I’ve been quiet on Substack over the past few months. It’s not that I’m not bursting with things I want to share with you - I am. But I’m also trying to write a book on many of these same topics, and it turns out that writing anything else - including Substack posts - sucks time away from THE book. Also, I’ve had the distractions of a Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference (amazing!) and a new grandchild (even more amazing!) But, for now, I’m back!

My husband and I had a swimming date last week. Our house is only three blocks from one of Minneapolis’ famed lakes where we can swim any summer day, but this mid-August outing was twelve miles north at a pool that I’d been waiting nine years to visit.

I first learned about the Webber Natural Swimming Pool during a national conference in 2017. Upon hearing that I’d moved to Minneapolis, a colleague’s voice crescendoed with enthusiasm. “I was just there” he told me. “You have to see this pool!” Bo lived in Mobile Alabama, more than 1,000 miles south, but all he wanted to talk about was Minneapolis’ new pool.

Overcast skies and 70-something air temperatures were not conditions that invite me to don a bathing suit, but this was the day that Marc and I had set aside for our outing, and I was determined to not let another summer slip away without making the pilgrimage. Sweaty from pedaling there – the Twin Cities are an urban cyclist’s heaven - Marc and I locked our bikes and grabbed our gear. Inside the bath house, teenage lifeguards – tan, sporting red bathing suits – asked if we’d been to the pool before. I kept my answer simple, a short “No”, skipping over the fact that I’d stalked the pool online and had many times examined it through locked gates during the off-season.

The reason I’d wanted so badly to try the pool out for myself was that it uses no chlorine. The Webber Natural Swimming Pool operates what is, as far as I can discern, the only public pool in the United States that operates without chlorine or other caustic chemicals. Instead, it lets nature, in the form of more than 7,600 aquatic and wetlands plants selected from 36 species, along with an entire ecosystem of zooplankton and microbes, do the work of consuming and filtering harmful bacteria and unappealing algae. The water-cleansing plants are all part of the “regeneration basin”, a nearly ½-acre constructed wetland/pond zone that cycles the pool’s water twice a day. It sits adjacent to the pool, just past the pool’s fence line.

Other than the regeneration basin – which seemed of interest only to me on the day of our visit - much about the pool was familiar. Kids playing Marco Polo with their dad, languorous lifeguards calling out “Walk please” and “Don’t hang on the rope”, forty-somethings reclined in lounge chairs, deep in their novels. However, there were no picnic spreads nor even a snack bar. Food and drink (other than water) are strictly verboten, presumably to keep errant chip bags and straws out of the pool.

The pool’s shape is a blend of straight-lined, vertical-walled pools that grace cities and suburbs everywhere, and the graceful bends and shallows of natural ponds. Fanning arcs do their best to mimic a waveless beach, offering bathers a way to gently walk into the depths. In other places, vertical sides that we’ve come to expect in modern swimming holes allow quick entry for those who want to get right to it.

Five roped-off swim lanes welcome the serious swimmer. The otherwise free pool charges three dollars for swim lane access at the noon rush hour. But at 3 o’clock on a cool, cloudy day, the lanes were free – free of charge, and free of competition - so I slipped in to give them a try.

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In no way am I a serious swimmer, but I’m accustomed to “wild” swimming, i.e. slowly stroking my way through natural water bodies, whether they be the urban lake near my house, the Virginia tidal river I return to each year, or a Great Lake in my adopted homeland. My friend Craig once talked me into a one-mile open-ocean swim as part of a fundraiser for Friends of the Virgin Islands National Park. I swam most of it in the company of a Labrador Retriever who felt responsible for making sure I didn’t finish last. This is all to say, I’m no stranger to chlorine-free swimming. I’ll take it any day over swimming in chemically treated water.

People who swim regularly know the ills of chlorine. Yes, it keeps bacteria at bay, but skin, hair, bathing suits, and respiratory systems pay the price. You could always pick out the competitive swimmers during my junior and senior high years – they were the ones with straw-like hair, often with a greenish hue.

The Webber Pool is hardly wild swimming, but the water itself is pretty darn close to being “wild”. When I took my turn in the swim lane, I didn’t expect anything different than swimming in my local pond. But I was wrong. My body cut through the water as if I were gliding across an air table, the kind used in physics classes to eliminate friction. No wonder they can charge $3 for the privilege.

Natural swimming pools have their roots in Europe, introduced in Austria in the 1980, with Germany opening the first public natural swimming pool in 1998. Europe now has tens of thousands, a mix of both public and private. Although still uncommon here, the U.S. has many unchlorinated private natural pools, but only one public pool.

I know of one other naturally unchlorinated pool in the United States, its origin story and mechanics are not at all like Webber’s. Capon Springs and Farms, an unassuming resort that’s been owned and operated by the same West Virginia family for nearly 100 years, features a spring-fed swimming pool that was once heralded as the “Best Swimming Pool in the U.S.” The story, as it was told to me by one of the Capon family members, was that when the West Virginia chlorine requirements were promulgated in the second half of the 1900’s, Capon wrangled an exemption.

The state health department lets the resort management off the hook for chlorine as long as they completely empty the pool twice a week and refill it with fresh spring water. As I’ve seen on countless visits with my family, on Wednesday and Saturday evenings, just before dinner, the pool’s plug is released, and its undoctored water slowly drains into the adjacent mountain creek. Once the pool is empty and its bottom has been hosed down, the plug is replaced and a pipe that comes directly from the resort’s iconic 100-gallon-per-minute spring starts refilling the primary pool and its adjacent kiddie pools. (I should note that not all 100-gallons per minute go to the pool - it has to share the bounty with all the other demands of running the accommodations.) But by morning, the pools are ready for anyone brave enough for the 65-degree water.

I’m not sure why no other community has followed Minneapolis’ footsteps to offer their residents an unchlorinated experience. I imagine that any existing pool with enough space could be retrofitted to add a natural “regeneration basin” or similar nature-based cleaning system. Maybe it’s just that their park leaders don’t know it’s a possibility. There’s an easy way to fix that!

Splash Zone

There’s no direct line between natural pools and the link I’m about to share other than that I’m passionate about both. My writing buddy Steve tipped me off on Netflix’ new documentary “Plastic Detox”. OMG. I just watched it and now I want to you do so as well. (It’s the fastest 92 minutes you’ll ever spend.)

Newfangled ways to treat bodily excretions don’t usually make it into mainstream news. There are plenty of scientists and inventors out there trying to tackle what is arguably one of humanity’s biggest challenges, but they tend to work in obscurity and news of their work struggles to circulate beyond a select sphere of colleagues. Case in point, Lina Zeldovich’s captivating and superbly researched 2021 book “The Other Dark Matter” struggled to find the light of day because agents and publishers were squeamish about her subject, human excrement. Thankfully the University of Chicago Press saw her topic’s value, but her challenges illustrate the larger point. Even though, to quote the popular children’s book title, “Everyone Poops”, not everyone wants to be reminded of it.

That obscurity makes it especially sweet when my in-box brings off-beat news about advances in this matter that is near and dear to me. The instances are infrequent enough that I always appreciate them. But as a real-life example of “grace happens”, last week not one, not two, but four friends independently sent me news of the weird. Knowing that many of you relish these tidbits as much as I, I’m paying it forward to you.

My friend Rob sent me a link to a Swiss invention that turns a urinal into a fertilizer factory. We all need food, and farmers need fertilizer to grow that food. But fertilizer production and transport is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, wastewater is chock full of nutrients, which become pollutants unless they are removed. But removing them requires energy, which also creates greenhouse gas emissions. What if there were a way to efficiently capture nutrients from wastewater and shuttle them directly to plants, thus reducing greenhouse gas emissions on both ends? Hello urine recovery.

It just so happens that, even though our pee makes up only a tiny sliver of wastewater’s volume, it carries the majority of the nutrient load – about 75% of its nitrogen, and nearly two-thirds of its phosphorus - yet virtually none of the pathogens. Once mixed in with the rest of a building’s waste stream it becomes energy intensive to filter out the nutrients, but collecting undiluted urine separately from wastewater keeps the nutrients concentrated. Concentrated nutrients are exactly what farmers need. Here’s where Rob’s link to the Swiss Nutrient Harvester comes in.

Behind what looks like a stylish urinal sits a micro factory that stabilizes and concentrates urine into a powdered plant fertilizer that can be easily packaged and transported. Lest you think this only solves half the problem given that only half the population can use urinals, go back and read my earlier piece about an easy-to-use $12 device that lets the rest of us pee, and aim, while standing.

The second news item came from my recently retired husband Marc. As a Minnesotan of a certain age, he is eligible to audit classes at “the U” (i.e., University of Minnesota). For free. This semester he’s taking “The Social Life of Soils”. Initially I was sitting in on the video lectures with him. After all, there was no “social life”, or life of any sort, in the soil science course I took in 1979, and I thought I’d enjoy learning along with him. However, it turns out that I know more about the ecosystem beneath our feet than I realized, so I ditched him.

But he didn’t ditch me. Marc is a diligent student, so when he was assigned a reading on the role of soil nitrogen in soils, he made it all the way to the references where his eyes landed on something he knew I’d like: a research paper titled “Urine luck”. This time it was Spanish researchers exploring the advantages and opportunities to be gained when urine is recovered separately from the waste stream. In the article they compare the climate impacts of conventional centralized wastewater treatment with the alternative of urine capture and use as fertilizer for an on-site rooftop vegetable garden.

