The Potential of Mediation for Resolving Conflicts Between Irrigation and Urban Water Users

by Joel D. Palmer (originally published in Management of Irrigation and Drainage Systems: Integrated Perspectives, 1993, American Society of Civil Engineers)

We can model conflict as a spectrum extending from mild disagreements to disputes to campaigns to litigation to fighting (Keltner, 1990). Major conflicts generally escalate from minor conflicts, and the parties’ ability to resolve a conflict on their own decreases as escalation occurs and violence becomes more likely. Increasingly forceful intervention may be required in the form of facilitation, mediation, arbitration, litigation, legislation, or police action. Disputes over water are usually engaged at the litigation stage or higher on the spectrum, with the result that “[t]he issue of what is the wisest use of water in the water-short West is in the hands of lawyers representing every conceivable interest [and is] an assurance of job security for an army of legal advisors, and a cause of deeply entrenched animosity” among disputing parties (Carpenter and Kennedy, 1980).

Yet litigation fails to account for “the goals of the contending parties, the use of water supplies to control growth in the metropolitan area, wilderness and other ecological values, and the needs of rural people who hold a deep-seated hostility toward urban demands for this natural resource” (Carpenter and Kennedy, 1980). In dealing with environmental disputes, litigation has earned a reputation for overcrowded courts, long delays, exorbitant expenses, and poor decisions (Kubasek and Silverman, 1988). Often the real source of a conflict cannot serve as the legal basis for a court challenge. Lawyers reframe issues to fit a legal doctrine and the court is not able to address the real issues and tailor an appropriate remedy. Court decisions interpret the law but rarely end a conflict or reconcile conflicting interests (Amy, 1990).

Conflict over allocation and use of water arises as much from the personal motives of individuals and the relationships among the conflicting parties, as from technical or substantive issues. Conflicts are often colored by emotional, psychological or financial issues. Often the parties have convinced themselves they are adversaries because of poor communication or misconceptions (Carpenter and Kennedy, 1980). Parties tend to see conflicts as “zero-sum” games in which one side can prosper only at the expense of the others. “[B]ecause the participants in multiparty, many-issue disputes are usually unable to deal with their differences on their own, assisted negotiation is often necessary” (Susskind and Cruikshank, 1987).

Mediation helps the disputing parties to settle conflicts peacefully, before they have escalated to the point of litigation. Where litigation involves lawyers fighting one another, mediation involves the conflicting parties collaborating to solve problems. Where litigation restricts communication, mediation encourages communication. Where litigation imposes a settlement on the parties, in mediation the settlement is decided by the parties. Where litigation is a coercive process, mediation is voluntary.
This emphasis in environmental mediation on cooperation and consensus-building is part of a larger alternative dispute resolution movement that includes divorce mediation, landlord-tenant mediation, neighborhood dispute mediation (Amy, 1990). Mediation has a longer history of use in labor-management disputes and international conflict resolution.

The traditional labor-management model of the mediator is a neutral third party who has no stake in the content of the agreement reached by the conflicting parties, but acts only to help the parties achieve an agreement on their own. The mediator leads a series of joint sessions and individual party caucuses. The mediator de-escalates the conflict, helps the parties understand one another’s interests and accommodate each other. The mediator ensures that the parties remain aware of the costs of failing to reach an agreement, and that the solutions proposed are realistic. In this “pure” model, the mediator will not promote one alternative over another and generally will not even offer alternatives of his own. “The mediator has no power to render a decision or to impose a solution” (Gray, 1989).

Bingham (1986) published the only comprehensive survey of mediation of environmental disputes. The 160 cases documented from 1973-1984 included 17 water resources cases. Many of the mediated environmental disputes involved only public agencies. Overall, agreement was reached 78% of the time. Even when those with the authority to implement the agreements did not participate directly in the negotiations, the parties reached agreement 74% of the time. Site-specific disputes were fully implemented in 80% of cases while policy agreements were fully implemented in 41% of cases. The likelihood of settlement was not correlated with the number of parties. A fairly comprehensive search of the literature made for this paper discovered no instances of mediation for resolving conflicts between irrigation and urban water users.

