I love this article in today's New York Times.
I have been lecturing for years that it is the mark of the civilized Western society that we can urinate, defecate and dump chemical waste into our own drinking water and not suffer for it. We can directly connect the success of urbanization with municiple water treatment systems. I always say that more people are alive today because of municiple water treatment than modern medicine ... but no one listens.
The author (not journalist in this case) visits a new water treatment plant and realizes that the purpose of the plant is to treat sewerage and return it to the city drinking water reservoir. The first response is "Yuck" but there is some really well developed science and chemistry here.
What really gets me cranking are the self righteous rural folk that claim that they have their own well and will not "pollute" their bodies with treated water. In most rural settings your well is down stream from someones septic field ... or a cemetery. At least with municple water someone is responsible for monitoring the water quality.
There is one line in the article that I really like and it shows the two objective and subjective sides of the science involved:
"You could argue that in coming to terms with wastewater as a resource, we’ll take better care of our water. At long last, the “everything is connected” message, the bedrock of the environmental movement, will hit home. In this view, once a community is forced to process and drink its toilet water, those who must drink it will rise up and change their ways. Floor moppers will switch to biodegradable cleaning products. Industry will use nontoxic material. Factory farms will cut their use of antibiotics. Maybe we’ll even stop building homes in the desert."
I think I am going to get a copy of the authors book.
No comments:
Post a Comment