Shi*ting Paradigms: Why we should be drinking our sewage

Hi HPM class! Glad to be e-here.

Following is one of my postings from the PolicyMatters website which is the Goldman School's journal. I have more posts here:http://www.policymatters.net/ingram.html

Thanks for reading!

I always wondered how recognizable a much lauded "paradigm shift" would be while it was actually underway. Would one be able to sense the tides of public opinion reverse? Would some kind of collective mass exhalation be audible one the shift was complete? "Oh, we've evolved again. Sigh."

I need wonder no more. Reading the New York Times magazine this week, I personally met a paradigm shift today over lunch, and, as you'll see, it's testament to my own shifting paradigms that I didn't lose my lunch upon reading the article.

The article deployed a cute little euphemism -- "indirect potable reuse" -- in its summary of a rather gruesome proposition. Apparently, Orange County's golf links and McMansions have been hogging lots of water, and the region is developing a little problem with access to this precious resource. An interesting solution has arisen and it involves a beautifully simple cyclical process of harnessing one's own waste.

I'm talking about poop and pee. And I guess a little dirty shower water too. Raw sewage as grist for the drinking water mill. In Orange County, a new, ultra high-tech system is utilizing physical and chemical processes to clean, and clean, and clean again, municipal sewage. After all that scrubbing, the end product is drinking water.

It turns out that it is entirely tenable to transform the most repugnant of human byproducts into safe, potable, and relatively cheap water.

Of course, many of us loath the idea of a cycle that involves our rear ends. This collective fecophobia is so irrationally pervasive that the poor scientists who devised this gorgeous system have to eventually dump the filtered water back into the more "natural" environment of some lake, where it sits around for a while looking pretty before we can suck it back up and pipe it to our homes. Meanwhile, the filtered water gets dirty again while sitting in the lake. All this so we can think to ourselves that the water in your glass came from a high alpine pond, rather than your drain.

While there is a fair amount of sensationalism and emotion wrapped up in this particular psychological leap -- golden shower to goblet -- the real point here is much larger and more important. We cannot continue to think about a unidirectional movement of resources. Extraction, use, and refuse has been a cycle that has driven human development since earliest human civilization, but it is one that we are nearing the end of. The idea of material goods moving from "cradle to cradle" has been discussed in an excellent book by the same name. The authors argue that recycling, reclaiming, and reusing materials is now key to mitigating climate change and achieving economic stability in the long term. We cannot continue to think in narrow terms of valuable raw materials vs. burdensome waste materials. Instead, all "waste", including human waste, should be harvested for its persistent value.

Perhaps the defining feature of a paradigm shift is the moment where everyone looks at one another and says "Huh. That seems to work pretty well. Shoulda done that sooner." Whether or not we are there yet with the "toilet to tap" policy idea is debatable. What is not debatable is that we need this paradigm shift, and soon.