But the successes documented by Bingham show that mediation can produce solutions to similar environmental conflicts with which all parties are satisfied and committed to implement. One of the advantages of the mediation process in producing agreements is that it allows the parties to move beyond their preconceptions of the conflict and their stereotypes of each other (Amy, 1990). As a result, much of the conflict often dissolves once the mediator has the parties communicating. The mediator helps the parties to redefine the conflict as a common problem, and to understand that their different interests are not necessarily conflicting interests.

Mediation explicitly accounts for the different values, perspectives and motives of the parties as they craft alternatives to the problem (Carpenter and Kennedy, 1980). The mediator helps ensure that any agreement reached is technically, financially and politically feasible to implement (Cormick, 1982, Cassady and Orenstein). By emphasizing the parties’ responsibility for solving their own problems, mediation can produce a strong commitment to implementation of the eventual solution (Crowfoot and Wondolleck, 1990). Because mediation results in a consensus solution, parties are more likely to consider the process fair, abide by the settlement, and negotiate future disputes instead of suing one another (Muller, 1984).

One of the greatest advantages of mediation for managing conflict is that the process encourages solutions that transcend each parties’ negotiating positions. Figure 1 (after Pruitt and Rubin, 1986) illustrates the point. The perceived benefit of a particular outcome to a conflict is plotted along one axis for Party 1 and along the other for Party 2. Each party’s aspiration or best expectation for resolving the conflict has been drawn as a line separating the solution space into four parts. Point A represents an alternative that benefits Party 1 at the expense of Party 2, while Point B represents an alternative that benefits Party 2 at the expense of Party 1. Point C is a compromise by both parties. Point D indicates an alternative that exceeds both parties’ expectations. Mediation explicitly seeks to create alternatives of this type.

The skillful mediator is able to discover the elements of such transcendent alternatives and keep them before the negotiating parties (Gray, 1989). He transforms the conflict by moving the parties from a “zero-sum” framework to an integrative bargaining framework. If the parties can externalize the conflict as a common problem, they can often cooperate in finding solutions. “The transformation involves exploiting the multidimensionality of most conflict situations.” (Susskind and Cruikshank, 1987).

The capable mediator generally does not need specific technical knowledge of a given conflict, and in fact this can be a potential problem as “the more the agreement is likely to be a result of the mediator’s ‘leading’ the parties and the less committed the parties will be to the difficult task of implementing the agreement” (Cormick, 1982).













Gray (1989) has listed the tasks mediators can be expected to perform:
* assessing readiness to collaborate
* getting the parties to the table
* minimizing resistance
* ensuring effective representation
* establishing a climate of trust
* modeling openness, optimism, and perseverance
* designing and managing the negotiation process
* managing data
* getting consensus

The nature of mediation makes it appropriate only under certain conditions. The mediator’s first task during the entry or conflict assessment phase is to evaluate the state of the conflict and whether it is “ripe” for mediation, or if the situation is too far escalated for mediation to be effective (Cormick, 1982). The mediator has extensive exploratory discussions with the parties before any commitment is made to negotiate the issues. If the parties are able to negotiate on their own, mediation will be of little value and the mediator’s presence may be a hindrance. Similarly, if the parties believe they have more to gain by stalling agreement or proceeding with a lawsuit, mediation will not be useful.

If after this evaluation the mediator decides to proceed, he must carefully “shape the table” by deciding who will take part, and how organizations will be represented. The mediator should determine who would be able to block implementation of an eventual agreement, and endeavor to include them in the mediation (Bingham, 1989).

The specifics of the process and the mediator’s style varies from case to case (Gray, 1989), but a differentiation, or problem-definition stage followed by a collaborative, or problem-solving stage is usual. Bingham (1989) describes a two-stage process for mediation of complex, multi-party disputes. The mediator first convenes the parties’ scientific and technical personnel to establish the facts of the case, what is known and not known, and what is presently in dispute...Next, a larger session, perhaps lasting days, is held with representatives of all identified interests.to negotiate a settlement. Bingham’s 1986 survey showed that the median duration of all cases from entry to settlement was 5-6 months, while 10% took more than 18 months.

