Stormwater is Calling from Inside the House!

Maybe if stormwater wasn't so pretty and shimmery, we'd be more upset about what run-off does. But who doesn't love an oily puddle rainbow?

Even if you recognize there's a threat, you're still just one person. Against rain. In the Pacific Northwest. Good luck with that, Noah.

Sightline's stormwater report acknowledges these truths. They give you the scope--a single Puget Sound home produces over 26 thousand gallons of run-off each year-- subtitle the horror story "Stormwater's costly and toxic cocktail," and talk about "what you can do."

Still, you and I and The Onion know how we think. If we were neo-hippies and lived in Fremont and derived a great deal of our identity from nagging other people about their wastefulness, we might think about painting a rain barrel with a Day-Glo mandala, sure. That soft rainwater is just what Dr. Bronner ordered!

That's why it's cheering to see a Seattle Metropolitan story on rain gardens. What we need to hear is, "It’s a nice oasis." Why? Because this environment thing is a leaky boat. Seattle has a great recycling percentage, we almost banned plastic bags, and not only did we screw in a bunch of CFL light bulbs, but we're going to take the dead ones back to Bartell's, too.

Each of these things requires personal effort--each draws from the limited fund of attention we can give to monitoring our "bad" behavior. And looking around, it's easy to see we'll be running crushing mental deficits far before we get this sustainable thing off the ground. (It's also why guiding principles are better than regulating homeowners into frustrated immobility, but that's another post.)

Doing something that just works better, by contrast, requires none of that sustained, best-behavior hall-monitoring. You go to a home show in Tacoma or Seattle, you get a sense of what a rain garden can do for you, you learn that Seattle will help pay you to install one--suddenly it's not a battle. A backyard "oasis" that keeps your basement from flooding and gives you neighborhood bragging rights? Bring it, Fremont rain-barrellers!

I wrote "leaky boat," earlier, and maybe it's true that it's always going to leak a bit. Life is not no-impact. Animals leave trails in the wilderness. But what a difference when you're rewarded for maintenance and upkeep, rather than simply to keep bailing harder. What Sightline is pitching is not just the fun of digging up your yard, but something called LID: "low-impact development."

Personal empowerment is great, but empowering policy is better. I think sometimes we take the wrong message from the Noah and his ark story--look, it's great to celebrate a visionary, but it would have been much better had everyone pitched in on a bigger boat, or, you know, house pontoons. As fatiguing as it is to look around at all that needs to be done, it's amazing the difference when a community decides to tackle something together.