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The Straight Flush
or
Human Waste In The Way Again In
Margaritaville
By Nancy Klingener
Gene Shinn, the dean of Florida geologists, has a
great act he occasionally performs at science seminars. He calls it the
stupid rock trick. He holds a hunk of coral rock, about the size of a
cantaloupe, over a Tupperware container on the floor. He takes a glass
of liquid and pours it slowly on top of the rock.
It takes a few seconds but soon the liquid finds
its way through the crannies and crevices of the Key Largo limestone and
streams into the plastic container below.
This trick is used to demonstrate to the
non-geologists among us why cesspits and septic tanks in the Keys are a
bad idea.
In recent years, the problem of treating sewage in
a coral rock environment has risen to the top of the public agenda in
the Keys. Federal, state and local efforts are focused, as never before,
on the mission to “get the crap out of the creek,” to quote one
unusually plainspoken EPA employee. The state’s 2010 deadline for
reaching new treatment standards is inching closer all the time. It
seems like an impossible task sometimes, one that has just recently been
thrust upon us.
Sometimes it seems unfair. What happened to the
famous laidback Keys lifestyle, the promise of a paradise where we are
free to live as we choose? Why do we have to do this now?
Institutional memory in the Keys is a rare
commodity (more on that later). But the fact that human waste, a
fossilized coral substrate and a living coral reef are a bad mix has
been known for decades,. We are paying the price of procrastination. And
so are our natural resources.
Exhibit A: Key West Citizen story dated Aug.
6, 1970, headlined “Encroachment of pollution in Fla. Keys is
publicized” (actually the headline said “Enroachment” but I’m sure they
meant Encroachment).
The story, by the late great Keys journalist Bud
Jacobson, recounted a recent piece in the Sunday New York Times Resort
section, titled “Pollution Beginning to Blight Even the Florida Keys,”
written and photographed by Tom Buckley.
“By the time Buckley ends the long and
nose-wrinkling expose about trash and sewage in the waters around us,
the reader is inclined to wonder what, if anything is really being done
to solve this mess,” Jacobson wrote.
An excerpt from the Times story: “The Chamber of
Commerce, most of whose members are involved in the tourist business,
simply prefer not to talk about them (the pollution problems),
suggesting to an inquiring reporter that he take a free ticket for the
tourist attractions.”
Exhibit B: Key West Citizen story on Dec.
23, 1973. Headline: “Increased population increases problems.” This
story provides details from a recent report by the Coastal Coordinating
Council, a report that “carries several warnings about increasing the
population unless sewage and solid waste disposal are vastly improved –
and soon.”
A quote from the report: “The severest problem
facing the Keys is the disposal of human waste.”
Another excerpt:: “Because of the nature of the
soil in the Keys and the high water table, the use of septic tanks is
questionable as a safe means of human waste disposal.”
Exhibit C: A five-part series that ran in
the Citizen in December, 1971 titled “Pollution of Progress.”
From Part 1 (“The
Dilemma of Development): “”The newly-created State Department of
Pollution Control says the Keys are in peril from their own human waste.
Sewage treatment plants throughout the Keys are largely inadequate or
illegal in their operation, the state says.”
Part 2 (“A Check on the Damage”) quotes an engineer
hired by the Pollution Control department to figure out what is going on
in the Keys. “If development trends continue as they are,” the engineer
says, “the Keys could become nothing more than islands of fill
surrounded by oceans of sewage.”
Are we there yet? Well, we have beaches posted just
about every week by the state Department of Health as unsafe for
swimming. We have studies that show viral tracers flushed down Key Largo
toilets show up in nearby canals and shorelines in less than 24 hours.
We have studies that show viable human pathogenic viruses – in other
words microorganisms that can make you sick – in our canals. We have
studies that identify Serratia marcescens, a bacterium commonly found in
the human gut, as the cause of the whitepox disease that has devastated
our elkhorn coral stands, the building blocks of our billion-dollar
coral reef.
From Part 4
(“Pollution and politics”): “… if we do ruin a part of the Keys, we also
ruin the adjacent water. And when the water is gone, the appeal of
coming to small weather-beaten islands in the path of three months of
hurricane season will be about nil.”
This brings us to motive, a reason for shelling out
hard cash to get the crap out of the creek. It would be great if we
could persuade ourselves to clean up the waters because it’s the right
thing to do, intrinsically and healthwise, but in case that isn’t
enough, let’s talk about our local economy.
I used to hate it when I heard local notables refer
to the Keys as a “product.” In my view, the Keys are a place, not a
product. The Keys are a community, an ecosystem, an archipelago. A tube
of toothpaste is a product. A widget is a product. The Keys are my home,
my friends, my family. They are islands and homes, mangroves and
frigatebirds, coral reefs and Key deer.
But I have recently decided to stop fighting this
prejudice on my part. Three million tourists a year can’t be wrong.
We’re selling and they’re buying so there must be a product.
And our product is based on a healthy marine
environment. People pay big bucks to come here and catch fish, dive
reefs, paddle kayaks and watch birds. While they’re here, they also hit
the bars, ride tour trains, visit museums, buy art, eat at restaurants
and sleep in hotel rooms.
In order to have a sustainable tourist economy, it
would seem to be in our best interest to protect – and maybe even
enhance – the foundation of our product. Backed with a
multi-million-dollar annual advertising campaign, we continue to draw
crowds, but the signs of trouble have been apparent for some time.
Exhibit D: A two-part series that ran in
Skin Diver magazine in February and March 1973, titled “The Battle of
Pennekamp Park.” The story focused on the state’s efforts to address
park management and threats to its resources, including silt from
dredge-and-fill activities in the Keys … and pollution from sewage.
