No Water. No Life. No Blue. No Green.
— Sylvia Earle
In the tradition of many of my posts, I end up looking at the local through a sometimes fine and other times coarse lens to extrapolate what this country, and most First World We Are the Only Ones Who Matter countries, is facing way beyond a world without polar and glacial ice.
The formula is simple — and you can replace “there” or “here” with whichever community or city or county or state or region you care to discuss. This is an earth where almost everywhere on the planet is supercharged on noxious capitalism and addictive consumerism; where the 99 Percent of the People Are Up a Shit Creek without a Paddle: the roads here, or the bridges there, or the emergency response here, or the water system there, or the schools here, or the housing there, or the chronically ill, under-employed, unemployed here, or the disenfranchised there, or the poor here, or the health care system there, or the ecosystems here or the state of the economy there.
Look, the conversations in a town like Newport don’t involve some of the important issues that, say, a Dahr Jamail might write about. Newport, which numbers 10,000 as regular citizens/residents but balloons on some days — when the sun is out and the temperatures in Portland and all over the state of Oregon and Washington, and parts of Idaho, and California hit above 90 degrees F — to 50,000 people is small town, small minded, simple yet has to deal with modern and global warming issues no matter how distracted we get on the pot holes issues.
Up and down this coast and California’s and Washington’s, many communities can only survive (regressive real estate taxes and sin taxes/hotel taxes/gas taxes) with that huge influx of tourists pushing their big butts into these respective communities with internal combustion machines with other internal combustion machines (boats, jet skis) in tow. We survive on trinkets, fish and chips sold, time shares, Air B & Bs, booze, food and drugs (and pot, now that cannabis is legal in OR).
One big Black Friday retail and service economy chunk of the year that feeds the residents in a boom or bust cycle that has made it almost impossible for parents to raise children because parents have to have two or five jobs between the two of them. The schools are busting at the seams and burn-out is high in public service jobs.
And, many tourists come out here, think: “This is it for my last hurrah . . . I’m moving here”; or they imagine it’s the ideal place from which to land after leaving the madness of big city life and/or to raise a family and send them to school while enjoying the beach town life.
Oh, I understand the draw, but the reality is leaving one city because of its wild fires or increasing vehicular traffic or rising crime rates or lowering air/water quality levels or degrading environmental situations or discordant populations or weakening school systems or flagging labor opportunities or lowering standards of living actually just brings all of that and more to communities like Lincoln City, Depoe Bay, Newport, Waldport, Reedsport, Coos Bay etc.
The world of Corrupt, Dog-eat-Dog, Disconnected, Non-Systems Thinking Capitalism follows American wherever they go. Nothing about regional planning for resiliency, for sharing of assets and that includes water, air, industries taught in schools, taught at work, or taught within families or generations. Instead, Americans are acculturated to boom or bust; and I notice more and more Americans laugh at the places and people they left behind. They blame the people in LA for sticking it out, even blame them for being 4th, 6th or 10th generation Californians. Americans like to piss on everyone else’s parade, not just internationally, but domestically as well. This is the schizoid blue state/red state/purple state infantilism and corruption.
People here laugh or scream at Salem, Portland, Bend, what have you. You know, so much for rah-rah “we are one state and should act accordingly as one state for all.”
Here’s how one scenario, locally, plays out nationally — again, replace pink shrimp fishermen/women with Volkswagen workers or Amazon workers or hospital workers or, well, you get it: pit worker against worker.
NEWPORT — It’s been weeks of blue tarps and yawns on the Newport shrimp boats. But now, frustration is on deck too.
The Pacific pink shrimp season has been open for a month, but processors and fishermen are still far apart on price. The captains and crews of some 115 boats along the coast are holding out while a deal is cut. Their patience is being tried as a fleet of some 20 boats from Washington and Columbia River ports make hay in the traditional fishing grounds of the Newport fleet.
“I don’t know what these guys would do if that was happening out front down here,” said Coos Bay shrimp boat owner Nick Edwards.