“The mediator is, at the most basic level, a facilitator of communication between parties” (Kubasek & Silverman, 1988). He must enforce ground rules yet allow the venting of angry feelings in a safe atmosphere. He must overcome power imbalances and ensure that parties are at all times aware of the alternatives to continued negotiations (Susskind and Cruikshank, 1987). He must foster a mutual understanding of the needs and concerns of all parties, and help them generate, assess and select alternatives that satisfy all interests and can be implemented (Carpenter and Kennedy, 1980).

Mediation can be a powerful means of managing conflict productively. It can help mutually interdependent parties with different long-term interests and objectives to identify and implement cooperative actions. But “the search for joint gains does not require everyone to be ‘nice’ or to make concessions...” (Susskind and Cruikshank, 1987). “Mediation does not lead to a resolution of the basic differences that separate the parties in conflict ... [it] can help the parties agree on how to make the accommodations that will enable them to co-exist despite their continued differences.” (Cormick, 1982). Mediation is not a cure for ongoing environmental conflict.

Compared to the labor-management model, the environmental mediator may have a more complex task and additional responsibilities. Initiating the process is generally harder, and identifying the parties and issues can be difficult. Some writers in dispute resolution argue that the less-structured context of environmental conflict demands a more activist role than the labor-management-style mediator. Susskind and Cruikshank (1987) state that mediators need special knowledge of public sector operations and an ability to “sell” mediation to the parties. Others suggest that mediators should sometimes propose their own solutions to conflict, as an impetus for the parties to negotiate. However, Lentz (1986) warns that once the mediator starts leading the process actively, the traditional role of mediation is lost. Such activists run the risk of becoming a party to the dispute and destroying their impartiality.

Another caveat is expressed by Cormick (1982): “A danger we now face is that the overselling of the process and its misapplication by inexperienced interveners anxious to enter the field will result in costly failures that could broadly discredit the mediation process.” One potential problem is that mediators, controlling access to the negotiations to facilitate settlement, may exclude less powerful or less organized parties. Mediation may be unable to cope with significant imbalances of power, negotiating ability, or technical expertise. Some detractors of environmental mediation aver that certain issues generate such fundamental disagreement that simply to agree to negotiate is to compromise one’s values (Amy, 1990).

But perhaps the best measure of mediation’s value is its success at resolving conflicts and here the literature is unanimous. Mediation does produce consensus agreements, improves the relationships among the parties, and decreases the chances of the conflict recurring (Ury, Brett and Goldberg, 1988, Kubasek and Silverman, 1988).

As employees of, and consultants to rural and urban water interests, the members of the irrigation engineering community are in positions to advocate the use of mediation. By endorsing this alternative conflict resolution process, we promote integrative, collaborative problem-solving, and create substantial opportunities for creative technical and managerial solutions to water development problems.

References

Amy, Douglas J. (1990). “Environmental dispute resolution: the promise and the pitfalls.” Environmental policy in the 1990’s, Norman Vig and Michael Kraft, eds., CQ Press, Washington, DC.

Bingham, Gail (1986). Resolving environmental disputes: a decade of experience (executive summary). The Conservation Foundation, Washington, DC.

Bingham, Gail (1989). “Must the courts resolve all our conflicts?” National Forum: Phi Kappa Phi J., 69(Winter), 20-21.

Carpenter, Susan L. and W. J. D. Kennedy.(1980). “Environmental conflict management.” The Environmental Professional, 2(2), 67-74.

Cassady, Jane and Suzanne Orenstein. “Mediating wetlands disputes.” Source unknown.

Cormick, Gerald W. (1982). “The myth, the reality, and the future of environmental mediation.” Environment, 24(September), 14-17, 36-39.

Crowfoot, James E. and Julia M. Wondolleck, eds (1990). Environmental disputes: community involvement in conflict resolution, Island Press, Washington, DC.

Gray, Barbara (1989). Collaborating: finding common ground for multiparty problems, Jossey-Bass Inc., San Francisco, CA.