The application of urine as a vegetable fertilizer is not unique. Trust me, there are lots of tomatoes being grown with urine even if they aren’t showing up in your grocery aisle. (They may, however, be in someone’s sidewalk “free tomatoes” box this summer. Just sayin’.) However, the article’s quantitative analysis comparing urine recovery with centralized treatment is important. Spoiler alert: It’s good for the climate to use urine for fertilizer.

Meanwhile, my friend James, an Omaha-based electrician, came across this nifty gizmo being tested in Japan. The WOTA Unit collects and cleans all of a household’s greywater – i.e., the water from sinks, showers, and washing machines – and then supplies it back to the house for use. I’ve seen similar technologies at meetings and trade shows, but what especially caught my eye in this Japanese application is the way the technology is being deployed.

It’s one thing to use them in a house here and there, but Japanese authorities are systematically testing them out in regions where depopulation has made it financially unsustainable to maintain aging water and sewer pipes. Imagine pairing a WOTA Unit or similar appliance with a Nutrient Harvester, a composting or incinerating toilet, and a rainwater harvest system. Voila. No centralized water systems needed. There are plenty of places in the U.S. where there aren’t enough rate payers to maintain a centralized infrastructure. In fact, in many of these places the cost of infrastructure maintenance is sucking the life out of these communities, sending them into a financial death spiral. It sounds like there’s much to learn from our Japanese counterparts.

Last but hardly least was a simple photo sent by my college roommate Donna who was visiting Florida’s Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary with her sisters. Donna, who may have known that I collect images of bathroom signs, texted me this poster she encountered while using the facilities. A home-grown laminated message taped to the tiled wall read: “Our water is yellow. The color is naturally occurring as tannins are released from plants in our “living machine” – environmentally friendly waste water treatment facility.”

Corkscrew’s Living Machine® – a trademarked name – has been treating and recycling the sanctuary’s wastewater for more than thirty years. In the early 1990’s The Audubon Society, which owns and operates the 13,000-acre preserve, was faced with having to upgrade its wastewater treatment. Conventional engineers advised them to install a small version of the wastewater treatment systems most towns and cities use. But not only was that going to be prohibitively expensive for the non-profit organization, it wasn’t in keeping with Audubon’s conservation goals. They went looking for another option.

The Living Machine, which relies on plants and microbes to “eat” harmful microbes and absorb excess nutrients, wasn’t just less expensive to build and operate. It also was quieter, less odiferous, created less sludge, and used almost no electricity. A simple 0.7 kw motor was sufficient to operate the bubbler in the aeration tanks. For an organization that prioritizes climate, this was an especially attractive aspect. After thirty years of operation – never violating their environmental permits - some of the components need to be replaced, but that would be true of conventional treatment plants as well.

Rob, the friend who alerted me to the Swiss urinal/fertilizer machine, is a seasoned corporate sustainability director, so it’s perhaps not surprising that he’d come across urine news. But Marc, James, and Donna have no such excuse. What this tells me is that either my friends are weirder than I thought, or that the world is getting to be more interested in, and comfortable with, bathroom matters. Or maybe – hopefully – both those things are true!

Splash Zone

As soon as I had I written this post and scheduled it for release on Monday, my podcast feed brought me yet another gift. Living on Earth’s Saturday release featured Dr. William Tarpeh, Stanford Associate Professor and recent MacArthur Fellowship awardee. Will didn’t highlight a particular technology, rather he took us to the 30,000-foot level to see the multitude of possibilities he sees in what other people view as waste. I encourage you to listen. And then listen again. It’s that good. (Note - the link might ask you to create an account, but you don’t need to do that. Just click “play”.)

Tlaloc was ever-present during our week in Mexico City, particularly the central part of today’s modern city built atop Tenochtitlan, the ancient Aztec capital that Cortes stumbled upon more than 500 years ago. Through excavated monoliths and plastic tourist trinkets, the god’s perfectly round eyes penetrated our every tourist move. I’m a water geek, but Tlaloc of the circular eyes, the Aztec god of rain, was new to me, and I to him. But the more time I spent in his territory, the more I understood why he was everywhere.

Most visitors to twenty-first century Mexico City are there to soak up the art and auras of painters Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, to trace disinterred Aztec history with visits to the National Anthropology Museum and Templo Mayor, the remains of what was once the center of Aztec civilization, and of course to eat “real” Mexican food. They give little thought to the role that water played for this ancient city and its remaking after Spanish colonization. Most have little idea that they’re walking atop what was once a vast lake, or why its geologic origins still matter to the hemisphere’s largest city.

When Hernan Cortes arrived at Tenochtitlan in 1519, looking for gold that didn’t exist, the city sat on a modestly sized island in the middle of a vast, shallow lake. The shores of the lake were dotted with smaller communities, most of which had been in place long before the Aztecs appeared on its shores. In fact that’s probably why the Aztecs, after years of searching, selected the island for their new home – everything else was taken. Two hundred or so years later, when the Spaniards vanquished the last Aztec ruler, Cortes launched what became a 400-year effort to drain the lake and, on its remains, build what we now know as Mexico City.

For Cortes, as much as he admired Tenochtitlan, whose size and cultural richness rivaled that of the largest cities he knew in Europe, destroying Aztec power meant dismantling their city and rebuilding it to his own specifications. It took the better part of four centuries to engineer a way to fully – or almost fully - drain the lakes whose beds Mexico City now stands on. The Aztecs and surrounding communities got all the freshwater they needed from the lakes as well as from streams and springs that fed into the lakes. Because Tenochtitlan was far from shore, and lake water levels and water quality fluctuated with the seasons, the Aztecs built an elaborate system of aqueducts and conveyances to bring clean, fresh water into the city center. They never had to drill wells.

Fast forward to the present era, and you’ll find a very different setup. Like any modern metropolis, Mexico City has a complex water distribution system. Roughly 25% of the region’s water supply is taken from rivers 75 or more miles distant, most of it having to be pushed up and over a mountain range. But three quarters of the city’s water supply is groundwater pumped from an array of more than 1,000 dispersed wells. The mechanics of these operations are daunting, but that’s not the biggest challenge. It’s that the city is running out of water.

It shouldn’t be surprising that providing groundwater to a metropolitan area of – in rough numbers – 20 million people is not sustainable. If you remove more water than can be naturally replenished – which is what’s been happening for decades – then groundwater levels will drop.

As groundwater tables drop, it becomes harder to get the remaining water to the surface, to the place where people need it, which in turn means higher energy costs and more greenhouse gas emissions, more contaminants in the water, and possibly deeper, more expensive wells.

You’d think that a metropolis with a dwindling water supply would do everything it could to conserve what they have. And maybe its leaders are doing everything that they can. After all, water isn’t the only problem on their hands. But meanwhile, I kept reading about how leaky the water distribution system is. Multiple sources bandied the astounding figure of 40% water loss for the distribution system though I’ll cut them some slack and go with the 35% claimed in a 2024 piece from the New York Times. Before we rag too hard on Mexico City, keep in mind that a typical “very large” public water system in the U.S. loses 16% of its water, while 20% is not at all unusual for more modestly sized systems. Both countries have room for improvement.

In both countries the water “loss” is from true leaks and pipe breaks, but generally “nonrevenue” numbers include water that is distributed for use but not billed. This can be intentional, like water supplied to public fountains or fire hydrants. But in Mexico City’s case, it’s estimated that there are as many as 900,000 illegal connections, i.e. homes and businesses that surreptitiously tap into the distribution system but don’t get a water bill, and don’t pay. Even among the 2.5 million legal connections, an estimated 60% of them don’t pay their bills meaning that altogether only about a quarter of the water that exits the treatment plant is actually paid for. I was explaining this to a friend who runs a public service organization with a nine-figure budget. He shook his head and said simply, “That can’t work.” No, it can’t. Which is probably why so many people have only intermittent supply.

Ironically, this city which almost ran out of water as recently as 2024 also floods. On the first morning of our January visit I struck up a conversation with an expat American who works for a world-renowned agricultural network with a research station an hour or so south of where we were staying. “It’s a good thing you’re not here during the summer,” she told me. “During the [summer] rainy season this city becomes impassable.”

Virtually all of Mexico City’s annual rainfall – 27 or so inches – comes between the months of June and September, not unlike the American southwest. Like cities everywhere, pavement, sidewalks, and roofs have displaced natural vegetation and healthy soils, making it nearly impossible for water to soak into the ground. But because Mexico’s capital city is built upon the former Lake Texcoco – which, like the Great Salt Lake, had no natural outlets other than evaporation - there is no escape route for rainwater. And so, the accumulated rain pools as if the landscape “remembers” its past and each summer tries to become a lake again. Like a sturgeon or salmon that keeps trying to swim upstream to its ancestral spawning ground despite the dam in its way, the lake remembers.

How can a city be faced with dialectically opposing challenges, dire water shortages on the one hand and chronic flooding on the other? Tightening up the distribution system will certainly help shore up the supply but would do nothing to counter the annual flooding. Similarly, constructing expensive drainage tunnels to alleviate flooding would do nothing to bolster water supply. What if there were a way to solve both problems at once? Could there be a way to alleviate flooding while also bolstering water supply? The answer is a resounding “yes”.