Some 500,000 pounds of shrimp landed so far by boats breaking the strike indicates there’s good product volume to be had.
But, Edwards said, shrimpers are looking at offers of 30, 60, 80 and 90 cents per pound for the different grades of shrimp, down from 45, 72, 90 cents and $1.20 last year, when fishermen struck for 44 days to get that price schedule.
Edwards blamed the slow and steady consolidation of processing facilities under just a few corporate names for a lack of competition and less chance for a deal fishermen can accept.
Newport fisherman Gary Ripka said that north coast boats breaking the strike have traditionally observed an unspoken agreement to stay well north of Newport.
“They’re rubbing it in our faces,” he said. “They’re fishing right in front of town. Good trips. It’s become a real boiling point.”
Oh my, oh my! So much for red-blooded All-American solidarity. This is capitalism run amok a million times over. Pitting worker against families, men against women, youth against old. Breaking solidarity strikes. Market monopolization the curse here, and everywhere. Hell, the reputation of Pacific Seafood Group in Newport gouging independent fishers and controlling all aspects of the market, including the only ice making facility in the area to pack on board the catch of the day, speaks of the crude, mean, boom and bust, I got mine, you ain’t getting yours mentality of a country that was based on murdering millions of First Nation inhabitants and using stolen peoples to toil the land. A nation of Irish and German white slaves, and Chinese slaves.
Don’t cry for me, Argentina. Ha. Replace Argentina with Flint, Detroit, Baltimore, and hundreds of cities in the USA. How’s that Flint Lead Enhanced Water working out?
We shit on our own water supply, spray carcinogens on our own human offspring, and we cook the goose that lays the golden egg.
Much of the allure here is the wide open beaches, cold Pacific tides, sometime incredible sunny summer days in the 70s, and, well, fish and crustaceans on the menu. Whale watching. Sea lion and seal entertainment.
But we have gray whales washing on shore emaciated, sick, big carcasses rotting on shore. More and more of them. Seals and sea lions, sickened, too. Rivers clogged or polluted. Yet, the tourist brochures show whales in pristine condition, seals and birds in a natural wonderland, dolphins breaching the waters and elk crossing the Highway 101.
Like all communities who do not know the value of all those ecosystems and nature services, and like all communities that have a few rich and the rest struggling hard, and like all communities with a rural character that have high youth poverty, high drug use, high homelessness, Newport and Lincoln City are in the midst of more struggle than just shrimpers duking it out for higher rates per pound.
We are vulnerable to droughts, vulnerable to huge rain events, vulnerable to an earthquake. Vulnerable to education cuts. Vulnerable to population influxes and depopulation. I wrote about that, here:
Water, Water, Water: War Against Humanity
Gray Whales Are Dying: Starving to Death Because of Climate Change
Below is another article about another transplant — the water planner is from Seattle area. He is here, in quietude, and my guess Mike below is in the high echelon income bracket. He has a nice house, I am sure, and he has the time to redesign it to be more “green” and water “efficient.”
He showed a group of us some really cool rainwater collection and gray water collection systems, even gray water filtering systems to deliver potable water. You know, the designs Mike has facilitated mostly go to the very rich, or rich communities. But, in the end, water is more precious than gold, and cities across the country are using valuable H2o to water grass and trees. We have toilets that leak, toilets that flush five gallons a use. We have people who have no idea how the water that gets to their taps in Lincoln City got there.
The amount of electricity to move water from source to plant, from purification, to pumping station, to tanks and then from tanks to homes, well, it’s huge.
Electricity in the water
Much of the electricity used to supply water is consumed in pumping. To collect water, it is pumped from below ground or from surface water such as lakes and rivers. It then needs to be pushed through pipes to the water treatment plant, pushed through treatment systems (such as filters) and pushed through more pipes up to a water tower (typically). From there, gravity does the work to push the water to your home. This pumping consumption, along with some miscellaneous treatment plant consumption, on average adds up to about 1.5 kilowatt-hour of electricity consumed per thousand gallons [kWh/kgal] of water. This does not include energy that may be applied to the water in your home, such as heat for hot water.