Keltner, John (Sam) (1990). “From mild disagreement to war: the struggle spectrum. In Bridges not walls, J. Stewart, ed., McGraw-Hill, New York, NY.

Kubasek, Nancy and Gary Silverman (1988). “Environmental mediation.” Am. Bus. Law J., 26(fall), 533-555.

Lentz, Sydney (1986). “The labor model for mediation and its application to the resolution of environmental disputes.” J. App. Behavioral Sci., 22(2), 127-139.

Muller, Frank (1984). “Mediation: an alternative to litigation.” Am. Water Works Assoc. J. 76(February), 42-43.

Pruitt, Dean G. and Jeffrey Z. Rubin (1986). Social conflict, escalation, stalemate and settlement, McGraw-Hill, Inc., New York, NY.

Susskind, Lawrence and Jeffrey Cruikshank (1987). Breaking the impasse: consensual approaches to resolving public disputes, Basic Books, Inc., New York, NY.

Ury, William, Jeanne Brett and Stephen Goldberg (1988). Designing systems to cut the costs of conflict, Jossey-Bass Inc., San Francisco, CA.

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Review: Is There Enough to Go Around?

Is There Enough To Go Around? by R. Buckminster Fuller. Books on Tape. Interview from a New Dimensions Radio program, New Dimensions Foundation, 267 States St, San Francisco, CA 94114.

I won’t try to outline the whole of his arguments, but Bucky makes some fascinating connections between politics, philosophy and science, and I’ll outline some of them in the following paragraphs.

Fuller’s answer to the question is, “Of course there is enough to go around. The real problem is the patterns of thought that have led to our belief that there isn’t.” To present his thesis, Bucky takes the listener on a rapid-fire, rollercoaster tour of western civilization, outlining the geometry of thought that makes us believe in scarcity. Few of us know the fabric of history well enough to see from where our assumptions about resources come.

Humans were conceived in antiquity with exquisite equipment but no experience. We are designed to be born ignorant, with thirst and hunger and curiosity, and later sexual desire; designed to learn by trial and error. Humans were designed to discover that they live on a huge sphere, so large that at first it seemed and still seems to most a plane that goes on to infinity.

The Babylonians were the most ancient people to record their thinking about that sphere. As they floated the sea, they saw mountain tops on the horizon, and as they approached, more and more of the mountains became visible, until they became an island, then the island went by and the mountains slipped over the edge again. This happened in every direction of approach and recession, a reality that made obvious the sphere. But it took persons with larger than normal horizons to see this. Man’s senses are only tuned in to narrow bandwidths, at both micro- and macroscopic scales. The raft people saw more than the landlubbers, and became better tuned in.

So anyway, this thinking about spheres led to the Babylonians developing spherical geometry and inventing polyhedra, and the idea of systems. The geometry that we learn today as children is retrogressive, with its infinite planes which are nowhere reflected in nature. A plane is a surface, which means it has to be a surface of something, and there are no infinite somethings.

A main reason we are back to this simplistic geometry that does not describe nature, traces back to the Roman Empire. The Roman leaders, with their roads and armies, had achieved complete physical mastery over their conquered peoples, but were frustrated at not having similar power over peoples’ minds. At that time, life expectancy was very short, about 19 years, and life in general was so miserable that the idea of a heaven afterwards was a popular notion.

With the level of spiritual technology, let us say, of the ancient Egyptians, it had been possible to send the Pharaohs to heaven. By the time of the classical Greeks, the technology of religion and the ability to build mausoleums allowed the whole of the aristocracy to get to heaven. The idea became so popular and the quality of life enough better that eventually those merely rich could afford mausoleums. But by the time of the Roman Empire people had come to the idea that everyone could get into heaven, and the great populist religions of Buddhism, Christianity and finally Islam arose from this expectation.

Getting back to the Romans, in the appeal of Christianity the Emperor saw a way to tie-in physical power with power over men’s minds. The Emperors adopted Christianity, and eventually controlled the Popehood. And they found very useful the idea that man had to confess, to go through an intercessor, in order to get to heaven.