Since 2009 Isla Urbana, a Mexico-based non-profit organization, has been delivering rainwater harvesting systems first to residents of Mexico City and, now, more broadly to other parts of the country facing similar water stresses, and even into some areas of the U.S. To date nearly 45,000 systems have been installed, annually collecting and repurposing 1.75 billion gallons of water that would otherwise be a nuisance. They’ve also trained countless individuals in how to build and maintain rainwater collection and purification systems for people who are otherwise overlooked by their municipal distribution systems.

Through it all, Tlaloc, the god of rain, is there. He answers prayers by bringing the gift of summer rains to this otherwise parched region of the world. I’ll take it one step further by suggesting that Tlaloc may be behind another significant gift – Isla Urbana and its rain harvesting wherewithal. We all have much to learn from Isla Urbana’s innovative example. There’s still a long way to go, but the organization’s leadership provides hope and a concrete path forward.

Splash Zone

Want to know more about the how-to of rainwater harvest, particularly for potable water? ARCSA (formerly American Rainwater Catchment Systems Association) has a wealth of resources on building and maintaining rainwater harvest systems, certification, etc. If you live in Virginia, check out their relatively new permitting system for potable rainwater systems.

I thought I’d landed on the perfect idea for the outdoorsy women on my holiday gift list – unique, practical, and bound to be the most talked-about present under their trees. Hardly able to contain my excitement, I showed one of the yet-to-be-wrapped gifts to my Army veteran, avid outdoorsman cousin who was in town for a pre-Christmas visit. “A she-wee!” Peter proclaimed with the boisterous enthusiasm usually reserved for reunions with long-lost friends.

The Christmas gift I cradled was a pStyle, not whatever it was that Peter was so excited about. The 7 ½- inch molded plastic device reminded me of the antique ceramic gravy boat we use at Thanksgiving, but without a handle or pedestal. I’d first seen one a year earlier while attending an on-line conference of researchers and practitioners from the obscure world of people who capture urine. Its unique contours allow a woman, or anyone without a penis, to urinate while standing and – most importantly – without dropping their drawers. Folks who camp, work on construction sites, or just need to pee on the side of the road during a long trip will appreciate its utility. It’s also terrific if you want to pee into a jug – it’s aim, as I learned when I tried it myself, is surprisingly accurate.

Peter’s excitement was my first clue that there was an entire category of “personal urination devices”, and that I had some catching up to do. I asked for the back story on his familiarity and shouldn’t have been surprised that it dated from his days as a U.S. Army officer. “On my second or third tour in Afghanistan, we’d be on long convoys, and some of those convoys were looong, and in hostile territory. The guys could pee in an empty Gatorade or water bottle inside the vehicle, but the female soldiers were forced to hold it. They weren’t too happy.”

Combat roles for women were new at the time, and peeing in an enclosed vehicle was but one of the many kinks still to be worked out. Enter the Shewee, pronounced with long E’s the way Peter said it. The brainchild of Samantha Fountain, a British woman pissed off about filthy public toilet seats, it was approved for use by NATO troops shortly after its invention in 1999. Now women could pee standing up, or within the confines of their vehicle and direct their wee into a bottle, if not exactly like their male counterparts, then close enough. While I was glad to know that our servicewomen had this option, it meant that my holiday gift idea wasn’t as new-fangled as I’d thought. But since none of the women on my gift list were military veterans, maybe I’d still be able to impress them.

Not my sister. Sally pointed out that privacy while peeing wasn’t a selling point for her. You don’t make it as a professional dancer – which she once was – if you’re hung up about nakedness. Taking me down a notch further, she let me know that she used something similar more than thirty years ago, in 1995, when she took a two-week wilderness kayaking trip with NOLS. The device she used was more of a pee-in-a-cup contraption that allowed users to do their thing while sitting in a kayak or canoe. “I don’t know if it was something that NOLS had fashioned themselves or if you could buy it off the shelf,” but she wasn’t impressed then, and she wasn’t impressed now. At least not yet.

Women haven’t always needed help with this most basic of functions. Skirts and robes, if they’re long enough, can hide a lot of anatomy and allow wearers to pee standing up with just slight adjustments to posture. But as women’s styles began to drift toward pants in the early 1900s, the search for urination upgrades was on.

The first such patent, for the “Sanitary Protector”, came along in 1922. Essentially a paper funnel that fit snuggly up against a woman’s underparts, the idea was that the “Protectors” could be stacked and sold in coin-operated dispensers to women who didn’t want to place their bare bottom on questionable toilet seats in public restrooms. In the 1950’s a foldable version, also made of paper, was introduced. Since both patents expired, I assume that neither was much of a money maker.

While hygiene has been an important rationale for any of the stand-to-pee inventions, the social revolutions of the 1970s, with more pants-wearing women pursuing the rugged outdoors, brought new needs. Combine that with technological revolutions – rigid, molded plastics became available at the same time - and the patent applications started picking up. But I don’t think the sales did much better, which is probably why I never encountered them, even during my backpacking heyday of 1975-85.

Fortunately, not all recipients had the same reaction as my sister. Upon opening the small package, Mary, my younger son’s girlfriend, erupted with “A stand-to-pee!” She had never seen this brand, but she was elated at the gift. A wetlands scientist who is often surveying people’s property, taking soil samples and making note of vegetation, she confided, “My bum is probably on critter cams everywhere,” a sacrifice her male colleagues haven’t had to make. I was glad to have leveled the playing field for her, even if just a little.

But my niece Callie was in a league of her own. I wasn’t with her when she opened presents, but she seemed to be familiar with the entire panoply of peeing tools and told me “They’re the frickin’ bomb. The pStyle is the best by far.” Callie, who spends a good portion of each year leading biological expeditions in the wilds of South America’s tropical forests, had been using another model that, after six or seven years of heavy-duty use, was showing its age. It will be happily retired now that she has a replacement.

But Callie had more to say. Never one to hold back, she added detail. “There’s a bit of technique to it. The ones with funnel designs don’t work as well. [The pStyle] is so narrow that you can really wedge it in and not take your pants off – it lets you pee like you have a [rhymes with tick]. After you’re done, you kind of scrape it forward so it mimics the action of toilet paper. No weird dribbles.” She also lauded the safety advantages. In the tropics, grabbing hold of a tree trunk can have unpleasant or even deadly consequences. Even in the relatively tame environments I frequent, my tush has had some close encounters with poison ivy that could have been avoided by standing.

Maybe my gifts weren’t as novel as I expected – it seemed that everyone knew about the women’s elimination revolution but me. Nonetheless, I met my goals. The gifts were unique – certainly there were no duplicates. And they were talked about, even if it was my teen niece commenting, “What a typical Lynn present.”

Splash Zone

pStyles and other “stand-to-pee” innovations aren’t just for wilderness, or for those trying to avoid communal toilet seats. They have a big following among transgender men who want, or for safety reasons need, to stand while peeing. As I discovered, they are also a valuable health aid in the early days after hip replacement surgery when quad muscles aren’t yet ready for getting up and down fro

m a toilet. I presume the same holds true for anyone with hip mobility challenges.

In a post-Christmas conversation, my daughter-in-law relayed that she’s heard that stand-to-pee devices are a great relief to people who’ve had C-sections whose abdominal muscles scream with every attempt to stand. I presume the same would be true for anyone recovering from abdominal surgery.

World Toilet Day was last week. I wanted to commemorate it with a post, but hospitals – which is where I was – aren’t great places to write. Especially not when you’re the patient. But I did at least snap a picture of the toilet in room 7236 where I’d spent the last 24 hours.

Before I turn to my hospital toilet and why I was so interested in it, allow me a quick digression into World Toilet Day. November 19^th is probably not a day you pay much attention to (unless you were one of the .3% of people celebrating your birthday). Similarly, most of us use a toilet – a clean, functioning, even pleasant one – multiple times a day without a second thought. But for some 3.4 billion people, a clean, functioning toilet (and waste collection/treatment system) would mean the world.

Jack Sim, however, understands. A Singaporean entrepreneur and philanthropist, in his early 40’s at the time, in 2001 created the World Toilet Organization (WTO) and established the 19^th day of November as World Toilet Day. After a dozen years the annual observance had grown enough that it needed a new home, and in 2013 the WTO transferred the annual day of international observance to the United Nations. As part of working toward U.N. Sustainable Development Goal #6 of safe and affordable sanitation for all, the international body uses World Toilet Day “to inform, engage and inspire people to take action” toward that vision.

Lest you think that poor sanitation is “other people’s problem”, in fact, more than two million Americans lack basic sanitation. It’s shameful, a stain on a nation whose leader likes to throw around adjectives like “shithole” for other countries, handily ignoring the problems within our borders. Maybe I’ll circle back to that topic for next year’s Toilet Day.

But what was on my mind in my hospital room last week was something a little different. I couldn’t help but think about the number of Americans who have access to toilets but don’t know how to use them. They are given the luxury of perfectly functioning toilets and treatment systems but, through their willful ignorance and misuse, cause all manner of unnecessary havoc and expense.

