From the feces files

One of the transitions from the old house to the new is the transition off of city sewage and onto a septic system. I grew up in a house with a septic system, and so it’s not as foreign to me as it is to my wife, and she’s still adjusting to not having a garbage disposal in the sink. (There actually was one in the house when we bought it, but we broke it straightaway, and I replaced it with pipe.)

We had it pumped out for the first time in November, and discovered the seam halfway up (a stupid design for sure) had burst and the sewage was seeping out instead of going out into the leeching field. This necessitated a repair in which a guy climbed down into the tank with hydraulic cement, which was no end of fun for my seven year-old son: “He’s in my poopie! He’s in my poopie!”

In addition to the absolute simplicity of the system (a 1,000 gallon hole that everything goes into, then seeps out of in a controlled manner), what I am noticing now that was not so apparent to me as a child is how much more directly this system connects our choices indoors to our immediate outdoor environment. With sewage, things run down the drain disappear into an abstract system of pipes, and abating the contents is someone else’s problem. With septic, whatever goes down the pipes ultimately ends up right in our own back yard.

This has me thinking more about the use of household chemicals such as chlorine bleach, ammonia and paint thinner. I haven’t stopped using them entirely, but I certainly use them more mindfully, and am on the lookout for signs in the back yard of any impact. Our yard has a healthy population of amphibians–toads, frogs and salamanders–and they are my coal mine canaries.

A better understanding of plastic pollution

Here’s a great article providing a better understanding of how plastics impact the environment, and how plastics on the ocean actually behave.

…if no one cleans it up, will the garbage patches keep growing? No. Studies in the North Atlantic Gyre and North Pacific Gyre have been repeated with interesting results. There’s no massive trend in plastic accumulation over time. Kara Lavender Law, of Sea Education, compiled data from 22 years of data from the North Atlantic Gyre, the same area that Carpenter studied 3 ½ decades earlier. “We observed no strong temporal trends in plastic concentration…” Last week we returned from 31 days crossing the South Atlantic Gyre. As we sailed into Cape Town we revisited half of the locations that Morris studied 3 decades ago and repeated his exact methods. Though our samples have not been analyzed yet, I can anecdotally report that the samples do not appear to show a tremendous trend in plastic accumulation over this time. Sure, there’s more, but the increase does not parallel the rapid increase in plastic production and consumption on land. So where does it go? We believe some sinks as absorbed chemicals, like PCBs, PAHs and other persistent pollutants, and biofouling make smaller and smaller particles more dense than seawater. Much of it washes ashore on islands in the gyres, like Hawaii and Bermuda, or is kicked out of the gyres onto mainland beaches as the gyre’s center wobbles east and west. Then there’s still room for unknown answers. What we now know is that if we stop adding more plastic to the ocean, in time the gyres will kick out the plastic pollution they currently hold. If you want to clean the gyre, clean your beach.

Some good news, in that the environment does seem to be able cleanse itself somewhat, though it’s not clear where the plastics ultimately end up. This means the focus really needs to be on stopping the flow of plastic into the environment, which is something all of us can do.

Plastics as a systemic issue

I’ve said before we need to end dependence on single-use plastics. Here’s why. Visit the Plastic Pollution Coalition web site.

Plastic where it ought not be

Happiness (and commuting)

Now that we’ve completed the move to the new house, the question that hovers over our family is “Will we be happier here?” Happiness, after all, was the reason for the move—better schools, better community, more space. Some elements of the happiness question are easier to answer than others. The schools are undoubtedly better, the house itself is a step up in space and amenities. We’ve already been warmly welcomed by the neighbors.

Really, there are three large happiness questions that I’ve been most concerned with: 1) Will my wife be happy living somewhere more rural, 2) Will the added cost of owning and maintaining the house—and attendant additional expenses—prove to be too much of a financial drain (more on this in a later post), and 3) Will the commute be more onerous than the one I had from the old house. Questions 1 and 2 are TBD, but I am at least beginning to get an answer to #3.

I should preface by saying I quite like commuting. The trains to Boston are relatively quiet and efficient, I can usually get a seat, and wireless is available. The 25-35 minute ride is far more pleasant for me than driving into the city, which I do one or two times a month. My total commute time from the old house was roughly an hour and ten minutes door-to-door, including a 8 minute walk to the train, 25-35 minutes on the train, 10-15 minutes on the subway, and transition time in between.

Since our new town had been a little further out, I had anticipated a somewhat longer ride, and thus a longer commute. I’ve discovered that my new commute, however, is more or less identical to my old one, at least in the morning. I still leave the house at 6:55 and arrive at the office at around 8:15-I’ve just traded my 8 minute morning walk for an 8 minute morning drive. In the afternoon, my commute is actually shorter, because while the train ride is longer, it’s on a different line with fewer stops, and thus faster. Rather than leaving the office at 4:00 to catch a 4:20 train, I can now leave the office at 4:10 and catch a 4:35 train, which still gets me to the house at 5:20, which is when I used to get home.

