RE: Assisting Our Stakeholders

[James Marple <jesl@carolina.net>]

Helen Villasor (and John Hagle):  

You make good points about the value of EPA aiding public presentation of fresh ideas and approaches but I caution that we should look beyond newspapers, radio, TV and community web sites for information, since these have been corrupted to a major degree by the persons who profit from natural resource mismanagement. In California even schools and libraries have been affected, flooded with water agency-sponsored brochures and books that distort history and public perceptions of water management alternatives.  
  
As an illustration: The fact that Southern Californians drink the sewage effluent of several thousand communities flavored by street/mine/agricultural drainage can be attributed to their over-reliance on information sources that have been stacked with deceptive premises and data that support false testimony from experts. Badly-infomed voters choose bad politicians.  

The dependence of Californians upon 'regular' information sources has led them to distrust their commonsense perception that rainfall should be stored, instead of 'disposed of' to successively flood dozens of communities on its way downriver.  These sources have left Californians ignorant of simple, inexpensive EPA/USDA Best Management Practices that eliminate need for the much more costly drainage facilities that have impoverished their state and enriched its profiteers.  (And their mercenary army that operates at every level to keep the public subservient.) 

Properly informed citizens would know that increasing the storage of their abundant rainfall would eliminate need for importing water, while also correcting flooding/pollution problems. Yet in California the word 'conservation' has been gradually redefined to nullify CA Water Code instructions of a half-century ago. (i.e.; "Conserve all or any stormwaters for beneficial use by guiding them into soils ... protect these waters from waste or contamination...")  CA public servants now use 'conservation' to describe 'reduced use' of water, defying the intent of the wise Legislators of WW II who ordered sensible water resource management. (And deceiving the public they purport to serve.)  It is noteworthy that some officials in the CA EPA recognize this evasion and have counseled planners to achieve water quality protection by applying commonsense rainwater storage planning and design.  But profiteer exploitation of the self-interest of bureaucrats and engineers has led most local and state planners to keep politicians and the news media so misled about costs/benefits of rainwater storage that most citizens take it for granted there is need for 'flood control' (my favorite oxymoronic term) and water importation systems, rather than the simple, cheap facilities that would put their bounteous rainfall to use. 

EPA methods and regulations are routinely rejected-resisted-evaded by agency managers and their professional advisors in California because identifying true costs of alternatives to past and present water or energy planning would bring job loss and blacklisting.  (Though most will deny, with a perfectly straight face, that private influence dictates their concerted actions to prevent intelligent rainwater management.)  Pressures exerted by special interests cause these public servants to devise plans that perpetuate disposal and contamination of the most precious natural resource of this region, in brazen defiance of common sense and State law. The few exceptions to this rule reveal its validity.  (Fresno, San Bernardino Valley Water Conservation District, eg.) and these too have gradually succumbed to the constant pressure from California's master misplanners. 

Persons who participate in EPA discussions, who communicate extensively with lower-level techs, can learn how to see past the false perceptions generated by a century of propaganda from water supply profiteers and spread through agencies and the news media. Interactions of participating citizens with this agency can soon show non-technical persons the true costs of storing rainfall versus the far greater economic and environmental costs of disposing of it and importing a replacment from hundreds of miles away.  Fully and fairly informed citizens would come to understand how 100,000 BMPs, quickly built for an average $100 each, could guide 500 billion additional gallons of water into the immense natural underground reservoirs of Southern California yearly.  

But I see no likelihood that newspapers, radio, TV and community web sites will provide the information most needed by concerned citizens; a clear, unbiased view of all planning alternatives.  In my view this can only be found by coordinated study of citizens groups combined with extensive exchange of ideas and information between they and their friendly local EPA/USDA/USDI folks.