Well, there were clearly some problems with the science of the time, which professed that the Earth was a sphere, and that the planets circled the Sun. Obviously, if the Pope and his men were Earthmen, the Earth must be a much more important place than the Sun. The idea of a flat Earth, and the concept of infinity, produced better maps, because one could have the Empire in the middle, and the Pope in the middle of the Empire, with a flat plane stretching out to infinity in all directions away from him. Heaven was up and Earth was down.

So the Romans, having become the Catholics, now had virtually complete control over everyone aspiring to heaven, through the power of the confessional. The sinner had to tell the priest everything, which gave the clergy access to all they needed for continued political control of the population. As a further control, only the use of Roman numerals was allowed, which made calculation impossible and counting a chore.

But through the insidious leakage of Arabic numerals into the Empire, the power of the cipher slowly became available to merchants and men of science. By slow steps, through the calculations of Copernicus and then Kepler, the idea of a spherical earth re-emerged. Brains were figuring out things that the senses couldn’t know: orbits, and gravity, how systems come about, and the properties of systems. Cemented by the discoveries of Columbus and Magellan (his expedition at any rate) and the other explorers of the age, learned people knew with certainty once again that they lived on a sphere.

Naturally this represented a great threat to the control of the clergy and the Emperors’ men but by now it was too late for them to stop. The discoveries, and accumulation of wealth, were going to those who could navigate and control the sea lanes outside the Mediterranean: the Dutch, the Portuguese, finally shaking down to the dominance of the British and its Empire.

In Britain, the East India Trading Company was assembling in one place, for the first time in human history, a collection of data from all of our closed, spherical system. Malthus was a statistician for the Company, and he in possession of all this information arrived at the conclusion that population was increasing geometrically, while production of life support was increasing arithmetically. A dire situation.

A hundred years later along comes Darwin who with his theory of evolution postulates that survival of the fittest determines the course of life on Earth. Karl Marx reads Mathus and Darwin and accepts both. To deal with the supposed lethal inadequacy of life support, he proposes that the persons most fit to survive were the workers, because they can make tools and plant seeds, while other people are parasites.

Naturally the other people disputed that, saying, “Of course we are not parasites. We are the explorers, the risk-takers, the creators of new ideas. It is the workers who are dull-witted and live courtesy of our discoveries.” This furious debate over which portion of humanity was fit to survive led to the great philosophical movements that have controlled our politics since: socialism and free enterprise. But in both camps, to prove their fitness to survive, the arms race became the pre-eminent demonstration.

Fortunately, spin-offs from the arms race have at least resulted in a good portion of Earth’s population having had their quality and quantity of life improved in the last fifty years to a level higher than all the potentates of old. Man has developed extraordinary tools for manipulating energy and matter in the production of arms, and as the weapons in time (usually rather quickly) became obsolete, their technology was redirected at goods which improve the lot of the rest of us.

Today this is almost totally the result of advances in knowledge of the invisible world, a reality that we cannot see, hear, touch or taste. Our scientists and manufacturers have become much better tuned in. And it is this invisible capacity to do more with less that provides the answer to whether there is enough to go around.

In medicine, in materials, in efficiency of energy use, the invisible world is providing us with the ability to live longer and better. But unfortunately, this has almost all been due to applications increasing man’s destructive power. Housing and environmental control (what Bucky calls livingry), for example, is hundreds of years behind the best militarily-directed technology. We can and should be applying that technology to improving peoples’ lives. Houses of geodesic domes, one of Fuller’s inventions, do so much with so little, that they can typically be flown in to their sites. Try that with your basic ranch style, gravity and friction structure.

A typical spin-off is that of commercial airliners following early military jets. The airliners are no doubt useful and convenient, but hardly represent the most intelligent or wide-scale application of what we know about protecting people from the elements (in this case cold and wind). Applying the best materials and knowledge, again to use livingry as an example, could quickly bring nearly all of humanity up to a high standard of living.

