EPA Supports Integration and Innovation -- Great Move!

Pressure from Mayors and utility managers has been building in Washington, D.C. to ease the escalating financial burdens for expensive CSO, stormwater and other Clean Water Act mandates around the country.   I had also written a letter as a resident of Gloucester, Massachusetts, suggesting there were far better wastewater and stormwater projects than a secondary treatment plant upgrade that EPA was proposing.  EPA has responded constructively.  Last Thursday, Nancy Stoner, Office of Water, and Cynthia Giles, Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, issued a joint letter (http://www.epa.gov/npdes/pubs/memointegratedmunicipalplans.pdf) announcing what could be a transformative new policy.  Municipalities will be able to draft integrated wastewater and stormwater plans, consider innovative and green approaches, and prioritize projects over time to achieve the greatest benefits to water quality and to the community.  Financial ability will also be taken into consideration as permits are drafted.   Kudos to Stoner and Giles!  The details will be worked out in coming months. 

Environmental Journalism ... and Public Narratives

I was so pleased to be invited by Cynthia Barnett (author of Blue Revolution) to participate in a water panel at the Society of Environmental Journalists national conference in Miami last week, along with Peter Gleick and Bradley Udall.  It was a lively and rich converstion with journalists from around the country, including talk about the worsening water crises related to emerging climate extremes, shortages of food, hydro-fracking, etc.  But I also threw out my view that journalists are not describing the full nature of the crisis in water.  As in the energy and food sectors, we need more coverage of the financial stresses on the current system and the need to change fundamentally the way we manage water.  Reaching out to media is another task we should all be taking seriously -- because what reporters write has so much influence over the stories and narratives people tell each other in the public square.  

Occupy Wall Street ..... and Water Management

Good to see more civic dialogue about failings in our economy and governance.  If the students, unemployed, union members, and others now talking to each other in the parks and streets turned their attention to water management, what might they see?  A sector that, in the U.S. at least, has largely resisted a wholesale privatization and takeover by Wall Street.  But that doesn't mean that a water-industrial complex doesn't exist in the design and construction of the centralized water and wastewater collection and treatment grid (see earlier blog on Cynthia Barnett's new book, Blue Revolution).  Can this industry self-correct, by guiding the emergence of a more sustainable approach in decentralized and integrated systems?  Unlikely.  Too much money to be made in the old ways. Yes, there are scrappy clean tech entrepreneurs trying to get a toehold in the new ways.  But, it's clear to me that pressures for a paradigm shift in water have to come as well from civil society, where the escalating costs and increasing public health and ecosystem threats are directly felt at the local level.  Citizens need to push for a redirection of capital investments into projects and technologies that generate greater benefits for their communities and the environment and to raise the alarm for equity and environmental justice.   We're all wondering where Occupy Wall Street will head, but for the time being, more talk about the basic structural flaws in our institutions could be a good thing. 

Human Right to Water and Sanitation

Last week, the UNC Water Institute convened a terrific international conference, Water and Health 2011.  I was on the agenda to describe the U.S. site visit last winter of the United Nations Independent Expert on the Human Right to Water and Sanitation, Catarina de Albuquerque.  As a member of the planning committee for the site visit, I introduced Catarina to colleagues from the Black Belt in Alabama and from Appalachia, who described to her the inequities and discimination in provision of water and wastewater services in the U.S.  We also arranged for a site visit to Falmouth on Cape Cod, where residents are facing proposals for $60-80,000 per home conventional sewer systems to deal (hypothetically) with nitrogen in groundwater and estuaries.  Citizens have been advocating for much more affordable and quicker solutions, such as composting toilets, permeable barriers, oyster uptake, inlet widening, and others.  Catarina's report on her visit states that we need a paradigm shift in the way we manage water and she recommends pilot projects, research, integrated planning, and multiple benefits.  In my session I spoke about the great potential to learn about needed structural changes in water management -- to recover resources, use natural systems, develop innovative financing and business models, and others -- that apply both in developed and developing countries.  Achieving the human right to water and sanitation will only occur through such a paradigm shift.   

Research: Reinventing the Nation's Urban Water Infrastructure

Stanford, UC/Berkeley, Colorado School of Mines, and New Mexico State University have been awarded a major multi-year grant from the National Science Foundation-Engineering Research Center program.  This consortium of researchers has developed a workplan to explore urban water systems that are energy-positive, enhance resource recovery, increase the water supply portfolio, improve aquatic ecosystems and urban aesthetics, and are financially and socially sustainable.  This is a tremendous opportunity for the water field to tap into high-quality science and engineering at these leading universities. I've been invited to serve as one of the ERC's Industrial/Practitioner Partners, so I got to sit through briefings last week with representatives from Veolia, CH2MHill, the Artemis Project, WERF, Tampa Bay Water, Sonoma County Water Agency, and others.   As this work proceeds, it is important to avoid a trap that academics can fall into -- of thinking that their new technologies or sets of economic principles will save the day, if only they can be imposed on the current unruly and sub-optimal system.  The best and most fruitful initiatives are, in contrast, those that actively engage civil society and policymakers in a joint quest for sustainability, environmental justice, and resilience.  Both sides -- academic researchers and the real world -- can do best when they are learning together.  In any case, congratulations to these faculty and to NSF for making this significant investment in reinvention.