True Confessions of a Sewage Plant Operator: We are the Environment

By Gordon McEvoy

A few years back, Mountain Gazette ran an article, “What’s in a Name: Truth in Advertising” (September 2002; p. 62), describing attempts by former Bureau of Reclamation employee Dave Wegner to persuade the United States Geological Survey to officially rename certain bodies of water, such as “Lake” Granby and “Lake” Dillon in Colorado, as just what they really are — reservoirs. Wegner’s concern is that people will fail to understand that “millions of dollars were spent and a natural ecosystem destroyed in order to impound that water.”

Forcing a name change will indirectly help us better understand the distinction between a reservoir and a lake. However, I believe that only through deeper experience with our natural resources will our perceptions — thus our language — become more precise.

In novelist Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, the main character, a young Buddhist on a spiritual journey, shuns convenient phrases as easy explanations of reality, discovering that, “Everything is slightly distorted when one utters it in words — a little falsified, a little silly.” Siddhartha eventually realizes the value of experiential learning: “Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom.” 

 

Saving Ourselves  

Try asking 50 people to spontaneously define the word “environment.” I did. The responses reveal our abstract, caricature-like concepts. For example:

  “I don’t know…um…like forests and everything that is natural and was here before all the buildings and stuff ... ” (Kate, 35 years old; Accountant);

 “Nature.” (Danielle, 28 years old; Bartender and student);

 “Pollution.” (Ken, 40 years old; Police officer).

 If we don’t agree on what or where the environment is, how will we save it? Where exactly does “the environment” end and “people” begin and what is the source of our rational perspective? I argue that we — policymakers, administrators and citizens – do not necessarily possess the wisdom to make intelligent decisions involving complex issues such as timber resource allocation, pesticide control or pharmaceutical waste in our water supplies.

In my opinion, we are increasingly isolated and detached from our surrounding natural resources that we depend on for our survival. We aspire to become doctors, computer programmers and financial analysts; no one wants to be a farmer. The environment is a place we visit on the weekends, comfortably sealed in obscenely sized vehicles with names like “The Intrusion”.

I believe the environment we speak of does not actually exist. Instead, it is an invented concept with subjective intellectual and emotional dimensions. Therefore, terms such as “environmentalism” are meaningless and misleading. Yet we continue to placate ourselves with warm fuzzy phrases like “environmentally friendly” and “good for the environment.”

 

We Have Met the Environment and it is us 

Having worked for years as a municipal drinking water system operator, I know that Americans are, at times, woefully ignorant regarding environmental issues — such as where our tap water comes from, or goes to, once flushed down drains.

Though experience as a public water or wastewater (sewage) system operator does not equate to eco-guru status, it does represent one contemporary profession closely interfacing between people and natural resources – hands-on practical work that sharpens our understanding of our relationship with our the so-called environment, while stripping away stereotyped or politically driven associations.

Potable water system operators wish for clean raw water sources, for example, not because they are wild-eyed tree huggers, but because increased pollutant loads stress the treatment plant production process, making it more difficult to meet user demand. Operators understand that people don’t manage the environment — it manages us. The real challenge at hand is safe, equitable allocation of a necessary utility to citizens at a reasonable cost.

Blue-collar experience in public water treatment plants teaches that disembodiment from our surroundings is illusionary. Instead, we are “the environment” — we drink, eat and breathe it. Visit a sewage treatment plant and the operators will show you the real environment: It smells bad and it’s definitely not green. Now are you an environmentalist?

Our words will change as our thinking does, but our thinking will change only with gains in both knowledge and experience. I am personally not hopeful. For example, I don’t see a shift in social thinking and job status leading to young, bright people lining up to work as sewage plant operators.

For now, we can at least recognize our current disconnection and attempt to speak more specifically about environmental issues, which may begin to effect some change in the way we perceive our surroundings. Call a lake a lake, and impounded water a damned reservoir. Avoid using the word environment. Try the word people, instead. Now are you an environmentalist?