When the water goes down the drain, it requires more electricity. The wastewater is collected, pumped, treated and discharged. An additional 1.7 kWh/kgal of electricity is expended on wastewater pumping and treatment.
So, in total, and the amount varies depending on where you live, about 3.2kWh of electricity is consumed for each thousand gallons of water delivered to your home. For a kitchen faucet delivering five gallons per minute of water, the water-embodied electricity is pouring out at about 1,000 watts. That’s like running a virtual hairdryer every time you turn on the faucet.
So, while we sit on our thumbs and allow the billionaires and millionaires and the military industrial octopus complex determine our destinies while destroying other countries’ destinies; while we listen to and view on dumb phone every conceivable perverted story akin to a Trump-Kushner Family Outing; while we stiff arm salute corporations, the boss, the job, the junk we have and the more junk we want, a gigantic swatch of the country, maybe 80 percent, will not be prepared for earthquake, flood, heat wave, fires, droughts, crop failures, disease outbreaks, food shortages, money woes.
So you betcha we are all Flint or Houston or Detroit or Paradise or Des Moines or Puerto Rica . . . . One hell of a lot more has to be done daily to fight, with weapons and tools. Yet, I am finding (see future postings, a future book of mine) more and more people who hate to know their history and who think life, including 12 years of school (or more if they are college-bound) is about “the job.” What we can’t use on the job, or to get a job, then it’s superfluous. More and more Americans across all sectors are desirous of only ways to perform on the job, how to land a job and what to do in that job.
Here is the story on Stormwater management. I hope it makes it in the local newspaper, though I think the editor is getting Paul Haeder Fatigue Syndrome because I go to these events, report on them and then write about them. I’ve already beaten a dead journalism horse to death many a time. But to repeat — we have gutted journalism at the local level so-so much that there is nothing in most towns, and those that have a day or two a week newsprint paper, well, threadbare seems to robust a word for today’s small-town and community news!
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Local Sustainable Water Management Expert Encourages More Green Design
Water is a human right, according to many around the world. For Lincoln County, Oregon, residents, the fact that we have water delivered to us from one source – a plant on Big Creek River – belies the fragility of this source of sustenance.
For one local resident who is an integrated stormwater management expert, water planning is big: we may see up to 80 inches of rain a year hitting our county, but we need to make sure that rainfall gets back into the groundwater and replenishes the water cycle.
Michael Broili, principal of Living Systems Design, is passionate about sustainable development. He spoke to the Mid-Coast Watersheds Council monthly group in Newport about what designs could be beneficial for Lincoln County residents.
“Water’s been so much of my life,” Broili said, emphasizing he now resides at South Beach, after spending a quarter of a century in the Puget Sound area. “I was in the Navy and then was a commercial fisherman, and then water management design for twenty-five years, so I know the value of water.”
He talked a lot about water management as a holistic approach for getting cities, schools, businesses and home owners to look at ways to develop gray water collection systems to help offset the need to use pure water from the Water Plant to irrigate landscapes and flush toilets.
A typical short term rain event creates tons of water just coming off a small roof, let along all the impervious surfaces like parking lots, warehouses, and compacted roads and streets.
“One inch of rain coming off a thousand square foot roof produces 623 gallons of runoff,” he stated. That’s almost 2.5 tons of water.
Reducing this water sluicing from hard surfaces back into stormwater catchments and diversions prevents so many of issues tied to the health of rivers and other watersheds, as well as stopping erosion.
The 20 people at the Visual Arts Center got to see some designs Mike helped create and implement in cities like Seattle, Shoreline, Edmunds that help rivers stay healthy through less disturbance (scrubbing) from surges during rain events.
Rain gardens and bio swales are two ways to get water from a parking lot to filter through biological means (grass, soil, gravel, plant roots) so the runoff ends up cleaner as it heads back into the stormwater systems.
