Let’s start with a tiny bit of a background. As
described in the linked news reports, the news story deals with a Ms. Robin
Speronis who currently lives off the grid in Southern Florida. She used a
rainwater cistern for drinking/cooking and solar power for her electrical
needs. Her sole connection to the city services was a connection to the sewer
system which she used to flush all her excess wastes (ref)
before the city shut the line (arguably for lack of payment). Many, (including
myself in this specific case) would consider her decision an acceptable one,
but her local community took it a bit differently. The case is sufficiently
convoluted that it does not serve as a useful case study since both Ms.
Speronis and the city appear to have been less than pure actors (the city for
shutting off sewers and she for non-payment of bills and possible animal
cruelty issues) but the story did bring out a class of activists who view connections
to our communal grids as a means for the government to maintain control over
the populace (ref
and ref).
The truth, however, is far less menacing and far more straightforward.
Those of us who were taught our social history in
school are reminded that after physical protection of the person, the primary
role of governments in early communal societies was to ensure the provision of
basic services. In earlier feudal societies, basic services were reserved for
the rich and the powerful. Anyone familiar with the rise of cities in the Middle
Ages in Europe will have heard of the regular outbreaks of dysentery. In
the Middle Ages dysentery was a disease of the cities and was the second
leading cause of death by disease (ref and ref). It was caused when
human waste got into the communal drinking water supplies and was particularly
deadly for the very young and the very old. One of the major advances in the
Roman Era was a system that allowed for clean water to be supplied to their
cities via aqueducts and one of the hallmarks of the rise of responsible and
representative governments was when they started to ensure that basic
sanitation and water services were supplied to all levels of society. I was
taught in my high school social studies that you can establish a pretty
reasonable gauge of the level of representativeness of a government by the
types of services provided by the government to all its citizens. While this
topic is a pretty huge one I would direct you to Marq de Villiers’ book “Water”
which presents a terrific history of water in societies and discusses how we
are using, misusing and abusing our shared water resources and the roles of
governments (historical and present-day) in its supply, protection and
allocation. The take home message from this paragraph should be that: governments
aren’t using services as a means to control the public, but rather the primary
reason for governments in a modern society is to ensure the fair allocation and
provision of services.
So why is the provision of common services an important
role for government? Well as the human population has risen, our ability as humans
to rely on natural/ecological services to provide us with clean, potable, water
and to dispose of our waste has become unbalanced. Rather than depending on
natural systems to address these needs, we have developed engineering solutions
to these problems. Were we, as a society, to move back to the land and get off
the grid we would encounter the scenario described by Garett Hardin in 1968 in the
seminal paper The
Tragedy of the Commons. For those of you not familiar with this important
work, it recounts the tale of the mistreatment a common resource (the British
common lands) by competing private interests (farmers with their personal sheep).
Given an absence of personal stake in the ownership of the common land, and the
benefits accrued by exploiting those common lands for personal profit, the
commons were overgrazed and ultimately the resource was lost to the community.
For a direct case relating to water/sanitation, let’s
consider my local community: the Township of Langley. The Township of Langley
is located in the Metro Vancouver region and is part of the Greater Vancouver
Water District (GVWD) and the Greater Vancouver Sewerage and Drainage District
(GVS&DD). Unlike the majority of the users in the GVWD, 23% of the Township
is not supplied with potable water by the GVS&DD and residents in these
areas rely on private wells (ref). The
Township is underlain by 18 identified aquifers with five being big and shallow
enough to be used for the provision of water (ref). Four
of these five aquifers are “unconfined” (ref). An
unconfined aquifer is an aquifer that is refreshed via surface water
percolation (ref).
Another feature of the Township is that over half its surface area is in the
Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) and is used for various farming practices. Even
with only 23% of our population in Langley relying on groundwater, our
groundwater aquifers are in trouble. Water levels have been receding and the
local salmon-bearing streams reliant on water from these aquifers are under
threat. As a consequence, the Township has had to spend millions of dollars
hooking communities like Aldergrove into the main GVS&DD water system
(which is primarily fed from reservoirs in the North Shore Mountains. Were 100%
of the Langley population made reliant on our limited groundwater reserves that
water would be gone in a generation. From a naturalist’ point of view, it would
also mean the end of the Nicomekl River, the Salmon River, The Little Campbell
River and Bertrand Creek as breeding grounds for fish as all depend on flow
from these aquifers and all would dry up in the summer absent those flows, destroying
those fish habitats. It is only through the provision of potable water via the
GVS&DD that we can maintain our population in this region. Now consider
that we live in a coastal rainforest area? If we can’t depend on groundwater from
unconfined aquifers in a coastal rainforest with our current population
densities how will the populations in the Eastern Seaboard described in my post
Ecomodernism
and Degrowth: Part II Future Scenarios make it work?
Now earlier in this post I talked about dysentery. Now
in a future “off the grid” Langley we could mostly avoid the threat of
dysentery through the use of septic tanks and septic fields. The problem with
septic tanks is that they need to be maintained and if not maintained can fail
(resulting in a risk of dysentery). One of the issues with septic fields is
that they require space. The size of your septic field is dependent on the
percolation rate of your soil but a typical septic field for a family of four
is about a quarter/half acre. The problem is that too many septic fields, too
close together, can cause too much stress on aquifers. The US EPA suggests that
any more than 1 system per 16 acres puts a community at risk to groundwater
contamination (ref).
Moreover, at high densities even perfectly functioning septic fields can harm
an aquifer as was discovered in the Santa Ana Region in California (ref).
The reason for this is that septic fields are not magic, they cannot eliminate
all waste and one of the serious concerns with high densities of septic fields
is nitrate contamination of the groundwater. Due to their chemical nature, even
a perfectly designed and operating septic systems flushes nitrates, pretty much
undisturbed, into groundwater (ref) and
nitrates are recognized as a cause (or arguably at the least a co-factor) of blue
baby syndrome (Methaemoglobinaemia) (ref).
Nitrates can also build up in aquifers over agricultural areas due to poor
farming practices and over-fertilizing (as is the case in Langley Township).
Nitrate pollution represents only one of many chemical issues associated with
too many septic fields in too small an area and anyone interested should read
the Santa Ana case study to see the other problems they can cause.
I hope this blog post has made it clear that
going “off the grid” is not simply a personal choice, as suggested by Ms. Speronis,
but one that can affect a whole community and all the animals and plants that
live in that community. Thus the community has a stake in ensuring that as many
people as possible are connected to the grid. This control is not to keep the utility
users in the pockets of big government or big corporations but rather to
preserve our shared resources and avoid a collapse of our commons similar to
the one described by Hardin in The Tragedy of the Commons.
The town of Cape Coral must have city hall controlled by neonazis. Do you really think it made sense to take her dog and toss her in jail the way they did? I think it was abusive.
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