“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.”