Sewage

I always find it somewhat curious as to how humans determine what is important and what is not; what things grab our curiosity and our passion. How do we determine which issues are so important that we will put our life on hold to do something about them while other things seem to be completely irrelevant?

For example when an orca carries around her dead baby for days and days - it is newsworthy. People, certainly on the west coast, get upset and start to demand that someone do something to ensure the health of the remain orcas in that pod. Thousands and thousands of dollars are spent to find ways to deliver antibiotics to one of the other young orcas who appears not to be thriving. On the other hand while a casual observer from another planet would perhaps assume that all humans would be concerned about human rights and that any violation of such rights would be immediately and vigorously protested, clearly that is not true. It might be equally assumed by the same visitor that issues of poverty and starvation would be quickly addressed by the population at large. Again for the vast majority - we do nothing.

Every once in awhile, some political party or other special interest group does a national poll to determine what our priorities are. While the results vary according to how the questions are posed, what is being talked about on various media outlets and how the economy is doing, the environment has been in the top three or four priorities for the last ten or so years. If one lives on the west coast it would be easy to believe that that protection of the environment is always at the top of any list. And rightly so - it is difficult to imagine the human species existing in its present form if we do not do something to protect the planet.

If those polls in any way accurately reflect what people feel or think - why doesn't the public rise up and do something about the amount of raw sewage that is pouring from our toilets into our lakes, rivers and oceans? Why do we spend countless thousands of hours of energy protesting a yet-to-be- built pipe line or the clear cutting of some very old trees but express no concern with what we are doing today with our bodily waste. Surely that is our responsibility. How we dispose of our sewage is a fixable problem - well within our grasp yet we spend our time bubbling with angst over the lives of sea mammals who are not thriving because of a lack of food and just maybe the amount of human generated pollution in their ocean but do nothing to fix the most obvious problem.

CBC reported in 2916 that " 205 billion litres of raw sewage and untreated waste water spewed into Canada's rivers and oceans last year" (CBC); earlier this week the same media outlet ran another story stating that " over one trillion litres of raw sewage leaked into Canadian waterways between 2013 and 2017, including 215 billion litres in 2017 alone" (CBC). To make things even worse almost none of that discharge is illegal. The convoluted arguments defending these practices are mind boggling. Take for example the city of Victoria whose sewage is discharged with minimal screening directly into the ocean a kilometre away from the city and fifty meters down. It has been argued that because that the pipe discharges the city's waste into the Juan da Fuca Strait it is quickly dispersed and therefore no harm is none. Diluting the poison does not solve the problem - not when you are dumping millions of litres a year.

While it can be argued that some sorts of pollution are the result of a complex change of interactions with our environment and therefore are hard to eradicate, the dumping raw sewage into lakes, rivers and oceans is a simple chain of cause and effect. It will take money to fix the problem, to build the infrastructure but it can be done. Given the fact that at least in BC this fall is municipal election time, perhaps we should start to demand that we clean up our local waste before demanding that others clean up theirs.