So the biggest happiness concern I’d had was impact on my time, which is now allayed-I am actually saving time with this commute. The other happiness concerns are really about finances—the additional cost of fuel and parking—and about the environmental and health impacts of the additional driving. These are lesser, though, not inconsequential concerns, and concerns that have more available mitigations than the time issue. So on the commuting question, I can at least say I should not be less happy in the new location.

Reflections on the Supreme Court’s decision

This morning, I find myself far more concerned about the implications of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on corporate money in campaign finance than I am about the Massachusetts Senate election.  In yet another damaging blow from the Bush administration, Bush appointees have tipped the scales just enough to overturn decades of limits on the money corporations can spend in elections, and now the gloves are off.

The new power of corporations to influence the election of national and local politicians, judges, and other officials is staggering, and extremely dangerous to the environment, consumer health and safety, and any other cause that corporations find inconvenient in their search for profits.  The results of the financial industry’s long campaign for deregulation may seem quaint compared to the catastrophes that might arise as a consequence of this decision.

I don’t think it will take too long for the public to recognize the poisonous effect this will have on the political system, but it will take years to correct it.  I feel like we’ve entered a whole new era of personal responsibility for consumer choices as the only effective curb on corporate behavior is consumers who choose not to do business with companies behaving unethically.  We need to be increasingly aware of who we are in bed with, and what they are doing with the money they give us.  We need strong transparency requirements attached to corporate campaign spending, distributed in a manner that supports ethical consumer choice.

More than ever, I feel the weight of the political in every purchase.

Plastic soup

Since I was very young, I’ve had this nightmare vision that hell for each of us is to spend eternity with all the disposable plastic we’ve each dumped into the environment weighing down on us.  Turns out, the reality is even scarier. I am generally an optimist, but if there is any one environmental problem that really depresses me, it is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also described as the Eastern Garbage Patch or the Pacific Trash Vortex, is a gyre of marine litter in the central North Pacific Ocean located roughly between 135° to 155°W and 35° to 42°N and estimated to be twice the size of Texas.^[1] The patch is characterized by exceptionally high concentrations of suspended plastic and other debris that have been trapped by the currents of the North Pacific Gyre. Despite its size and density, the patch is not visible from satellite photography because it consists of very, very small pieces, almost invisible to the naked eye ^[2] and most of its contents are suspended beneath the surface of the ocean. ^[3]

I can imagine ways we might reverse the accumulation of greenhouse gasses, but how we are going to remove the toxins leaching out of these plastics from the sea seems beyond imagination.  I’ll put aside my despair about the cleanup, and hope someone more clever and less daunted will find a way.  I do however want to note that it’s a clear signal that plastic is a dangerous material, and one that we as a culture need to rethink.  And fast.

Here be plastics. (Wikipedia)

Plastics strike me as a particular perversion in that they are basically indestructible, and have been positioned economically and culturally as a disposable material.  I read the other day that something like 1/3 of plastic is basically employed in a single use mode, and then (usually) discarded or (occasionally) recycled.  Given the enormous amount of ecological damage done by plastics, they are the prototypical case of products with low initial costs and very high ultimate costs.  If plastics were priced for manufacturers to include the ultimate costs of removing them from environments such as, say, the oceans, they might choose a more suitable medium.

We need to reposition plastics as a material of necessity rather than one of convenience.  While I agree there are some clear needs for disposable plastics, such as those used in medicine, our understanding of plastics must be that they are a choice of last resort in single-use situations and must be carefully recycled to avoid additional environmental damage.  We should reserve their use primarily for durable goods that are again properly recycled to close manufacturing loops.

Some of this might be done a the grass roots.  I still need to read up on envronmental economics, but it seems that consumers can have a big hand in this, both through changing purchasing habits and through pressure on government to clean up the existing mess and tax manufacuters who use plastics.  East, right?  But needed.

The other water system

In addition to the MWRA water supply, the other water system affecting my household is the Neponset River watershed, in which the house sits, and into which our sewage water drains along with any contamination from the pesticides and fertilizers we spread on our lawn.

The Neponset is in some ways a fortunate waterway, with an organization dedicated to its care.  The Neponset River Watershed Association (NepRWA) provides volunteer water quality management and disseminates information on the health of the river to the public.

The Neponset River Watershed (from NepWRA)

The Neponset drains into Boston Harbor, and both the river and the harbor have come a long way in the last half century in terms of health and cleanliness.  Nonetheless, the watershed is easy to overlook in our town, because the bulk of our residential water does not come out of it.  For other towns in our area, this is not the case.

It’s not unusual in the summer to go one town over and see lawn watering restrictions in place, but I can’t recall there ever being a similar ban in our town.  As with almost all watersheds, the Neponset is under increasing pressure due to overuse.  While we are not affected, we are nonetheless tied to this ecosystem and its overall health, and I would do well to keep closer tabs on it, I think.