Toilets are designed to flush three things: pee, poop, and reasonable amounts of toilet paper, all of which readily decompose. But some people – maybe most people – flush items that aren’t on that short list. They confuse toilets with trash cans. Interestingly, the confusion only goes in one direction: they’d never pee into their trash can, but they routinely flush dental floss, condoms, cigarette butts and wipes. Each of these is problematic, but these days the number one culprit behind clogged toilets is wipes. Which is why I took a picture of the toilet in my Minneapolis hospital room.

At the base of the toilet bowl was a small device that encircled the outlet – barely noticeable if you didn’t know what to look for. I’d seen a similar contraption a little over a year earlier at the Medical University of South Carolina where my mother was cared for after her stroke. In that first case, it was the ominous, eye-level sign on the wall behind the toilet that first caught my attention:

DO NOT PUT HAND IN TOILET!

IT CONTAINS A SHARP DEVICE THAT CAN CAUSE INJURY!

Prompted by the poster, I peered into the ceramic stool at my feet and saw what all the fuss was about: small razor-like protrusions - each about the size and shape of the plastic daggers that came with young my sons’ Playmobile® knights - rimming the circumference of the exit pipe. Unlike my sons’ toys, however, the submerged toilet daggers were legitimate defense weapons. Their razor-like barbs were designed to latch onto the unyielding non-woven fabric of errant wipes as they tried to pass through the orifice, holding them back before they could enter the pipes and cause problems.

In a quiet moment last year, I asked one of the South Carolina nursing assistants about the “Do not put hand in toilet” sign. Who the heck puts their hand in the toilet, especially a hospital toilet? Lord knows what lurks in hospital waste systems. She told me that despite plenty of signage, some people still try to flush wipes, which then get caught on the dagger-containing gizmo lurking below. Not wanting to get caught doing something stupid like flushing a wipe, visitors then make their second foolish move by trying to pull the wipes out. But after slicing their fingers on the little daggers, they now had two embarrassing messes: a clogged toilet and bleeding fingers. At least the medical attendants are well equipped to fix one of those problems.

The finger-slicing device at the bottom of the Charleston hospital toilet turned out to be a Traptex® Plumbing Protection for Toilets. Fast forward to last week, I found the exact same thing in my Minneapolis hospital toilet. The Traptex isn’t cheap – a few hundred dollars plus installation costs – but neither are clogged pipes. A single emergency plumbing repair can easily cost a few hundred dollars, not to mention the health risks and disruption to hospital operations that come when sewage backs up into a patient’s bathroom.

Beyond the on-site expense caused by flushed wipes, the National Association of Clean Water Agencies (NACWA) in 2020 estimated that American wastewater utilities spent about $441 million per year dealing with the mayhem that “flushable” wipes cause to their systems. The problem was bad enough that in 2021 the city of Charleston SC sued a consortium of American wipes manufacturers and got them to, among other things, change the wording on their packages. Now the descriptor “flushable” can be used only if the wipes meet disintegration standards that make them safe for pipes, septic systems, and centralized treatment systems. (Note: Some wipes still contain microplastics, and nearly all are packaged in plastic, so I am staying with toilet paper.)

The pandemic was a particularly challenging time for toilets. Between toilet paper shortages, gastrointestinal problems associated with the Coronavirus, and crazed attempts to disinfect our way out of the disease, the sale of wipes surged. More wipes were flushed which brought more clogged pipes. When pipes clog, sewage backs up into toilets and basements, or, for blockages further downstream, overflows into streams and rivers.

I remember my first visit back to my hair stylist in 2020 after months of home isolation. She and I were both masked and were catching up on pandemic life as she snipped my overgrown mop. Somehow the conversation made its way to toilets, with a comment from me about the epidemic of clogged pipes. She laughed and said she knew all about it. With toilet paper in short supply, she, like millions of others, turned to wipes. And she flushed them. When the toilet backed up, her boyfriend, who owned the house where they lived, came to the rescue. He also gave her a bit of a lecture. Understandable.

After that embarrassing experience, my pandemic-era hair stylist learned to treat toilets with the respect they deserve – there are only three things she flushes. (If you’ve forgotten what those three things are, go back and re-read this from the beginning.) Though World Toilet Day 2026 is still 51 weeks away, I hope that you don’t wait another day to start respecting the toilets in your life. And keep your hands out while you’re at it.

Toilet Day is every day. Pass it on.

Splash Zone

• There are lots of things that shouldn’t go into your toilet, but there are also lots of things that shouldn’t go down your kitchen sink. The surge in plumbing emergencies the day after Thanksgiving has earned it the moniker “Brown Friday”. Before the holiday begins, and before guests start putting who-knows-what down your kitchen sink, read this overview from USA Today. It’s good advice any day of the week.

• In case you’re concerned about my hospital stay, I’m A-Okay. I got a new hip for the holidays and hope to be dancing by spring.

Photo of urine-diverting composting toilet schematic that hangs in Hilda Maingay’s and Earle Barnhart’s bathroom, Falmouth MA.

Last week’s post, Potty Talk, generated more comments and questions than I’m used to, some of them on Substack, most of them not. Going with the iceberg theory – that if one person is asking, there are probably many more who are wondering – I’m following up with this post, addressing some of the questions the collective “you” raised.

“What do they do with the urine?”, I was asked. The simple answer is that urine, high in both nitrogen, phosphorus, and essential micronutrients, yet generally without pathogens, is a terrific fertilizer. On Cape Cod the collected urine is diluted – generally about 5:1, water: urine ratio – and used on home vegetable and fruit gardens, while in Vermont, farmers vie for access to the urine to fertilizer their hay fields. Meanwhile, Bright Earth Tools has developed technologies that concentrate the fertilizer so that it can be affordably transported longer distances.

On Sunday I ran into my friend, whom I’ll refer to by his initials T.P. – after all, this is about toilets and what we do or do not put into them. Though he is deep into sustainability and lives lightly, the benefits of urine collection were new to him. T.P. asked the question that is probably on most people’s minds: How does a urine-diverting toilet work? While I can’t disclose trade secrets about the toilet I saw on Cape Cod, the one that will hopefully be available on the American market in early 2026, I have no such restrictions around describing other toilets designed to do something similar.

Unlike the mystery toilet I saw, most urine-separating toilets – yes, there are many models – are variants of composting toilets. I realize I’m opening a whole new line of conversation with the mention of composting toilets, but that will need to wait for another day. Suffice it to say that composting toilets work much better if liquids are kept to a minimum. Any gardener who’s ever kept a compost pile in their back yard knows that you want the ingredients to be moist enough to allow decomposing bacteria and fungi to do their work, but not so moist that you drown them out and cause the system to become anaerobic. It’s the same when you’re composting excrement.

To separate the urine, the fundamental principle is the same whether for a composting toilet or a water-using one: as the diagram at the top of the post illustrates, the toilet bowls have two exit routes, one in the rear of the bowl for feces while a separate exit at the front of the bowl receives urine and routes it to its own container or collection system. That’s the basic idea. Trade secrets and patents come into play around various designs for improving on that fundamental principle.

You’ve probably realized by now that the user has to sit down for this to work. Our plumber back in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin told me that when he was a young boy his father, also a plumber, put the fear of God into him about not missing the bowl and so he still, half a century later, always sat down to pee. But I don’t think that’s common.

Urinals – the world’s oldest pee separation technology – solve the problem for people who prefer to stand. Though urinals typically connect into the waste stream coming out of the toilet, there’s no reason they have to. In fact, if Cape Cod residents collected urine from just the people with penises – 50% of the population – their water quality problems would be solved without any new-fangled urine-separating toilets. However, urinals aren’t easily incorporated into typical residential bathrooms. That is, until now.

Let me introduce you to the P-pod. Cape Cod residents Earle Barnhart (whose voice you hear in the video) and Hilda Maingay worked for years to come up with a simple, durable urinal design that could be easily installed in a home. Their solution sits flush against the wall when it’s not in use, and hinges open from the bottom when being used. The white square, roughly 8” x 8”, is hardly noticeable unless you know what to look for. My anatomy isn’t suited for using it, but I spoke with several guys who gave it a try. To a person, they were impressed. Even the tall guys! No splash, no smell.

Another friend, Amy, asked “If we are on city water/sewer does the treatment plant separate out the urine for anything?” Unfortunately, no. Once urine and feces are mixed, the urine can’t be separated out. In fact, because the two materials are mixed, the treatment plant has to spend a lot of energy and money trying to remove urine’s nitrogen and phosphorus from the wastewater. What’s more, at the treatment plant, phosphorus often recombines with other minerals to form struvite, a mineral buildup that clogs the pipes much like plaque clogs human arteries. The treatment plant’s job would be a lot easier if we didn’t send urine down the pipes. So, even though they aren’t asking you to do so, every bit of urine that you keep out of your city’s system makes their job easier, and a wee bit less expensive.

My brother, Ike, an experienced sailor who’s crossed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans more times than I can track, wrote that years ago he rented a sailboat that had a Nature’s Head composting toilet “with a pee-bottle in the front and a dry-compost receptacle in the bottom that we would turn with a crank and add a little sawdust”. He went on to say “It actually worked really well. The amazing thing was that the poo side of things seemed to last forever before it needed to be emptied. And, there was absolutely no smell.”

