and, yes, our toilets.  In Israel, more than 80 percent of household wastewater is recycled, providing nearly half the water for irrigation. A new pilot plant near San Diego and a national “NEWater” program in Singapore show it’s practical to turn wastewater into water that’s clean enough to drink. Yet, in most of the world, we are resistant to do so.

Why?

We think we are rational beings, but we are not. We are emotional creatures, subject to obscuring feelings like fear and disgust. No one knows more about this than Paul Rozin, the subject of this piece, who has studied disgust for decades. His work shows us the fallacy in assuming that, given the facts, people will make logical choices. While recycled water may be a smart and clean way to manage our water supply, our primitive instincts are more programmed to fear the murky water hole than to worry about climate change, new contaminants and population growth. We should think green, but we can’t help thinking brown. Until we understand the very human, irrational component to our actions — or lack thereof — we’ll still be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. 

The Academy Award-winning filmmaker Jessica Yu is the director of the forthcoming “Last Call at the Oasis,” a feature documentary on the water crisis for Participant Media.  Her nonfiction and scripted films include “Protagonist,” “Ping Pong Playa” and “In the Realms of the Unreal.”