Mortality of salmon species has been cut through mitigating the hydrocarbons that might have ended up directly into streams but were instead held and retained through several biofiltration landscape designs.
On a more holistic level, practitioners like Broili call it Hydrologic Restoration, and while we are in a rural area, unlike Portland or Seattle, all the designs for new construction Lincoln City or Newport could help utilizing graywater capture systems for landscape purposes, as well as creating innovative and healing rain gardens with some dynamic zones and robust planting. Existing structures could be retrofitted to these designs.
His mantra is simple when it comes to construction sites – “Find ways to reduce site disturbance and restore soil function.”
Some of the members of the MCWC wanted to know about permeable road and parking surfaces as well as green roofs. “The goal is to disconnect hard surfaces and bring back the water cycle to a near forested situation where no runoff occurs because of the natural features of complex soil layers, leaf litter (duff) and transpiration from trees.”
The MCWC’s mission is aligned with many of Broili’s hydrologic planning goals – “MCWC is dedicated to improving the health of streams and watersheds of Oregon’s Central Coast so they produce clean water, rebuilding healthy salmon populations and support a healthy ecosystem and economy.”
Part of May 2’s presentation was anchored by a famous Benjamin Franklin saying, “When the well is dry, we know the worth of water.”
We discussed the City of Newport’s Ocean Friendly Garden that was spearheaded several years ago by Surfrider at City Hall. Surfrider also looked at pollution going into Nye Creek, finding several homes’ sewer discharge was directly entering the stormwater system.
The City’s sewer and stormwater infrastructure has been mapped and various groups including Surfrider helped advocate for revisions to the municipal code to mandate best management practices for sewer, stormwater and other non-point source pollution controls.
Six years ago, the City of Newport created a new stormwater utility and an opt-out incentive program for residents and businesses who want to disconnect from the system in order to install the green infrastructure Broili discussed to prevent rainwater from leaving their property.
“This may seem like big city stuff,” Broili told the crowd. “But rural communities and a city like Newport can benefit from integrated water management.”
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Again, I could go on and analyze what I wrote and what bigger issues parlay from this small talk on a small part of sustainability, yet it is not so small, is it, given the precious nature of water, how we get it, how it is taken from the water cycle, and what happens to the ecosystems, to boot?
I’ve also reported on James Anderson’s research tied to water vapors and increased storm activity.
The ocean was running almost 10º C warmer all the way to the bottom than it is today and the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere would have meant that storm systems would be violent in the extreme, because water vapor, which is an exponential function of water temperature, is the gasoline that fuels the frequency and intensity of storm systems.
The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero. When you look at the irreversibility and you study the numbers, this along with the moral issue is what keeps you up at night.
This Harvard scientist worked on the ozone hole decades ago — remember, chlorofluorocarbons?
I know every day I wake up I am about to teach people things — PK12 or daily in my interactions with people, or what I can teach myself. I understand that capitalism and the way industry has been set up have to disappear. It is not an easy task when the controllers and the purse strings and one’s survivability is set by a small elite with their roving marauders of money launderers, banks, cops, collectors, usury thugs.
I’ll let Dahr Jamail have the last word, over at Truthout:
Each day I wake and begin to process the daily news of the climate catastrophe and the global political tilt into overt fascism. The associated trauma, grief, rage and despair that come from all of this draws me back to the work of Stan Rushworth, Cherokee elder, activist and scholar, who has guided much of my own thinking about how to move forward. Rushworth has reminded me that while Western colonialist culture believes in “rights,” many Indigenous cultures teach of “obligations” that we are born into: obligations to those who came before, to those who will come after, and to the Earth itself.
Hence, when the grief and rage threaten to consume me, I now orient myself around the question, “What are my obligations?” In other words, “From this moment on, knowing what is happening to the planet, to what do I devote my life?“
Each of us must ask ourselves this question every day, as we face down catastrophe.