Anyone who’s been responsible for the more typical toilets one encounters at sea will appreciate his observation that “[The] best part was that there were no pipes to get clogged, no ‘thru-holes’ in the hull to cause leaks, and no chance of accidentally dumping in the river when a guest flips the wrong switch.”

Unfortunately for my brother and his shipmates, when they returned the rented boat to the marina they were instructed to empty the collected urine into the toilet. An opportunity down the drain.

That said, it seems that we’re entering a time when at least some people are getting more comfortable talking about pee and poo. And technologies are making it easier for people to put that talk into action. While we’re not going to see the end of conventional toilets, septic, and sewers at a grand scale anytime soon, I do think that the momentum is in that direction.

Splash Zone

· Manufacturing synthetic fertilizer (i.e. Miracle-Gro and that ilk) is energy intensive. If you’re an at-home gardener who is urine-curious, check out Pam Dawling’s blog on the topic. It’s full of practical information.

· Speaking of synthetic chemicals, Circle of Blue reports on USGS’s finding that pesticide residue is gradually diminishing in our groundwater. That’s good news. (Though why they didn’t test for glyphosate is beyond me.) But if agro-chemical giants have their way, funds for monitoring these chemicals will be slashed, while simultaneously giving them blanket immunity from the health impacts of their poisons.

A week or so ago my husband and I were in our front yard trying to rein in our exuberant slice of urban prairie. Neighbors on an evening stroll, making small talk as they neared, asked me “You’ve been away?”

“Yes, on Cape Cod for a few days – a conference. Got back yesterday,” I replied.

Husband Marc, apparently thinking my answer wasn’t sufficient, added “She saw a lot of toilets.”

We know these folks well, and one of them works in construction, so maybe he’d be interested in more detail? “It turns out that if you keep urine out of wastewater, it solves a lot of problems.” There. I’d said it. “Urine.” After a few chuckles our neighbors were able to escape back to their evening stroll. My husband, however, was stuck with me.

The conference I’d been to – the one Marc humorously claimed to be about toilets – indeed had its share of potty talk and potties, but it was all in the name of clean water. The kind of water that entices people to swim and fish. The kind that draws vacationers and retirees. The kind that supports robust property values and good health. Increasingly, however, pollution from excessive nitrogen and phosphorus – essential nutrients when they’re in balance – is catalyzing a downward spiral led by the explosive growth of harmful algae species, followed by their massive die-off. Not all algae are “harmful”, but high-nutrient environments – what ecologists call “eutrophic” – often encourage species that manufacture harmful, even deadly, toxins. Serious stuff that I’ve written about previously, as has Dan Egan in his 2023 book “The Devil’s Element”. But even without the toxins, bacteria that feed on decaying algae carcasses, miniscule as they are, can quickly deoxygenate a pond or stagnant stream, killing fish and the aquatic invertebrates they feed on. A dead zone has no silver lining – it’s as bleak and unappealing as it sounds.

In rural America, algae blooms and dead ponds are driven almost entirely by conventional agriculture. Excessive fertilizer and manure make their way to ponds, streams, and rivers – and eventually to coastal waters – where they wreak havoc. But areas with more people than farms aren’t off the hook, especially if those people live relatively close together and don’t have a well-functioning system for handling their, ahem, excretions. Such is the case on Cape Cod.

The people of the Cape believe in science. Being home to the internationally renowned Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and culturally infused with Boston’s brain trust just 90 minutes north, rationality is in the air. So, twenty or so years ago when algae-choked ponds and shellfish advisories started ruining people’s weekends, they looked for data.

Whether they liked the answer or not, science clearly pointed to septic systems as the culprit. Lawn and golf course fertilizers shouldered some of the blame, to be sure, but the big kahuna was the thousands of septic systems that dot the peninsula, serving 85% of the homes and businesses on this sandy, porous spit of land jutting out into the Atlantic.

The kneejerk solution would be to build or expand centralized wastewater treatment plants, along with extensive networks to collect the wastewater and transport it to distant facilities. For homes and businesses near the handful of treatment systems already up and running, this was the obvious solution. But to sewer the entire Cape, with its plethora of homes on one-acre lots, would cost tens of thousands of dollars per home, with some estimates adding another zero to that. Money wasn’t the only roadblock. Designing, permitting and constructing big-box treatment systems easily requires a decade or more, and burying the pipe network would bring massive disruption, likely removing many of the mature trees that are a large part of the region’s charm. Thinking that there had to be a better option, a radical idea started circulating: “What if we kept the septic tanks but didn’t flush the urine?”

While urine makes up less than 1% of typical wastewater volume, it carries more than half of its phosphorus and about three-quarters of its nitrogen. Scientists estimated that capturing even half of the region’s urine would be sufficient to clean up the Cape’s beloved waters. As crazy as the idea may sound, there are entire communities in Europe that have proven that it’s possible. By keeping the nutrient-dense urine out of septic systems and finding another use for it – e.g. fertilizer - the pollution problem would be solved at a small fraction of the cost of constructing and operating central sewers. For the last dozen or so years, a cadre of dedicated people – on a technology adoption curve, they’re the earliest “innovators” – have been experimenting with collection methods.

Knowing that urine collection wasn’t as thrilling to Marc as it was to me, upon returning home from the conference I tried to keep my enthusiasm to myself. But after dinner that first evening back, I wanted to show Marc the impressive vegetable garden – fertilized with urine - I’d toured. Digging through my phone I had to scroll past the toilets, urinals, and composters I’d photographed on my trip. With each, I tried to make him more comfortable by adding – truthfully – that there was absolutely no odor to any of these. None. But I could see him retreating inward, pulling into his shell like a box turtle. With some prompting on my part he confessed, “I just want a normal toilet”.

My husband wants clean water as much as the next person, but he also, like pretty much everyone else, wants a normal toilet. Or at least a normal toileting experience. Which is why, if we ever want this to get past the enthusiastic pioneers, if we want to get enough urine out of septic systems to keep water clean for Cape Cod and lots of other places, we need toilets that do the separating for us. Toilets that don’t call attention to themselves. Europe has such toilets, but because North America uses a different plumbing code, the European toilets won’t easily work in an American bathroom. That’s about to change.

While we were in Falmouth, the town on Cape Cod that hosted the conference, some of us had the opportunity to see a prototype of the bathroom innovation poised to give Americans the ability to separate and capture urine independently from the rest of a home’s waste stream, all while giving people the bathroom experience they’ve come to expect over the last hundred years. After sessions ended on day one, I huddled in a back hallway with three others where we each signed a non-disclosure agreement and were told to leave our phones behind. We were then led into a small office where a draped bed sheet concealed what we’d promised not to photograph. I can’t say much but suffice to say that the American market will soon have its very own urine-separating toilet. One that allows people to have a “normal” toileting experience while the behind-the-scenes plumbing allows for a not-yet-normal capture of the liquid gold most people dismissively flush into their environment.

While we are still decades away from a toilet revolution in the U.S., the conference was abuzz about a pilot project that will bring these toilets to Falmouth in 2026. Twenty-five lucky homes, whose residents have been manually collecting urine for years, will be outfitted with one of the new urine-separating toilets. For the next year, scientists will carefully monitor the costs and nutrient recovery statistics, as well as the impact on water quality. Assuming good results, we’ll be one small step closer to clean water at an affordable price. All with a toilet that even Marc will love.

Splash Zone

Want to learn more about urine separation and the pioneers who are finding better ways to collect and repurpose its nutrients? I suggest starting with the Rich Earth Institute in Brattleboro, Vermont. If you’re super interested, sign up for the Virtual Summit that they’re hosting Nov 12-14, 2025, bringing together a global suite of practitioners and researchers.

Other places your curiosity might enjoy traveling to:

• The Green Center which has served as the epicenter for Cape Cod urine collectors and practitioners. Click on the “Nutrient Recycling” tab.

• If you’re into the science of nutrient recovery and the hard data on urine use as fertilizer, check out Dr. Nancy Love’s lab at the University of Michigan, particularly the “Publications” tab.

• If you want to learn more about technologies that complement the urine collection, check out Brightwater Tools, an outgrowth of the Rich Earth Institute. Their technology is finding additional applications for other, more traditional liquid “waste” streams that are high in nutrients. (Note - I’m an advisor to Brightwater Tools, but uncompensated and not a shareholder, so I’ve got no financial conflict of interest to worry about.)

• I took the toilet waterfall picture at the MASSTC, our host for Day 1 of the conference, and the folks who will be running the pilot urine-capture project in Falmouth.

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I’ve been re-reading Annie Dillard’s 1974 “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” off and on for the last month. My first-edition hardback copy sits on my office bookshelf after surviving at least eight moves with me, but it was a paperback reprint from a Milwaukee friend’s Little Free Library that lured me to re-read what I’ve long considered to be one of the handful of books that shaped me as a young woman. Never mind that not a single sentence rings familiar - the overall sentiment is still a literary homecoming.

Though I’ve never set foot on the banks of Tinker Creek, or disturbed the crickets in its adjacent fields, as a young woman I knew the region well. I’d spent countless days and nights hiking and camping in the national forests that drape the mountainous borderlands between Virginia and West Virginia, sometimes alone, but mostly with friends. It was, and still is, easy for me to picture the places Dillard described.

