Tossing Mullet

“Water, Water, Everywhere, Nor Any Drop to Drink!”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in 1798 and the theme obviously deals with the threat of drinking salt water, which has dire consequences to our delicate systems, but the phrase has evolved to represent a number of contradictions where there’s a lot of something that we can’t figure out how to use it – even energy.

The undeniable truth is that fresh water (which we not only can drink – we must drink) is less than 3 percent of all the water on our so-called blue planet. There’s a remarkable exhibit at an aquarium in Tokyo which predictably represents the globe as a 3-dimensional feature probably 3-4 feet in diameter. The surface is three-dimensional and reveals the topographic relief of the land and the bathymetry of the ocean floor.

This looks a lot like the wonderful graphics from National Geographic and you have to be drawn to it to appreciate the fantastic faces of our planet. But the volume and dimensions of ocean water is usually described as resembling the outer skin of an orange, and a thin-skinned one at that!

The truly remarkable message of this exhibit is in the presence of a very small glass below the large representation of the planet, which contains all the water, fresh and salt, that we have! The unexpected message is all the more powerful because we simply cannot appreciate the value of that substance, its scarcity, and our dependence on it.

Now – imagine taking a tablespoon of water from the glass and reflect on the unpleasant thought that it’s all there is that we can actually drink! We aren’t making any more of it so it would behoove us to take care of what we’ve got.

One of the more aggravating things that affects those concerned with water, which should obviously be all of us, is our public policy of getting it out of our backyards as quickly as possible – thus the remarkable concrete channels that thread through the city and rapidly drain “The Village of Spring Hill” and other developed suburbs and neighborhoods. Oddly enough, many of the older (and lower) regions of the city are not so advantaged by topography and city engineering.

The problem – to get back on point -is that we seem to have committed almost mindlessly to hurrying fresh water into the Bay, not only contaminating the Bay with everything from baby diapers (yuuuchhh and eeewwww!) to automobiles, but thoroughly mixing the dirty fresh water with salt water from the Gulf, thereby rendering it useless to both us and the sea creatures, some of which we value.

The fact that there are 44,000 square miles (the watershed of Mobile Bay) of folks just like us behaving in about the same way is small comfort – in fact it’s no comfort at all – it’s quite depressing, frankly. So far, the efforts to manage the rather large amounts of rainfall that impact this huge watershed are few and far between. The intentions may be good and there are some efforts being made to address these issues at the watershed level, but we are most often confounded by the simple fact that the rivers (and bays) remain the most obvious geopolitical boundaries.

Consequently our penchant for inconsistent regulations further complicates an already contentious issue. Counties and states on opposite sides of the river most often have different approaches to and levels of management. The agency tendency to equate process with progress has yielded precious little demonstrable success to date.

We make quite a big deal about our watershed’s size and its involvement with three other states, but we should realize that our “kissin’ cousin,” Chesapeake Bay is almost a third larger in area and six states are struggling with most of the same issues. All six have signed on to the agreements to reduce nutrient loading and stormwater management. Because they have recognized the threat in fresh waters in New York (state) that has the Susquehanna impacting Chesapeake, half a billion dollars (that is a B) are being allocated to improved farming practices and the upgrading of 28 wastewater treatment plants. Better monitoring in New York and therefore better data bases are making the effort more likely to succeed

New York City is investing in thousands of acres of forest conservation easements in the neighboring watershed of the Hudson River Valley because they have found it to be cheaper than building water treatment plants to clean up the water coming down from the headwaters. These real investments in maintaining the level of ecosystem service are unheard of in our part of the world.

Through the leadership of the Mobile Bay National Estuary Program, Baldwin County is trying to actually get legislation through that would provide for a stormwater management plan, but again the geopolitical realities for the Bay are not encouraging. The county is growing subdivisions faster than silver queen corn and projects like the Bass Pro Shop do little to reassure those of us concerned with the impacts of unbridled greed – sorry, I meant growth – and the subsequent degrading of the aquatic environment.

The so-called water wars with Georgia have begun to catch the public’s attention and we may be entering an era when the real value of water may be better appreciated. We are blessed with a great deal of water, but not so much that we can afford to continue wasting it by cutting it off from groundwater reservoirs by sporadic and ineffective stormwater management – “nor any drop to drink.”

Mobile has, or had at one time, a stormwater management ordinance that imposed a monthly fee on residents to support some controls. It had obviously been lifted from a municipality in Florida because the “authors” had neglected to remove the reference to mangroves from the text! It really didn’t matter since the ordinance has never been implemented – once again elevating the existence of process to an exalted and totally dysfunctional level.

George Crozier is Lagniappe columnist. Contact him at george@lagniappemobile.com.

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