Kicking the Water Can Down the Road

On the same day (Sunday Oct 14, 2012) that the Orlando Sentinel’s Aaron Deslatte writes in his “Capital View” column that our Agricultural Commissioner Adam Putnam is focusing his agency’s work on protecting water supplies as the way to ensure sustainable development for agriculture in Florida, we have the front page of the same paper chronicling the difficult and defeat-ridden road of protecting the Wekiva waters (“Despite protection, Wekiva River’s health, flow continue to decline” article by Kevin Spear). I have been reading columns and articles about the need to protect the Wekiva River basin for about 20 years now, and still to this day we have not had the political courage to match the environmental and scientific knowledge we have in order to craft policies that can stem the rising tide of pollutant damage. But we don’t need alarmist alerts to try to get attention to this problem. That only gets the base fired up, not the wide range of citizenry needed. What we need are tangible directions and solutions that increase the well-being of the individual property owner or citizen. For example, a while back I remember a state legislative initiative to improve septic tank standards (to reduce/eliminate seepage that contaminates the watershed) that ran into the roadblock of adding too much cost on to each individual homeowner’s upgrade of an old system or installation of a new system in new construction. That increased cost is a reasonable objection. But somehow we can’t provide an argument that includes the real cost (economists call them “externalities”) of not improving standards? We can’t show how investing in infrastructure does do that “well-being” thing? We can’t show how a loss of water quality jeopardizes economic vitality and growth? We Americans like to think of ourselves as realists with a “can-do” attitude that is up to any challenge. When it comes to environmental issues, like this one on water quality, we are thinking and not doing. Well, we are doing something. We are kicking the proverbial can down the road…..paying later instead of paying now.