Midway through the book she takes us back to Hurricane Agnes – just a year before the time she was penning her draft – the 1972 storm that brought unprecedented flooding and destruction to the Mid-Atlantic. I was twelve years old that June, celebrating the freedom of school’s end. Weather forecasts forty years ago weren’t at all what they are today, but it was clear that after Agnes had made landfall in Florida, she was moving up through the interior of the country picking up moisture as she went. Communities braced for heavy rain, but little did we know just how bad it would get.

As the rains intensified over Northern Virginia, my best friends, Beth and Gwen, and I were scheming a sleepover at Beth’s. She and I lived back-to-back with a narrow strip of pines and a well-worn footpath separating our backyards. Gwen’s house, however, was a ten-minute walk down a narrow, dead-end lane that led to three or four houses on larger lots. No matter what was happening with the weather, we three needed to get to Gwen’s to collect her pajamas and whatever else she needed for the night.

Our route, typical of Virginia’s rolling Piedmont, took us down a long hill, across Popes Head Creek, and up the other side. As we traversed the single-lane wooden bridge we noticed that the creek, normally five feet or so below the bridge, was already lapping its underside. When we came back the other way – which couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes later - the café-au-lait torrent had risen to the bridge’s wooden railings. Gwen held her belongings high above her head, out of the water’s reach, and we waded in. By the time we reached the middle of the bridge, we were literally waist-deep in water, bracing ourselves against the crosswise current and clutching each other’s hands as tightly as we could, never once thinking that maybe we were putting our lives on the line. All for the sake of pajamas.

We made it through, drenched but safe. Our neighborhood, along with almost the entire region, lost power. Since our homes all had wells that relied on electric pumps, losing power also meant losing water, ironic given the amount of rain that had fallen. Our tribulations, however, were minor compared to the wide-scale damage Agnes left in her wake. The regional water authority, supplying water to 500,000 people, was out of commission for eight days. Its dams and facilities took four years to fully repair. Major bridges were destroyed.

All told, Agnes took 128 human lives and left 220,000 people stranded with nowhere to go because their homes had been swept away or were damaged beyond habitability. In Fairfax County, where I lived, the impact was much less than it could have been because of the foresight of county citizens and planners. Concerns about protecting the water supply and the natural beauty of the region amidst intense urban sprawl led “far-sighted Fairfax citizens and government” to protect 5,000 streamside acres, a revolutionary action for the 1950’s. Though the land protection was designed with water quality in mind, by keeping development well away from floodplains and streambanks, county leaders had also protected the region from intense storms. Little did they know how important that would become.

That experience, and Fairfax County’s wise planning, was on my mind during a recent trip back to Wauwatosa, Wisconsin - the Milwaukee suburb my husband and I, along with our two sons, lived in for 17 years. When our family arrived in 2000, feeling like we’d moved to the other side of the world from our Mid-Atlantic roots, the community was still talking about the devastating floods of 1997 when ten inches of rain fell in a few short hours. “When CNN shows up in your neighborhood, it’s time to worry” recounted Deb, one of my new neighbors who remembered it well.

Our block was a half mile away from, and elevated well above, the Menomonee River, so it had been spared the worst of the damage. My neighbors recounted their tales of flooded basements and impassable roads, but that was a cakewalk compared to those who lived close to the river.

Wauwatosa is a modest “first-ring” or inner suburb, snugging up to the western edge of Milwaukee, the larger and older city of the pair. From its beginning, Wauwatosa was defined by its river. Potawatomi and Menominee Indians made their home along the river until the 1830’s, and local lore claims that the city’s name is derived from a Native word meaning “firefly”. The first Euro-American settler staked his claim along the riverbanks, eventually building two mills. Not long after he set up shop, enterprising people built a road opening the way between Milwaukee and Madison, the territory’s capital 75 miles to the west, as well as a railroad line that took advantage of the river basin’s gentle terrain, straight through town and became the backbone of Wauwatosa’s business district. The years ahead would prove that building along a river had its drawbacks.

With every new settler and every new building, rain had fewer places to go. Instead of being slowed down and soaked up by meadows, savannas and wetlands, when downpours inevitably came, they rushed straight off roofs and roads, racing for the river. Like all rivers, the Menomonee had a natural rhythm, it rose and fell, sometimes going beyond its banks to replenish floodplains with sediment. Nature’s fertilizer. But as buildings encroached, the river had fewer places to spread when water ran high. Squeezed into smaller spaces, floods that had been part of the landscape for millennia became human catastrophes.

On June 21^st, 1997, the skies opened on Milwaukee and adjacent Wauwatosa. The ground, already saturated from previous rains, may as well have been concrete for its utter lack of ability to absorb any more precipitation. A section of highway was suddenly under twelve feet of water, the Milwaukee Brewers’ stadium – just a stone’s throw from the river - was also under two to three feet of water. It was the first time a major league baseball game had to be canceled due to flooding. Wauwatosa’s entire downtown was inundated, as were the blocks of charming, 100-year-old homes on the other side of the river. All told, there was more than $53 million in damage.

Wauwatosa and Milwaukee were certainly not alone as they recovered from the 1997 floods - river communities flood all the time. It’s a familiar story – the heartache of flooded living rooms and kitchens, photos and treasured heirlooms forever gone, and all too often, the loss of human life. The financial loss, the outpouring of aid, and the eventual getting on with life. All too often, the lessons are forgotten only to repeat themselves a decade or two later. But in Wauwatosa’s case, the story took a different tact.

Municipal leaders from up and down the watershed, along with the regional sewerage district, went into high gear after the floodwaters receded, launching a years-long process of planning for, and getting the public to agree to (and pay for) changes that would better prepare the region for the next flood. Homes were torn down or moved, parks were expanded and sculpted to better absorb floods, pavement was removed. Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars were collectively invested into flood management projects. To the region’s credit, most of those projects worked with nature rather than against it. Lifeless concrete channels were restored to natural streambeds. Trees, whose leaves naturally capture precipitation, were planted, and raingardens installed. Asphalt parking lots, particularly those near the river, were replaced with permeable surfaces, designed to allow water to flow through them rather than off.

As fate would have it, a recent visit brought my husband and I back to Wauwatosa just days after a deluge even more cataclysmic than the 1997 downpour. When we arrived, we could easily tell which homes had flooded basements because of the soggy rugs, filing cabinets, and boxes of holiday ornaments sitting by the curb waiting to be hauled away and buried in the landfill. A savvy observer could see the dusting of mud on tree trunks, indicating the high-water mark. But the big story wasn’t what we saw. It was what we didn’t see. The downtown had not been underwater. Bridges had not been washed away. Life was flowing. The planning and investments had worked.

Before Wauwatosa, Marc and I lived in Wilmington, Delaware, where the corporate culture lived and breathed the mantra “Safety is no accident”. Preparing communities for new precipitation patterns doesn’t happen by accident – it requires intention. Building to survive and even thrive in flood-prone landscapes takes time. Lots of it. While the best time for other flood-prone communities to start planning has already passed, today is the next best option.

Splash Zone

Photographer and writer Eddee Daniel, who has lived in Wauwatosa since well before the 1997 floods, captured the 2025 inundation and reflects on how much worse it could have been in his lyrical piece posted on his blog “A Wealth of Nature”.

Speaking of rain, Gov. Younkin declared this week “Virginia Rain Harvesting Awareness Week”. Not quite a year ago the state became the first in the country to adopt potable rainwater harvesting standards and permitting guidance, largely due to the efforts of Tyrone and Leslie Jarvis, owners of Go Green Autocare in Newport News. The Certificate of Recognition was a well-deserved surprise birthday present - for Tyrone this week. I’m pasting an image of the certificate below because I’ve never seen a better enumeration of the justification for rain harvesting! Nicely done!

WHEREAS, rainwater harvesting is the practice of collecting and storing rainwater from rooftops or other surfaces for later use, providing a sustainable and decentralized approach to meeting water needs for both potable and non-potable purposes; and

WHEREAS, Virginia has taken an important step in advancing this practice through the passage of House Bill 192 and Senate Bill 851, which legalized and established guidelines for rainwater harvesting in the Commonwealth; and

WHEREAS, rainwater harvesting systems provide substantial benefits for water supply and wastewater subsystems and can help reduce water supply costs for Virginia residents; and

WHEREAS, rainwater harvesting helps reduce demand on public water systems, conserve groundwater, protect watersheds, and promote environmental stewardship; and

WHEREAS, this practice can provide communities, schools, and public facilities with a reliable supplemental fresh water source, improve resilience during droughts, and encourage sustainable water management; and

WHEREAS, rainwater harvesting can help mitigate excessive pollution from stormwater runoff, which can lead to severe health and environmental concerns; and

WHEREAS, educational outreach and implementation efforts are underway across the Commonwealth to inform Virginians about the benefits of rainwater harvesting and the ways they can participate;

NOW, THEREFORE, I, Glenn Youngkin, do hereby recognize September 14–20, 2025, as RAIN HARVESTING AWARENESS WEEK in the COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA, and I call this observance to the attention of all our citizens.

References:

• https://www.fairfaxwater.org/news/50th-anniversary-hurricane-agnes

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Agnes

• https://www.pwconserve.org/issues/occoquan/shoreline.html

Dane Rogers, the freckled captain of his school’s soccer team and a member of the National Honor Society, was the archetypal wholesome American son that parents dream of. It was as if he walked straight out of Disney’s central casting for “perfect sons”. The world was his, ripe with possibility, until a summer swim doused those dreams as swiftly and completely as a guillotine’s blade.

