The Golden-Brown Rule

I sometimes suggest to my students that, if they want to be sure of jobs in these uncertain times, they should bet on poop.  Death and taxes aren’t the only inevitabilities in life; excrement, too, will always be with us.

I’m not sure that this sales pitch has ever made a convert. Effluent has an image problem that no marketer has been able to solve.

Except, perhaps, in Whatcom County.

Today’s Bellingham Herald featured an article on poop.  “Whatcom County Council Skeptical on Need for Tougher Septic Tank Rules,” says the headline. 

Tougher rules?  What rules?

It turns out that voluntary inspection leads to minimal inspection.  Outside of the Lake Whatcom and Drayton Harbor watersheds, there are no deadlines for septic tank inspection and no penalties for failure to inspect in Whatcom County.  The County does send reminder postcards. So does your dentist, probably.  If householders pitch the postcard, what happens to them?  The same thing that happens if you ignore your dentist's postcards:  nothing.  Your dentist doesn't come after you, and neither will Whatcom County.

This leads to a compliance rate for voluntary septic tank inspection of 22%.  And so, as the Herald notes, “some failing systems continue to operate.”

Read further into the article, and you’ll find this quote from a County employee:  "Quite routinely, we still do find failing systems with straight-line pipes that discharge into roadside ditches."

I don’t know how you react to that sentence.  “Yech” is one natural reaction .  “P.U.!” might be another.

Unless you’re on the Whatcom County Council, apparently.  The next sentence, the very next sentence, states: “Council member Sam Crawford said he has never been convinced that septic system problems are causing health or environmental problems serious enough to warrant the regulatory crackdown.”

Now, I grew up on a farm in upstate New York – and if you aren’t aware that New York exists outside of New York City, plug 2655 Depew Road, Stanley, New York into the satellite portion of Google Maps.  If it looks like any part of Whatcom County, it would be the part north of Badger Road - -not the sin-stained metropolis of Bellingham., much less Manhattan.

Anyway, I grew up in rural New York, and my father and men of his generation had a saying about uppity people that comes to mind.  In its sanitized version, it would go something like this:  “They think their excrement doesn’t stink.”

And perhaps that’s the problem with Whatcom County.  We know that we are special people who live in a special place.  We are people who are so special that, unlike anywhere else on earth, our excrement only makes our special water even more special.

Mr. Crawford did not, of course, make this claim.  He justified his skepticism by pointing out the absence of data demonstrating that rigorous enforcement around Lake Whatcom and Drayton Harbor has resulted in “measurable improvement” in water quality in those waterbodies. 

If you expect to see “measurable improvement” based on septic tank inspection, you would have to have very accurate measurement that excludes inputs of all other sources of, er, nutrients. 

Do we have that?  No.  And I think that the assumption that those data must exist before we take action reflects two problems.  

The first is a variation of the “CSI Effect.”  Prosecutors complain that juries are less likely to get convictions in criminal cases these days (here’s an article on this), because juries have unrealistic expectations about evidence.  Based on TV, they expect that a high-tech machine will match every fiber with a precise garment, every piece of soil with the garden across which the perp had scampered.  All you have to do is put the sample in a machine.  Neon lights glow, and voila!  A computer screen pinpoints the precise result.

Unfortunately, these high tech machines are – I hate to break the bad news – fabrications.  Or very expensive, or not as accurate as the shows would have you believe.  Real life is far messier and more uncertain than TV.  Evidence is far messier and more uncertain than on TV.

I saw a crime show once where two attractive young women with frowns on their faces gathered around a screen.  An adjacent contraption buzzed and whirred, lights flashed across a screen, and then a map appeared.  It showed the precise locations of all pollution sources in a harbor, with all of the pollutants listed.  Frowns gone!  The investigators found the exact location where a body had entered the water, because another of those infallible machines had identified pollutants on the clothing.

Why don't we just buy one of those machines and have it report on septic tanks!  Except that, well, if the machine actually existed, somebody would still have to get all of the data and input it into the machine, and it would have to be kept up to date.  How many tax dollars would that cost?

So problem number one is that, no, we don’t have a high-tech machine that perfectly pinpoints every source of pollution.  We have some monitoring data and we have the known fact that more poop in the water leads to worse water quality.  And we have the known-but-ignored facts that Whatcom County has a large aquifer with some of the worst nitrate pollution in the state, and 77 stream reaches that are impaired, and two harbors restricted for shellfish growing and gathering. . .

Problem number two is the cumulative impact problem.  There are many sources of pollution affecting our water bodies – and many sources of poop.  People, farm animals, deer and geese.  As the children’s book says, “Everybody Poops.”  And so, it’s easy to say “Well, a few leaking septic tanks won’t hurt anything.” 

Nor will a straw break the camel’s back.  Except when it does.  (That’s the significance of the picture up top.)  

Conversely, it is undoubtedly true that inspecting and correcting leaking septic tanks won’t cure all of Whatcom County’s water problems.   To do that, all the various sources will need to be addressed.

So why pick on septic tank owners? 

Remember the Golden-Brown Rule. Do unto your own poop as you would have other do unto theirs.  

Now, bearing in mind the Golden Rule, I do think that we should ensure that low-income householders are not impoverished by having to inspect and, particularly, clean up their septic tanks.  

We need to make this subsidy mindfully, however, rather than simply subsidizing septic tank owners across the board.  That's what we are doing when we turn a blind eye to leaking septic tanks. 

It takes an ounce of inspection to avoid a pound of poop.  And sorry, but I am not, under any circumstances, going to search Google Image for an illustration of this saying.  It probably is vivid enough in your own mind's eye.