[intro music, ocean sounds]
Welcome to World Ocean Radio…
I’m Peter Neill, Founder of the World Ocean Observatory.
Listeners to World Ocean Radio must be used by now to the expansive extent of what we define as the ocean: from the mountain-top to the abyssal plane describes the inter-linked flow that assumes so many different forms in passage around the water cycle from land to air to sea. The snow-capped mountains are connected to the white-capped waves, to the minute molecules in the deep sea to the minute molecules amassed in great storm cloud invisible from land. There is symmetry and connection in that circle, and in the understanding of that fact is a key element in our messaging -- our advocacy and educational commitment to public understanding of the integrated ecosystem that is water worldwide. The sea connects all things, and it takes many forms.
One such today is the outfall and treatment of our wastewater, corrupted by use and disposed of, treated or not, back into the cycle and seemingly forgotten. That water endures; it seeps out of our sewers and septic systems, our manufacturing sites and our homes, affected by use both positive in its specific use and negative in its cursory disposal. We have spoken here often of “down-stream” consequence, the poisonous neglect of water exploited and abandoned with no thought of what that water carries or where that water goes. Our planning for wastewater starts as an after-thought to its basic utility, its good established and its evil ignored. A toxin from a riverside factory in the industrial United States can find its way eventually to a pristine natural protected area in the Galapagos Islands, thousands of miles away, and depositing that toxicity a second time with even more unthinking, delinquent consequence. Wastewater, even treated, can poison local shellfish beds, stimulate algae blooms, close local beaches from human recreation, and perpetuate the negatives with short-term and long-term unexpected unknowns. It seems such a small part of a global phenomenon with such a large implication for the future of human health and survival.
What lies down-stream from the sewers? What happens to the sludge pumped from our septic systems? If you are looking for an example of such lack of foresight, you need only look at the impact of PFAs, so-called “forever chemicals,” contained in sewer residue that was spread, where I live as a then-considered progressive dispersal of fertilizer on agricultural fields and organic gardens now discovered to have made the crops grown there unfit for human consumption. Science has revealed these worst results of best intentions: the genetic impact of DDT, the presence of deleterious chemical and compounds emitted discovered in slivers of ice cores from centuries past, the warnings to pregnant women against ingestion of mercury from the flesh of migratory fish, or the oil and gas emission-derived distribution of chemicals changing the pH of ocean water thousands of miles away, indeed everywhere.
The irony is that we describe outfall and wastewater treatment as septic intent when actually the goal is aseptic, to prevent the introduction of pathogens into the human body, an ecosystem to prevent the passage of disease-causing microbes and the further deterioration of human health through anthropogenic disease.
It seems complicated, but it isn’t if you are willing to link cause with effect: to remove the cause to mitigate the effect. We have so many excuses for not so doing, but these are mostly the result of misplaced value: the price of a gallon of gas or an investment share as more valuable than the price of a debilitating disease or a human life. You would think the logic of one would displace the logic on the other. As a pervasive condition today, however, it does not seem to matter enough to change the value equation and the pattern of human behavior. As an individual threat to a single life – yours, mine, or our neighbors -- it should seem pervasively otherwise. What a waste!
We will disuss these issues and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
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[outro music, ocean sounds]