Looking to cool off on a 97-degree July day, Dan and four friends did what any sweaty, fun-loving Wisconsin kids would do. They went searching for water, even if it was just a golf-course pond. Undeterred by the fence between them and the fairways, they escaped the heat with a grand evening of horsing around in the water. Two nights later, Dane went into a series of seizures and collapsed. Paramedics could not revive him and within hours he was dead. Of Dane’s four companions from that sweltering evening, three experienced mild symptoms, but the remaining one, who, like Dane, had fully submerged on that hot day, came down with severe diarrhea and abdominal pain. He, however, survived.

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Because the illnesses didn’t surface until a full two days after playing in the pond, it wasn’t immediately clear that Dane encountered his mysterious assailant in the water. Instead, the coroner first explored a number of dead-end searches as he looked for causes of this young athlete’s death. Drugs, congenital heart defects, food poisoning, and pesticide exposure were all ruled out. It wasn’t until Dr. Stephen Carpenter, an internationally respected limnologist - i.e. someone who studies lakes - from the nearby University of Wisconsin read of Dane’s tragedy in the Madison newspaper and recognized a familiar pattern. Over the last decades epidemiologists had been tracking an increasing number of cases in which dogs – mostly water-loving retrievers – had died from swimming in cyanobacteria-infested waters. The blue-green bacteria - popularly referred to as blue-green algae though they aren’t actually algae – produce poisons, “cyanotoxins”, that cause a distinct suite of neurological and intestinal symptoms that sometimes lead to death. These were the same symptoms that killed Dane Rogers and sickened his four friends.

Dr. Carpenter emailed the coroner to share his hunch. The medical literature had no examples of a human killed by cyanobacterial toxins, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen.

It seemed far-fetched, but by this point the coroner was running out of hypotheses. Dane was long gone, but the hospital had collected samples of its patient’s blood and stool, allowing the coroner to run new tests on them. A year would go by before the answer was in, but the evidence was clear. Anabaena, a particular species of cyanobacteria, and anatoxin, the poison it produces, were found Dane’s samples as well as those from the sickest of his four friends. Dane earned the posthumous title of being the country’s first known human to be killed by freshwater toxic algae.

As Dr. Carpenter and others who study water quality knew, cyanobacteria naturally occur in low, background levels in freshwater throughout the world without causing any problems. In fact, they perform the essential job of converting gaseous nitrogen into compounds that plants can use. In other words, they are natural fertilizer factories. But under certain conditions – i.e. warm, nutrient-rich waters - the bacteria move into overdrive, replicating quickly and often releasing powerful neurotoxins. From the cyanobacteria’s vantage, the toxins perform the useful function of inhibiting the growth of competitors and keeping microscopic predators at bay. But for warm-blooded animals, like dogs, cattle, and now humans, who ingest water from a polluted farm or golf course pond – or dare I say, golf course water “hazard” - they can be deadly. Thanks to the sleuthing that answered the questions surrounding Dane’s untimely death, countless others have been saved. And maybe, just maybe, some ponds have been cleaned up.

Splash Zone

After reading my last post, The Problem With Nitrates, reader replied that she’s joined the Isaac Walton League’s Nitrate Watch. I found the link and signed up to volunteer along with her and hundreds of others and anticipate my kit to come in the mail any day now. Whether or not you can volunteer, check out the map – you’ll be able to see whether there are any volunteers near you and what they’re finding.

Also, a shout out to for highlighting ’s piece on data centers, The Cloud Drinks Local. Rothberg quoted the same excerpt that I’m going to post here. If you feel like you can’t get ahead of the data center steam roller, you’re not imagining things. It’s the most real explanation I’ve seen of the permitting imbalance:

“[This example] illustrates what I call the infrastructure timing gap; our world now runs on two fundamentally different clocks. A data center can go from site selection to full operation in 18 to 36 months. The water treatment upgrades and reuse networks they depend on take 5 to 10 years to plan, fund, and build. The transmission lines that carry their power can take 7 to 15 years. The math simply doesn't add up.”

The first realization that nitrates in the water supply were a serious problem came in 1945 when a pediatric resident in Iowa City, Dr. Hunter Comly, noticed a troubling pattern in formula-fed infants. Babies that were perfectly healthy when discharged from the maternity ward started turning blue after they went home, especially around their mouths, hands and feet. Along with the discoloration came other worrisome symptoms like difficulty breathing, lethargy, and even loss of consciousness, any of which had to be terrifying for the new parents.

The cluster of symptoms is known to doctors by the mouthful of a word, “methemoglobinemia”, though many people default to simply calling it “blue baby syndrome”. There are rare genetic disorders that can cause the condition, but since Dr. Comly’s patients were healthy when discharged from the hospital, he suspected a different mechanism was behind their illnesses. Like a real-life Inspector Poirot, the star of Agatha Christie’s detective novels, Comly noticed patterns. Breast-fed babies and those from homes served by municipal water seemed immune from the condition. Instead, it was popping up in families from rural areas, and particularly babies who were drinking formula reconstituted with well water. Symptoms for these little ones seemed to clear up when they were re-admitted to the hospital, only to return when they went home.

The “aha” moment came from a baby who was readmitted for the third time. The child’s father, having seen his newborn recover each time they came to the hospital only to deteriorate back at home, was convinced that the answer lay in his home’s well water. He insisted that there had to be something that was poisoning his infant yet left the rest of the family untouched. Water testing identified the culprit: high nitrate levels.[i]

But where were the nitrates coming from? During the build-up to World War I, Germany pushed its scientists to develop a faster way to manufacture ammonia, an ingredient in explosives. This rapid process, dubbed “Haber-Bosch” after the chemists who invented it, was repurposed to create fertilizer badly needed by farmers. By the 1940’s early adopters from the American farming community were lining up to try the new synthetic fertilizers on their crops. Though Dr. Comly’s discovery about the cause came relatively early in the fertilizer revolution, the ensuing decades saw stratospheric increases in fertilizer use as the “Green Revolution” pushed crop productivity to its limits. The new synthetic fertilizer boosted plant growth, but no one thought about what it did to the water. After all, how could something so good for plants – basic nutrients – possibly have a downside?

The unfortunate “blue babies” proved that nitrate-laden water can be dangerous for the very young. Further research identified the complexities underpinning the nitrate – methemoglobin connection. In a nutshell, infants are uniquely susceptible to nitrates because their metabolism differs from adults’ in critical but obscure ways, most notably, the speed at which their guts process nitrates, and fetal hemoglobin, which remains in their system for the first few months, is more susceptible than “regular” hemoglobin.[ii] With this discovery, national and international standards for nitrate were established. The first U.S. standard was set at 45 mg/l in 1963, but with additional study, it was discovered that concentrations even half that amount could trigger the syndrome.[iii]

In the 2002 update of the Safe Drinking Water Act the level was set at 10 mg/l, which is where it remains today. While that’s a huge help, it only applies to municipal or public water supplies. There are another forty million people, more than ten percent of the U.S. population, who rely on private, essentially unregulated, wells, primarily in rural areas.[iv] It’s those kids that are most likely to be exposed to excessive nitrates.

Even at lower levels, long-term exposure to nitrates – which natural gut bacteria convert to more dangerous nitrogen compounds which are then absorbed into the bloodstream - can trigger all sorts of repugnant conditions. Developing fetuses are especially vulnerable. A larger study of babies in Texas and Iowa found a clear correlation between drinking water with just over 5 mg/l of nitrates – well under the federal drinking water standard - and spina bifida, cleft palate, limb deformities, and even anencephaly (i.e. the lethal condition where the brain is missing some of its parts).[v]

Adults are not immune to the ills of chronic nitrate exposure. A review of more than 30 studies found clear links between chronic nitrate exposure through drinking water – often well within the regulatory limits - and adult health problems, particularly colorectal cancer and thyroid disease. [vi] Activists in Iowa are particularly worried about this connection. Whereas the U.S. has, thankfully, been seeing a slow but steady decline in cancer rates in recent years, Iowa not only has the second-highest cancer rate of any state in the country, it also has the fastest growing rate of cancer. There are a whole host of reasons why this could be happening, but experts are quick to point out that the factor that differentiates Iowa from other, less cancer-prone states, is agriculture. Herbicides and pesticides are certainly a concern, but nitrates are front and center in the discussion.

Like many environmental problems, the solution is obvious. Cut back on chemical fertilizer use. Improve soil health so that this lower amount of fertilizer stays put rather than leaching into wells and rivers. Grow plants with deeper roots that are more likely to capture nutrients. These principles apply to the 40 million acres of turfgrass in America’s lawns, golf courses and office parks just as equally as they do to farms. Getting people to do this is the trick.

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Splash Zone

I feel like I say this with practically every post, but it’s because I don’t know of anyone else writing as pointedly about water quality: Chris Jones’ (aka “River Raccoon”) Swine Republic takes my 30,000-foot view straight to the front lines of the war. “The trick” to getting our water clean isn’t just about chemistry and fertilizer habits. It’s about big money - as in Big Fertilizer, Big Agriculture – and politicians who think that following that money is more likely to get them elected than following public health or clean water. Check out his most recent post, but also pretty much anything else he writes.