Doing more with less, applying our intelligence intelligently, we may very well not need to mine any more metals from the Earth. Recycle, mine the junkyards, improve the alloys! Applying the best we know of energy cycles, we could be living on our energy income (we’ve already got fusion energy, as long as Old Sol shines). Instead we spend our energy capital, poisoning Earth with concentrated radioactives, and the atmosphere with smoky corpses of long-dead plants.

We are now technologically capable of making it so, merely by deciding that it will be so. We need no longer rationalize to ourselves why one person should have it so good when this other person over here has it so bad. The choice is no longer you or me, it’s you and me. We can increase our life support geometrically, ride the rocketing curve of riches in the invisible world.

So why does man live from crisis to crisis, with only the prospect of disaster ahead? Because, Bucky says, the power structures of Church and State still depend on man being in discomfort, and on their being man’s only hope of getting into heaven. Our governments promise that things can get better, but only if we wait, and stand in line and pay our taxes, and defeat our enemies. And what would the clergy do for a living if whole populations took it into their own hands to create a heaven on earth?

What, given this situation, can the ordinary person do to improve this situation? Don’t go along with the politics of the day. Handle the information for yourself and learn the truth. Insist that the truth be told, proclaim it and teach it to your children. We needn’t accept the lie. There is enough to go around.

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Free Energy and the Mining of Natural Resources

We already have free energy from the sun. We need to become more clever about using it.

Natural systems yield much more than typical agricultural systems. We need to become more clever about the types of yield we are able to make use of. We need to be more clever about assembling systems that mimic the complexity and efficiency of natural systems.

Our present approach is to bludgeon natural systems in order to have our way with them. We need to be clever enough to coax natural systems to yield for our purposes.

The more we can imitate the redundancy and stability of natural systems, the more stable our systems of artifice.

The more we depend on technology to provide our basic needs, the more susceptible we are to large-scale disruptions, including disruptions economic, financial, social and political.

Old sunshine energy in the form of oil has left a trail of destruction across the world. We do not need any more energy than new sunshine. Oil is just concentrated sunshine. We need to be clever enough in the assembly of our systems that waste products of some elements are the needs of others, that we take advantage of all existing energy fluxes before importing more energy than sunshine.

Defining agriculture as “just a resource” implies that the only measures of that resource are the economic decisions of the current generation of Americans. We need save nothing for our children, or for any other living thing.

What thing can man make that is as complex as another living thing? Life is the most important “resource” we have. With the loss of any creature are also lost the yield and use of that creature. We need to be expanding our options, not reducing them. Blind devotion to technological fixes at the expense of living systems represents the destruction of survival niches, for us and for other living things.

We do not need to destroy natural systems. We can meet all our basic needs by manipulating natural systems.



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Sustainable Agriculture Resources

This quick survey of links outlines some of the more important influences on what is meant by sustainable agriculture in the United States, as philosophy, policy and the exercise of appropriate technique.

The really high point of thinking about how, specifically, to create communities that over the long term feed themselves, recycle their wastes, and culture the highest aspirations of human potential, is Bill Mollison's Permaculture: A Designer's Manual. From climate to earth-moving to gardening to economics, Mollison illustrates how energy and material flows can be arranged to create whole landscapes that feed themselves, that generate their own energy: systems which, once set in motion, require little external impetus to keep going. This extraordinary book should required reading for every student of agriculture, engineering, anthropology, landscape design, economics - well, just about everybody who would like to experience a vision of abundance for all life and the design principles to create it. (Amazon's permaculture book selection; Wikipedia's permaculture article.)

Going back even earlier to the days of the Whole Earth Catalog (which first attracted a 12 year-old me because it had an article on synthesizers) are Nancy & John Todd's Living Machines. The Todds have made heroic, poetic, as well as soundly scientific demonstrations of compact living systems of plant and animal life, which sustainably purify water, turn wastes to fertilizers, and produce copious amounts of food, all in a small amount of space with little maintenance.

Wendell Berry for decades farmed with horses on his Kentucky homestead, writes novels, essays and poetry, and provides a deep, American justification for the preservation of rural life, and an approach to farming that on balance does more good than bad, for the land and for people. Wikipedia link.

