Water Wise: Problem Statement and What We Can Begin To Do

Background and Problem Statement:

Water has many separate uses and so there are a variety of problems that occur. Four years ago there were a group of water activists who got together to develop the “Thurston County Water Resource Project.” We basically wanted to do very much what we are starting to do all over again with ACT-SS (Alliance for Community Transition-South Sound). This former effort was spearheaded by Shirley Nixon, Executive Director of CELP (Center for Environmental Law and Policy) and Sue Gunn, Washington State Director of PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility).

The water group came up with the following objectives:

1. To assure surface water of Thurston County remains in streams and lakes in flows sufficient to maintain the biological and recreational values identified in the County Comprehensive Plan and mandated in state and federal legislation.
2. To assure current and future land use plans are based on accurate information regarding availability of water to support proposed activities.

This statement places the biological needs of the ecosystem on a par with human water uses. It also prioritizes living within our water limits ahead of developing at the pace that we currently are. In other words, it makes it clear that water availability is a potential limiting factor for development.

CELP and PEER helped sponsor legislation that year that would have allowed Ecology and local governments to develop an in depth understanding of the interconnectedness of ground and surface waters and to develop a detailed inventory of our groundwater resources while putting in place a system to monitor withdrawals and recharge.

I think that it is important to state some additional problems that face our water resources.

1.      The need to conserve water: This is becoming more and more clear as we see how global climate change will affect water resources.

2.      Recharging the groundwater: We need to increase recharge opportunities by reducing impervious surfaces. That means that we need more rain gardens, design buildings differently and retrofit existing ones and so forth to prevent stormwater runoff and allow infiltration. We need to make water more closely mimic a natural watershed. This will also mean that we need to reduce the amount of fresh water that gets discharged into salt water, in our case Puget Sound.

3.      Protecting and enhancing water quality: One way this can be accomplished through the stormwater reduction efforts mentioned in 2. above. Stormwater is a nasty carrier of pollutants so if we can use vegetated buffers, rain gardens, green roofs, and so forth we are moving in the right direction. The other thing that needs to happen is we need to get limits placed on the use of various toxic chemicals that are used for various applications (Spartina eradication, weed killing around school grounds, herbicides along state and local roads and highways, for example).

4.      Finally, one of the issues that has always irked me is the way we take the nutrients that we biologically create from eating and put it in our drinking water! This means that not only are we wasting the nutrients that we create, but we also have to go through a great deal of machinations and expense to remove the nutrients from the water. Every year we excrete enough nutrients to fertilize the food that we need to eat during that year. So why aren’t we making use of it? We need to develop programs and incentives to get people to put in composting toilets. These would be better if they incorporated a urine separator.

Conclusion:

This is a very brief initial problem statement along with some generic solutions. I am open to suggestions that anybody has to add to the problem statement and to develop more specific responses. These can be policy and legal changes that need to be made, model projects that we can get going, and educational efforts that are a must.

This statement was developed for ACT-SS and I am posting it on my blog. In both forums I want there to be discussion and comments.

Thank you,

Krag Unsoeld

Water Wise Liaison for the Alliance for Community Transition-South Sound