Back in the late 1980s when I was working on an assignment with the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, the executive director went public with a proposal to involve upstream communities in the watersheds of the city’s three rivers in efforts to control pollution that ultimately affected the city and Lake Michigan.
Well, judging from the reaction, it’s lucky for him the pillory had passed out of existence a couple of centuries earlier. A headline on a Milwaukee newspaper editorial pretty well summed it up the reaction: “City Hall Can’t Run the Region.” (The paper ascribed the proposal to city hall because the mayor had power to appoint seven of the district commission’s 11 members.)
Whether the paper’s editors knew it or not, that headline cut straight to the root of the problem: A provincial attitude among municipalities, townships and counties that tends to discourage large-scale, cooperative solutions to regional problems.
In reality, the director’s proposal made excellent sense. After all, pollution in a river, most notably nutrients in the form of nitrogen and phosphorus, comes not from the city at the river’s mouth but from the entire watershed — from upstream cities and villages, from farms and lawns, from all manner of rural and urban runoff. Why should wastewater agencies and their sewer users bear all the cost of controlling those nutrients?
Bigger picture
Clearly more visionary people understand this. The Chesapeake Bay Initiative, for example, takes an entire-watershed approach to helping clean up the bay. The program looks not only at wastewater treatment plants, septic systems and urban and rural runoff but also at deposition of pollutants from the air.
We are also beginning to see innovations like nutrient trading and adaptive, watershed-based approaches in other states and localities. In this month’s “In My Words” article about reducing phosphorus in effluent from lagoon treatment systems, the interviewee specifically mentions the phosphorus rule in my home state of Wisconsin.
It allows wastewater agencies facing newly strict phosphorus limits to look upstream for part of the solution, generally involving management programs that help curtail nutrient-rich runoff. Such remedies tend to be both sensible and more cost-effective than trying to do the whole job with treatment technology.
The limiting factor
The impact of phosphorus on waterways became elegantly clear to me when I read a wonderful book, For Love of Lakes, by Darby Nelson, an aquatic ecologist, former community college instructor, and former state legislator in Minnesota.
Nelson first describes all the ingredients in his wife’s blueberry muffins and explains how, if she happens to have only two teaspoons of baking powder, she can only make one batch of muffins — no matter how much flour and sugar and how many eggs she may have on hand. Then:
“In lakes, except in unique circumstances, the ‘tin’ of phosphorus usually empties first. Compared to demand, it is phosphorus that is available in least supply, the bottleneck to alchemy. Little phosphorus in lake water begets few cyanobacteria, algae and aquatic plants. Lots of phosphorus begets lots of blue-green (algae) or aquatic plants or both.” (Blue-green algae is the worst consequence of phosphorus pollution.)
If not just wastewater operators but citizens in general understood this simple yet powerful concept — that phosphorus is the key ingredient in a biological process that is fouling our waters — then it might be easier to get people to cooperate with phosphorus control initiatives.
Presumably that would include getting people, first to be willing to spend money and change their behaviors to do their part, and second to look beyond parochial interests and accept that here is a case where what on the surface may look like Big Brother and “big government” is really the only approach to a serious problem that can actually work.
Strangely enough, I see more discussion about watershed-based approaches in my work involving onsite wastewater treatment — septic systems — than I do in the big-pipe community. I would not swear that this perception of mine is accurate; I simply offer it as something I observe.
Time for teaching
So here’s a salute to those wastewater agencies that are doing what they can to educate their customers and their communities about nutrients, their effects, and the remedies with which each of us can lend a hand. And here’s an extra note of congratulations for agencies that are taking bigger-picture, collaborative, watershed-based approaches to help deal with nutrient enrichment issues in the waterways we all love and depend upon.
In a time when political cooperation at the state and national levels is harder to achieve than at any time in memory, perhaps there is room to believe, or hope, that local cooperation and personal involvement on this issue is possible. If so, it will do more good than almost any state or federal nutrient legislation that may come out of the pipeline.
