debitage: part of the core tool and scraper tradition

debitage

2.8.06

Wildfire link

Nice article on the importance and problems of dealing with wildfire at the community (rather than individual or government) level.

Stentor Danielson, 23:13, |

Water Recycling And Trust

Australia's debate over recycling water provides an interesting additional facet to the phenomenon of "economic" versus "social" paradigms of risk that I discussed with respect to Yucca Mountain. In summary, various places in Australia are considering recycling sewage water and sending it back into the main water supply, where it could be used for drinking water. There's strong resistance to the idea among the public, and a referendum in the town of Toowoomba recently went down in flames.

I was talking to some folks yesterday about this, and I was struck by their strong "economic" perspective. They had complete faith in the science that said the treated water would be clean, and therefore complete faith in the project. They attributed opposition to ignorant knee-jerk "eww, sewage water" reactions, and therefore called into question the propriety of using more democratic decision-making (such as a referendum) on an issue like this.

In this case, I'm happy to basically trust the science that says the sewage water can be cleaned adequately, because water treatment is the sort of narrowly-defined engineering problem that technical risk assessment works best on. (I was surprised, however, when in another context my interlocutors cited as incontrovertible fact a study that pinpointed a one-in-a-thousand-years probability of a certain parrot being killed by a proposed wind farm -- how on earth can you accurately calculate something like that?) The pressing importance of Australia's water crisis further militates toward limiting the amount of extreme precaution we take with respect to water cleanliness.

But even if we trust the science, there remain important social questions that could justify concern about implementing such a recycling project. Just because some engineers in the lab can clean the water adequately when they're motivated to prove that it can be done, doesn't mean that the sewage treatment plant will always work properly in practice. There are many stories of facilities for the use or treatment of hazardous materials which become a danger because -- through laziness, the pressure for profit, or a desire to look good to one's superiors -- protocols were not followed and the real danger greatly exceeded the theoretical danger. The question here is trust -- can we trust the people executing the water recycling plan to do it properly? Scientific risk assessments mean little when you can't trust the social system that the assessed activity is embedded in.

What's needed is a process of building trust. Perhaps a system can be worked out in which water is reused "down the scale" of cleanliness -- for example, in the way that one of my friends pumps her used laundry water into her toilet. This would have the added advantage of requiring more household-scale infrastructure, rather than big water projects that foster ignorance, dependency, and corruption by removing water users from contact with their water provision and treatment system.

Stentor Danielson, 20:23, |

31.7.06

Blaming Environmentalists For Fires

The idea that environmentalism is responsible for bad wildfires has become one of the central rhetorical devices of contemporary green-bashing. Usually there's at least a semblance of an explanation -- environmentalism is said to have led to abandoning controlled burning and other fire control measures, so that fires easily got out of control. I don't entirely agree with that argument*, but at least it's an argument.

However, it seems that to some people have gotten to the point where saying anything about wildfires constitutes proof that environmentalism is wrong. Take this article by Miranda Devine. She attempts to use the 2003 Canberra fires as proof that environmentalists are wrong (as well as self-righteous and pushy) on the uranium mining issue. But in reading her description of the Canberra fires, it's clear that the blame for deaths in those fires lies with a flawed public communication effort by the firefighting authorities (which I think is true, though I haven't followed the investigation into these fires as closely as I could). Last I heard, poor public communication is not a central tenet of environmentalism.

* It's more true of Australia than the US (since in the US environmentalists were among the people fighting against the militarized "all fires are bad" ideology), but in both countries the picture is far more complex. I think the biggest factor in both countries is the expansion of exurban settlement, which is missed by the "blame greenies" storyline. Exurbanization 1) puts more people in danger zones, 2) fragments ecosystems and exposes them to increased ignition sources, 3) expands and spreads out the assets to be defended, complicating fire prevention and firefighting, 4) puts heavy reliance on homeowners to keep their own property in order -- but through ignorance, naivete, entitlement, and differing values they don't, and 5) leads to meddling by homeowners in fire control projects on adjacent lands because of concern over smoke, the risk of escaped controlled burns, and the aesthetic disamenities of mechanical treatment or controlled burning.

I also suspect -- though I don't have clear evidence of this -- that there are a pair of vicious cycles going on among fire authorities. On the one hand, they assume that environmentalists are against them, so they don't bother to create fire control plans that meet safety objectives as well as satisfying environmental concerns, thus provoking environmentalists to oppose those plans. On the other hand, the "environmentalists cause bad fires" storyline creates a powerful temptation to slap a fire control justification on projects that primarily serve other purposes, creating additional points of seeming fire safety vs environmentalism conflict.

Stentor Danielson, 08:16, |