Mr. Berry's long-time friend is Wes Jackson (Wikipedia link). Wes Jackson is a plant breeder who founded The Land Institute in Salina Kansas to create a perennial polyculture of native prairie grasses, bred to produce harvestable amounts of grain. The Land Institute envisions vast fenceless, roadless areas of prairie grains, never plowed and disturbed only by a balloon-tired harvester once or twice a year. The Institute's mission has expanded to include a more general support for rural arts and culture. One of the classic Berry/Jackson collaborations is New Roots for Agriculture

Sustainable economics has one of its greatest champions in Hazel Henderson, who has long examined alternative models for production and trade, and advocates "ethical economics." Paul Hawken is another advocate for ethical economics, and for sustainable business operations.

At the production agriculture level, there are several notable think tanks, each taking a rather establishmentarian point of view. They provide excellent insight into the future of government land use policies, economic incentives, production systems and the like:
USDA's Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education
UC Davis Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education Program
Washington State University Center for Sustaining Agriculture & Natural Resources.

Tilth is an intangible quality in soils that is a measure of its health and productivity. "Tilth" organizations, such as Seattle Tilth, tend to represent interests in urban gardening, community supported agriculture and general food production awareness. Oregon Tilth additionally has grown to have a large business in certifying producers and and food products as organic and sustainably grown.

Closely allied with the sustainable agriculturists are the heirloom breeds preservers. There are many such among the livestock fanciers - see the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy. Preeminent among the vegetable growers is Seed Savers in Decorah, Iowa, and whose quiet garden beds winding along the banks of laughing water are a terrific place to visit.

Sustainability is a slippery idea, particularly around the edges. Unfortunately the term is tossed about with little care for definition. Most of the information referenced in this article leads to the edges, where questions outnumber answers, and real sustainability is recognized as a long-term and iffy proposition.

Send me your suggestions for additional resources to add to this page!

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The Illusion of Water Scarcity

[This article was originally published in Oregon Tilth's monthly In Good Tilth newspaper. Oregon Tilth supports locally appropriate, sustainable agricultural practices, and certifies farmland and producers as organic.]

by Joel D. Palmer, PE

Many of us are concerned about the quality and quantity of our water supply. Government officials warn that we should be conserving and carefully manage existing supplies to assure enough for the future. Frantic planning is underway in the northwest and across the country to prepare for the presumed shortages to come. But while conservation and good management are important goals, the scarcity of water is an illusion, based on assumptions that we need not take for granted. There is in fact an enormous amount of water about. And we have the resources to ensure a plentiful supply for ourselves and our landscapes for all time.

Scarcity is an illusion because we have insisted that all water at all times be available in the same way. By having our governments construct vast, costly collection and distribution schemes, we have in effect “put all of our eggs in one basket”. A reservoir is constructed to collect water for an entire city; water in the reservoir is pumped to a treatment plant and then to holding tanks. From the tanks a complex of distribution pipes convey the water to our homes. Everyone uses water from the same sources, and for all purposes. Thus we have the absurdities of, for instance, using chlorinated, fluoridated, and flocculated water not only to drink and bathe in, but to water our gardens and lawns, to wash our cars, and to flush down the toilet.

How many of us living in towns and cities know the source of our tap water? For instance, in Corvallis, Oregon in the summer, most of the water is pumped from the Willamette River. In the winter the water comes by pipeline from three creeks on Marys Peak. Chlorine is added to destroy coliform bacteria. Alum is added to cause impurities which color the water to coagulate and settle out. Fluoride is added for strong teeth in the drinkers. This water is stored in Baldy Reservoir on the west side of the city, and in two volumes collectively known as North Hill Reservoir on the north side. The total volume stored is about 21 million gallons.

A supposed advantage of these centralized systems is that the individual citizen need never give a thought to the water supply. One merely turns on the taps, and out it flows. But the consequence of not making any effort to secure our water supply is that we learn to think that the water actually comes from the tap. The citizen is relieved of all responsibility for thinking about the watershed, the reservoir, the pumping plants, the chemical treatment, the infrastructure upon which the tap depends.

