“People don’t pay attention to what’s underground,” observes Paul Hitchcock, who manages waste water treatment for the city of Stuart, Florida. “We call it a world out of sight, out of mind.” Yet what happens to waste water has a profound effect on our health and on the environment.

Before settling in Stuart, Hitchcock called attention to the underground world of water treatment in developing countries. As a task leader for an American-based company called Operation Management International, he lead a team that helped the Egyptian government build two water treatment plants, at a cost of $750 million. The plant treated 450 million gallons of water a day and served 63 million people.

When Hitchcock arrived in Cairo in the mid-1990s, the average life expectancy of residents of the Egyptian city was around 40 years. At the time, sewage was dumped directly into the canal where many people washed their clothes. Some people developed cracks in their feet from walking barefoot, permitting the waste water and the worms the waste attracts to go right into their blood stream. As a consultant to the Egyptian Government Environment Agency, Hitchcock’s job was to help Cairo residents add another 25 to 30 years to their lives by redirecting the wastewater to drying beds in the desert. There the waste could be treated and transformed into fertilizer.

“We killed the waste,” Hitchcock says, “so it wouldn’t hurt people.”

He later went on to work on wastewater management projects in the United Arab Republic and the Gaza Strip. In 1997, he provided the same services in Salvador, Brazil.

Back home in Florida, Hitchcock -- like his colleagues across the country -- faces mounting challenges to aging water treatment facilities and a severe water shortage.

Florida’s ever-growing population has exceeded the capacity of the existing pipelines, he points out, but there is little political will to invest the money that would be required to expand the infrastructure. Increased use is depleting the state’s supply of fresh water. Eventually, water will need to be drilled from wells as deep as 1,000 feet. In the meantime, golf courses and large housing developments have begun to draw from this deeper water – which is harder to treat and not suitable for drinking, but fine for irrigation. Drawing from this water, he says, will relieve pressure on the drinking water supply.

“You’re going to see a lot more purple lines, indicating reclaimed water,” Hitchcock predicts. “They’re almost forced now to put in reclaimed systems and storm water retention ponds.”

For Hitchcock, the key to insuring that we'll have the water we need in the future lies in learning lessons from nature.

“We must change our thinking to design with nature, not to circumvent it,” he observes. “After all, nature has worked in ways that have allowed this world to last for billions of years so far.”