A quote from the story: “Anybody who claims that
Florida’s coral reefs are not endangered by pollution and the silt from
dredge and fill either has his head in the sand, or is blinded by
personal avarice and selfish interest. There is overwhelming evidence
that turbidity is increasing and visibility is decreasing in Pennekamp
waters, and there is ample scientific evidence that reef building corals
require clear water and bright sunlight in order to survive. There is
also ample testimony available by veteran skin divers that the coral
reefs look as if they are sickly or dying.”
But wait, you say. In pure economic terms, the Keys
are thriving. We are still getting three million visitors a year. We
have Florida’s lowest unemployment rate and Florida’s highest hotel
occupancy. Anyone who managed to buy a home here has seen their
investment rise faster than a tech stock in the late ‘90s. Ask someone
who just got here last year and they’ll tell you it’s the most
beautiful, coolest place they’ve ever seen.
This is where the institutional and collective
memory comes in. Few things are more heartbreaking than listening to a
Keys diving veteran describe the reefs as they appeared 20 or 30 years
ago. And it’s not just anecdote. A scientific survey conducted by the
EPA and NOAA annually since 1996 documents the loss of 37 percent of our
live hard coral cover in just six years. If our hotel occupancy or our
bed tax collection took that kind of fall, we’d get the Governor to
declare a State of Emergency in the Keys. But when it comes to natural
resources, we throw up our hands and point fingers at the Everglades,
the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi, global warming, anywhere but the
thousands of cesspits leaching sewage and the plumes of stormwater
streaming from our shores.
(Of course regional and global influences are
causing problems for our reefs. We must fight those battles, too. But
while we continue to argue for responsible behavior elsewhere, we must
make taking care of our own business our top priority – people in glass
houses atop septic tanks should not be throwing porous coral rocks.)
Meanwhile, we are falling prey to a phenomenon
known as shifting baselines. This term, coined by fisheries biologist
Daniel Pauly in 1995, refers to slow, hard-to-notice changes, from the
scarcity of fish on the reef to the increased drive time from Key West
to Miami. A ten-pound weight gain is a shift in waistline … and
baseline, especially if you buy new clothes to fit the new you. (For
more on this intriguing subject, complete with a video featuring Jack
Black, check out
www.shiftingbaselines.org. You’ll be amazed at how many areas of
life it applies to.)
Florida thriller writer John D. MacDonald nailed
the environmental impact in The Empty Copper Sea, a 1978 novel
featuring his boat bum hero Travis McGee. McGee’s buddy Doc Meyer sums
it up: “Florida can never really come to grips with saving the
environment because a very large percentage of the population at any
given time just got here. So why should they fight to turn the clock
back? It looks great to them the way it us. Two years later, as they are
beginning to feel uneasy, a few thousand more people are just
discovering it all for the first time and wouldn’t change a thing. And
meanwhile the people who knew what it was like twenty years ago are an
ever-dwindling minority, a voice too faint to be heard.”
In the Keys, we are particularly susceptible to
this syndrome because of the incredible turnover in our population.
Large hotels report more than 100 percent staff turnover in a single
year. Four out of five candidates for Key West City Commission this year
had lived here for three years or less. People speak nostalgically about
a favorite watering hole that opened in 1997 and closed in 1999.
Once again, data backs up the anecdotal
impressions. I asked a planner from the South Florida Regional Planning
Council to help crunch those numbers for me and here’s what he found,
from a question asked in the 2000 Census: Out of the 76,301 residents of
Monroe County who were 5 years or older, 23,114 (or 30 percent) had
moved into the Keys since 1995. By the same token, a total of 24,874
people who lived in Monroe County in 1995 had left by 2000.
The net change is small. The turnover, as a
percentage of the population, is huge.
We feel this in all kinds of ways in our individual
and civic lives. It’s incredibly hard to recruit foster parents and keep
church congregations going, to maintain friendships and build
relationships, when nearly a third of the population either just got
here or is on their way out the door.
And of course, all those newcomers base their idea
of a coral reef or a natural shoreline on how things looked when they
got here. That’s understandable. But it is not real. It is not the way
those systems are supposed to look and function. And it is not a
sustainable way of life. It is classic short-term thinking. If you’re
planning to sell your house next year and leave the Keys, it may work
for you. But the folks left behind are stuck selling a degraded and
degrading product.
We can do better. The Keys have given us all a lot,
starting with an incomparable place to live, and they deserve better.
Our heirs who may want to live and work here in future decades deserve
better. We can acknowledge reality and we can improve treatment levels.
We stopped dredging canals and spraying DDT on fields. We have brought
protected species back from the brink. In recent years, we are finally
starting to see recovery in Queen Conch, our local symbol. We
established the nation’s first significant ecological reserve to protect
the healthiest parts of our remaining reefs. In Key West, we replaced
sewer lines, upgraded treatment and eliminated the ocean outfall. Some
8,200 of us shelled out $17 million to replace the lateral lines from
our homes to the street.
Now we just have to keep going to get the rest of
the crap out of the creek. The state of Florida, which has invested
around $200 million in protecting the Keys over the last 20 years, is
willing to invest another $100 million to buy natural lands. In return,
they would like to see some significant and real commitments from us on
upgrading sewage treatment. We should support these commitments. The
facts on wastewater in the Keys are not new but they are real.
Nancy Klingener is the Florida Keys Program
Manager for The Ocean Conservancy. She has lived in the Keys for 12
years and feels like she just got here. |
