The flat and transparent larva of the eel which grows about 60-300 mm. They are so hard to spot and rarely sighted.

The original letter is at mondaymag.com/articles/entry/letters-september-30/

The facts about sewage treatment

In 1968, when I was half my present age, I was assigned the job of assessing an application by the Capital Regional District to discharge screened raw sewage down the first of our long outfalls. The substantiation was by consulting engineers Associated Engineering Services Ltd., and their lead engineer was a brilliant man with a doctorate in engineering. It was more than adequate to prove the discharge would not cause pollution; the length of the outfall was derived form a formula developed by the engineering faculty of a U.S. university using scientific and medical information from the extensive monitoring already carried out elsewhere.

A permit was issued with a requirement that the discharge be monitored by an independent agency, for if land-based treatment was shown by a government agency not to be needed, no one would believe the politicians were doing anything but trying to save money. Indeed, the monitoring was not to prove that such treatment was not needed—which was readily predicable—so much as to enable the public to be so convinced. That purpose was never met for whilst the monitoring results were available; the CRD never publicized them and they have done nothing to justify their original decision to instal that long outfall since it was installed.

Following this, an identical process was carried out for the second of our long outfalls. The agency that the CRD and province agreed on was our own university and the medical health officers. It was obvious that no one was better qualified to assess the impact of the discharges and that is still obvious.

So following 30-plus years of monitoring, not a single biologist, oceanographer nor medical health officer supports the notion that we need land-based treatment. Six medical health officers and likewise as many scientists and not a single exception! When our minister of environment, Barry Penner, ordered land-based treatmnet to be provided, they and many other well qualified people—91 in all—wrote to Penner that he did not have the evidence needed to justify his decision. They received a fatuous answer.

This insult to the university is more important than the irreversible environmental damage that the building and operation of land-based plants will do, although that is significant, and more important than the the diversion of money from needed environmental projects. It not only means that the monitoring over 30 years has been a waste of money; more serious is the waste of talent. The scientists must wonder what their purpose in life is thought to be when the most important recommendation they will ever make is ignored. What was the point of all those exams and all that work?

Not only is their work trashed, so also is the work of the Pat Bay Oceanographic Centre, whose director, a scientist of world renown, gave lectures in Victoria explaining why we did not need land-based treatment. So is the work of the U.S. scientists who selected the director of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, Professor Isaacs, to explain to a committee of Congress why land-based treatment was not needed with long outfalls. So is the work of U.K. scientists and medical health officers whose advise to a British Royal Commission led to a famous result that comparing secondary treatment with short outfalls to long outfalls, the latter under the right conditions, could be “environmentally preferable.”

Minister Penner quoted from a report by the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (a report that never had peer review) in support of his order, but the most reasonable interpretation of the conclusions of that report is that we should not be installing land-based treatment.

We are back to Galileo and the sun going ’round the Earth, which was as obvious to citizens then as the need for land-based treatment is now. This is more than a mistake; it is a disgrace.

Ted Dew-Jones, Victoria

The Crash You Can Avoid

2:07 PM Tuesday July 20, 2010
by Tony Schwartz

We live in a world that defines “more, bigger faster” as invariably better.

It’s an ethic that places the greatest value on companies that offer ever more products and services, and generate ever higher profits.

It’s an ethic that rewards and prizes people who work the longest hours, move at the highest speeds, take the least downtime, and juggle the most tasks at the same time.

But it’s also an ethic that can survive and prosper only so long as capacity — the planet’s resources and our own — exceeds the demand we make on it.

For generations, we’ve acted on the belief that we can consume as many of the earth’s resources as we want, blithely confident that there will always be more where they came from. We’ve done much the same with our internal resources. We spend our own energy at more and more furious rates, on the assumption that our capacity naturally expands to meet rising demand.

The jig is nearly up.

The problem with “more bigger faster” is that it generates value that is narrow, shallow, and short term — diminishing returns until there are ultimately no returns at all.

Was the BP disaster an anomalous event, for example, or an inevitable outcome of the world’s unquenchable thirst for more and more oil, and a big public company’s hunger for higher profit, more and more quickly?

Was the sub-prime debacle a surprising development, or the inescapable outgrowth of a race among large financial institutions to run up profits by creating and selling a product — deceptively packaged mortgages — to customers who couldn’t reasonably afford them?

Were the flaws in recent cars produced by Toyota — a company that built its brand on reliability — anything more than a predictable consequence of ramping up production to manufacture more cars, more quickly to earn more money, faster?

The complexity of the problems we’re facing is growing, but our capacity to meet them is diminishing, precisely because we’re moving so fast. We feel compelled to push ourselves harder and more continuously, so we’re sleeping less, resting less, sitting at our desks for longer, moving and exercising less, eating fast foods faster, and becoming fatter and less healthy.

In the face of relentlessly rising demand, we feel constant pressure to get more done. Seduced by the new technologies, we juggle multiple activities to try to keep up. We’re partially engaged in many things, but rarely fully engaged in anything. By splitting our attention, we sacrifice the qualities we need most: absorbed focus, reflectiveness, creativity and the capacity to think big picture.

Calmness is critical to being able to think clearly and deeply. Instead, feeling stretched and stressed and pushed, we increasingly fuel ourselves with adrenalin, noradrenalin, and cortisol. These “fight or flight” hormones not only wreak havoc on our bodies, but also progressively shut down our prefrontal cortex so we’re more reactive, impulsive and focused on our immediate survival rather than thinking long-term.

The way we’re working — and living — is unsustainable.

We’re in a shared conspiracy of denial because we don’t want to face the sacrifice, pain, and change that recognizing our limits would require. We can’t remain numb to the consequences of the way we’re living indefinitely, but we also can’t change what we don’t notice.

So what has to change to make us wake up? What will it take for us and our employers to connect the dots between the way we’re working, and the accidents, breakdowns, and destructive business decisions that occur with increasing frequency?

Sadly, I suspect the answer is pain. Change rarely occurs until the pain of our current behaviors exceeds our fear of doing something new and different. My own bet is that another severe downturn in the stock market, and the economy, is the most likely trigger.

But why wait?

What if you set aside a specific time every week to get off the treadmill you’re on? What if you stopped moving, quieted down, put away your technology, and took some time to reflect on the consequences of the choices you’re making? What would it look like to move from “more, bigger, faster” to “richer, deeper and more satisfying?”

Try our energy audit for starters. (Click on the link.) It will tell you a lot about whether you’re building your capacity, or draining it.
Tony Schwartz is president and CEO of The Energy Project.

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