Two ways of looking at wastewater contamination in the Delta

In a previous post the DNP showed how the Peak Water Studio (3.9MB) was speculating on how strengthening Delta levees could augment water-based habitat.

Despite ballast water depositing invasive clams (e.g.) from Manila in the Delta’s waterways, most of the Delta’s ecosystem problems are caused on land. Those involved in Delta-Cal water issues are familiar with the question of who is responsible for the Delta ecosystem’s failing state.

The answer is “pretty much everyone.” Discharge from urban wastewater treatment facilities ringing the Delta make their contribution.

Students in the Peak Water Studio looked at the question of wastewater in the Delta in two different ways. In the first, they simply mapped the locations, capacities and spills of the various water treatment facilities around the Delta. Stockton’s, apparently, is particularly offensive.

Students also developed a way to think about how Delta agriculture could treat its irrigation discharge water prior to pumping it back into the Delta’s rivers and sloughs. In this solution, 1/7th of each Delta island would be converted to bio-remediating water treatment landscapes, with the rest remaining as farmland.

The students further argue that the increase in habitat would strengthen habitat corridors and help stabilize the Delta’s land-based ecosystem.

Such a proposition provides a way to think of the Delta’s future in a finer-grained, finer-scaled way than does the future represented by PPIC, in which entire sub regions of the Delta are packaged together.

The PPIC’s vision is coarse if rational, a glimpse into the world view of the the New Orgman.