The situation is precisely analogous to the widespread, albeit sometimes subconscious, belief that food comes from the grocery store. Our personal responsibility for providing such a basic necessity as water has been pre-empted. If something goes wrong, a pipe breaks or there is a chemical spill upstream, the individual’s only recourse is to complain that the experts, the specialists were remiss in their responsibilities. So not only are we relieved of responsibility, we are relieved of our ability to correct any problems that develop.

There are probably psychological effects associated with our no longer having to take any care for our supply of water. What are the consequences of losing control over essential goods and services, in terms of the way we think about the world and about our effectiveness? How much do we waste or use unwisely because we don’t see the effort that was involved in bringing the water to the tap?

We know that it rains a lot in the Willamette Valley, but do you know just how much? According to George Taylor of OSU’s Atmospheric Sciences Department, on average Corvallis has 42.55 inches of rainfall every year. Pull out your measuring tape to forty-two and a half inches above the ground. If all that rain ponded where it fell, with no evaporation, you‘d be chest-deep in water after only a year. That’s forty-two inches on the ground, on the streets, on the rooftops, on the lakes and rivers.

We presently discard our local rainfall, in fact we treat it as a nuisance. The rain runs away, down the spouts and into the gutters, through the grates and into the storm sewers, entailing another vast, expensive infrastructure. But this abundance of rainfall suggests an alternative to supplying our household needs for water: water harvesting. As some simple calculations show, local rooftops shed enough water through the year to supply much of our demand without taking any conservation measures. And water harvesting allows the householder to take personal responsibility for a safe and clean water supply.

According to Melissa Ware of Corvallis’ Water Department, average residential water use is about 61.5 gallons per person per day or 22,440 gallons per year. A family of four would use about 90,000 gallons per year. This much rain falls on only 0.08 acres of land, a square plot 58 feet on a side. A typical 1500 square foot house roof area would shed about 40,000 gallons of water, or 44% of all the family’s water needs.

When one considers that current 8 gallon per flush toilets can be replaced with those requiring only 2 to 3 gallons, the scope for meeting household water needs from rooftop harvesting grows considerably. Add in low-flow shower heads and a few other sensible conservation practices, and the possibility exists for doing completely without the centralized city water supply.

Another advantage of rainwater harvesting is that water need only be treated to the extent necessary for the intended use. Toilet and outdoor water need not be treated at all. Water for cooking and drinking (and bathing, if one were particular) can be purified in the home by chlorination, filtration or other method.

Unfortunately, rainfall harvesting is of questionable legality. State and city codes, enforced in Corvallis by the Plumbing Inspector, do not allow rain to be collected for home use, for the sake of protecting the public’s health. But there is no reason that properly designed and maintained rain harvesting systems cannot be as safe as the centralized systems. Elsewhere in the world, harvesting rainfall for households is routine.

Hardiness of water supply is a function of redundancy, diversity, storage, conservation, and enhancement. Our present water supply systems have little redundancy or diversity: they consist of a few far away reservoirs filled with water from even farther away sources. Many types of disruptions could occur, and cut off the existing supplies. Those 21 million gallons of water in the city’s reservoirs would last about three days at our autumn rates of consumption. In August the consequences of disruption would be much more severe.

The capability for long-term survival of our city under conditions of disrupted central supply does not at present exist. But we can develop a number of smaller scale resources to collect and store water, of which rooftop harvesting is just one example. Neighborhood-scale reservoirs, and harvesting from small streams and upland watersheds are others.

We city-dwellers have pegged all of our hopes to a very few, impersonal, large-scale, complex engineering works that effectively remove control of the water supply from the citizen. But this needn’t be the case. Relatively simple measures are available to augment and diversify our water resources, and to regain control and responsibility for one of our most basic needs.

©1990, Joel D. Palmer

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Dear Readers,

This site is presently inactive, as I have had to devote my attention to other matters. Please contact me at worldaboundingATcomcastDOTnet for information about my engineering, mediation and communication services, or with any questions or concerns.

Very best regards,

Joel David Palmer

Livestock & Ag Waste Intelligence

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