Only recently, our friend Carl Etnier, well known to be on good terms with nature and its creatures, gave it a second try. He came back. And here's what he saw:

What's the Alternative?

"What's up with the slogan, Joe?" I asked.

"I've been puzzling over why people dump poisons in my swamp," he explained, "not to mention rivers and lakes and oceans. A lot of times they don't bother to justify it; they just do it. But often risk assessment is used—in fact, the US EPA is trying to make risk assessment the basis of all their decisions. And you know how they describe these things. 'Less risky than smoking a cigarette or two in your lifetime.' These scientist and policy types go off and define what they think is acceptable risk. Like those particle physicists at Brookhaven who are smashing particles together and making strangelets. One of them calculated that the process had 20 chances in a billion of creating a particle that would trigger a chain reaction, consuming the whole earth, and declared this was acceptable! What arrogance—defining for a whole planet of swamp creatures and other animals what risk is acceptable for them! [Footnote 1]

"But I've got their number now," Joe continued, his eyes gleaming. He pulled out a dark blue paperback and brandished it. When he'd slowed down his waving of it enough for me to read the title, I saw it was Mary O'Brien's Making Better Environmental Decisions: An Alternative to Risk Assessment. "I don't have to be silent any more when confronted with huge reports in jargon I can't understand about how hazardous some chemical or process is to me. I can demand that alternatives be examined!"

"What do you mean?" I asked, wondering at his excitement.

"Well," he continued, waving a webbed hand about, "suppose some ecological engineers get the bright idea of using my swamp to treat domestic wastewater. If that's the only alternative debated, my head will be spinning with phrases like 'attenuation of infectious dose anticipated' and so on. Heck, I know every cattail, reed, and frog in this swamp. But I don't know from squat any of the Typha or Phragmites or other fancy stuff those guys refer to in their reports. And what am I supposed to argue when they say fecal cauliflowers are going to be less than X parts per million, and so the water is safe for me? Will that help me when I'm getting sick, and they say I can't prove it's the wastewater that done it?"

"Um, that's fecal coliforms, Joe. But anyway, it sounds to me like you're upset when you only have one alternative to comment on," I ventured.

"That's right! If they're going to talk about using my home to treat wastewater, I'm going to insist on finding out what else they could do with the wastewater! Maybe build a simulated wetland somewhere, and leave me alone. Or put in source separation. Or a big, fancy concrete and steel facility that makes a lot of humming and has very satisfying readings in and out. I want to know about these other possibilities, by golly, and who's going to get hurt or helped by them.

"How is it that humans have met their needs for hundreds of thousands of years without releasing hormone-mimicking chemicals, dioxins, and other poisons into the water, and you can't do it now? Have your needs changed? Don't you still have the same needs for food, water, shelter, amusement, and so on as before? I bet you people are smart enough to figure out how meet these needs without poisoning me and my friends. But to do that, you gotta ask the right questions! You gotta say up front what you're trying to achieve, and ask what other ways there are of achieving it and what their consequences are.

"Look," he continued, "you've observed some decision making on wastewater treatment issues. Have they considered more than one alternative?"

"Well, yes, often more than one alternative is considered."

"Well, have you ever seen a formal process where the citizens could add to the list of alternatives considered, and get them taken seriously?"

I hesitated, thinking about only a handful of projects I knew about that might be what Joe was looking for—or were they? Before I could answer, Joe apparently took my hesitation for a no, and with a "Harumph galumph" he plopped back into the swamp and swam away. But not before tossing me a dark blue paperback, which I picked up and started paging through...

Footnote 1: New Scientist, 7 October 2000 (Vol. 168 No. 2259), p. 4.

© 2000, International Ecological Engineering Society, Wolhusen, Switzerland