Also, keep reading Water-philic. I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of our nitrate troubles, particularly the unfair burden that regular folks – the ones who like to drink water and swim or fish in lakes – carry so that others may profit.

[i] https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-blue-baby-syndromes

[ii] The Blue Threat: Engineering Against Nitrate-Induced Methemoglobinemia | Ecologix Environmental Systems and Fetal hemoglobin - Wikipedia

[iii] nitrate-nitrite-history-feb2017-rev.pdf or https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1638204/?page=1 or Nitrate/Nitrite Toxicity: What Are U.S. Standards and Regulations for Nitrates and Nitrites Exposure? | Environmental Medicine | ATSDR (https://archive.cdc.gov/www_atsdr_cdc_gov/csem/nitrate-nitrite/standards.html - says it is archived and no longer being updated. ASTDR was consididated with other programs on April 2^nd 2025 as part of MAHA.

[iv] Updated Information on Locations of Domestic Well Use | U.S. Geological Survey

[v] https://www.disabled-world.com/fitness/nutrition/foodsecurity/nitrate-defects.php

[vi] D https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/db3139c4-0803-33da-b56a-27dda46c1a47/rinking water nitrate and human ... preview & related info | Mendeley

I had Kernza® for dinner last Thursday. It nourished my body, cleansed the soil, and because the occasion, a farm-to-table fundraiser hosted by Friends of the Mississippi River brought together people I enjoy and respect, it fed my soul. “What’s Kernza?” you say, while thinking “and why should I care?” Come with me.

In a nutshell, Kernza is a newly developed grain that, primarily because of its deep roots and perennial growth habit, has the potential to heal our agricultural landscapes and clean our waters, all while producing food for people and profits for farmers. Building off MacArthur Fellow Wes Jackson’s vision for the possibility of perennial grain crops, and early work by the USDA and Rodale Institute, in 2003 The Land Institute, based in Salina, Kansas, took on what is now more than two decades leading a collaboration that has taken Kernza from an intriguing possibility to an early-market reality.

The “intriguing possibility,” i.e. Kernza’s ancestor, arrived in researchers’ hands as intermediate wheatgrass (Thinopyrum intermedium), a grass crop whose seeds are too small to be realistically harvested as grain but, because of its high nutritional value and ability to grow year-after-year with very few inputs from farmers, is valued for cattle forage. Using techniques that plant breeders have been applying for more than a century, scientists at The Land Institute and its co-conspirators elsewhere have developed the large-seeded variety wheatgrass that we now know as Kernza. University of Minnesota plays a leading role in the collaboration, which is how I happened to be served Kernza in St. Paul last week.

The pursuit of perennial crops is fueled by worries surrounding our current way of feeding ourselves. Since I want this post to be about Kernza rather than the woes of modern agriculture – which is a whole other corn maze of a digression - I’ll limit myself to three key points.

• First, agriculture is one of the top sources of greenhouse gas emissions - and the top source for methane emissions – both globally and in the U.S. specifically.

• Second, what we now call “conventional agriculture” – though it was hardly conventional seventy years ago – has mined the rich stores of carbon from native soils. For the most part, that carbon has volatilized into the air and will stay there until we start putting it back into the soil.

• Third, fertilizers and manure are the primary source of water pollution, hands-down. If you need convincing, check out Chris Jones who makes the case each week in his Swine Republic newsletter, as well as his book of the same name, and does so with a combination of expertise, vigor and cutting sarcasm that I can only dream of. For a Minnesota take on it, look no further than MCEA’s recent litigation on the matter.

Any of those would be sufficient justification to look for new crops that could reorient the trendlines. Given that Kernza attacks all three simultaneously, it’s a no-brainer for our attention and investment.

I’d never heard of Kernza until eight years ago. New to the Twin Cities, I was happy to accept the McKnight Foundation’s invitation to a dialogue between Kernza researchers, funders interested in clean water, and a handful of extraneous folks like myself. My son, recently graduated from the University of Wisconsin – Madison where he was deep in sustainable agriculture circles, had introduced me to the concepts of permaculture and perennial crops, but I didn’t yet see how it got us past nuts and berries. My day as the McKnight Foundation’s guest was about to change all that.

Two memories from that day in 2017 capture the essence of Kernza and its possibilities. The first is a photograph of a complete Kernza plant. Someone had painstakingly unearthed the entire plant, both the above- and below-ground portions, and gingerly washed the soil from the roots. Captured in a reclining position was the full beast: Three or so feet of leaves and grain-bearing stems, trailed by nearly eighteen feet of an increasingly fine tangle of roots. It made me think of a Portuguese man o’ war, only instead of stinging tentacles dangling far below the above-water blue float, the soil-enriching roots hung unfathomably deep below the green parts above ground.

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That photograph told me much of what I needed to know. That the plant could spring back from a hard, Minnesota freeze. That its roots built carbon deep beneath surface, giving it the possibility of regenerating prairie soils while also drawing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. That it could tap into water held deep beneath the surface and weather periods of drought while also accessing oxygen during temporary flooding.

But what’s the good of a new food source if no one likes it? It was quickly apparent that taste was not going to be the barrier to uptake. In true Minnesota fashion, a local chef cooked up a Kernza bar that no one could resist. Nutty and slightly sweet, I could see why this new grain had captured the attention of giants in the processed food world, some of which were headquartered nearby. The Kernza beer served at day’s end disappeared just as quickly.

Fast forward to 2025. While crop development is still an area of active research, many of the initial challenges like seed plumpness, seed “shattering” (i.e. falling off the stem before harvest), “lodging” (i.e. stem falling over before harvest) are now largely solved. And while Kernza is still a specialty food, buying it, or products made with it, no longer requires a secret handshake. But don’t take it from me – try an internet search for “Where to buy Kernza - fill in the blank with beer, cereal, flour, or crackers – near me” and you’ll get an answer.

What had been hopes and hypotheses regarding what Kernza fields could do for water have materialized into data and experience. While we were in the field, Dr. Jordan pointed to the nearby plot of corn towering above our heads. During our region’s 2021 drought, he recounted, the corn lost its color and sagged while the Kernza plot chugged along unfazed. At the opposite extreme, he’s observed the Kernza field absorb even a ten-inch downpour while the same rainfall floods the hardpan of the cornfield.

Equally exciting is the research that’s coming in on water quality. Wells in some regions of Minnesota, like much of the Midwest, are plagued with nitrate contamination. The source of the unwanted, or at least misplaced, nutrients is clear. Over-fertilized and over-manured fields inject nitrogen fertilizer, not to mention other agricultural toxins, into groundwater and rivers alike, making the water unsafe to drink. Residents have no choice but to spend a thousand dollars or more on in-home reverse osmosis systems. Cities in the region invest millions of dollars in giant-sized versions of the same, passing the cost on to ratepayers.

But what if there were a simpler, less expensive way to clean the water? As it turns out, there is.

Picture those insanely long roots undergirding each Kernza plant. Researchers wondered what would happen if Kernza, rather than the more typical corn or soybeans, was planted in the zone around polluted wells. Now we know. In fairly short order – just three years – Kernza removes as much as 96% of the nitrate contamination around these wells, all while providing a marketable crop.

This isn’t the end of the story – neither Kernza’s trajectory, nor my interest in it. On the one hand, under the current federal administration it’s hard to tell whether research on this and other game-changing crops may stall. On the other, there may be new opportunities. With wine glass in hand, one of the farmers at last week’s dinner referenced the turbulence in the Midwest commodity market triggered by the tariff wars. He wondered aloud whether that might provide an opening for alternative crops. Wouldn’t that be an interesting turn of events?

Splash Zone

I can’t begin to tell you how upset I was when I heard the NPR report that President Trump wants to destroy our perfectly good space missions that collect carbon dioxide data. The satellites have long been paid for, and the annual maintenance costs are a pittance compared to what we, the taxpayers, have already invested. It turns out that the mission's data are also used by farmers, though I couldn’t tell you exactly how. Among my Substack colleagues, @dockorzoom covered this as well and, rightly, asked us to call our elected “congresscritters” to tell them to not blow up our satellites.

On a lighter note, I appreciate the little gestures from friends that help me look better. Like the quiet signal that lets me know I’ve got mayonnaise on my lips, or the discrete hand that reaches behind my neck to tuck in an errant label. In the same helpful spirit, I want to clear up some boating terminology. Rowboats are rowed. With two oars (per person) and the human facing backward. Same with rowing shells, the kind seen on rivers that run through elite college campuses. Canoes are paddled. With one paddle (per person) and the human facing forward. Same with kayaks. The only place where the line gets blurred is on Viking longships, which are/were rowed. With one oar (per person) facing backwards. There. Somebody had to say it.

Image credit: By José Manuel Suárez, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4602887

At a family gathering not too long ago, my nephew, who’d heard the rumor that I was easing away from consulting to focus on writing, wanted to know more. He was kind to ask – his interest put a bounce in my ball. But I never know how to answer these types of queries, the ones that want to know what I’m cooking in my literary kitchen and what they should expect when mealtime finally rolls around. Not yet having a polished answer despite the dozens of times I’ve been asked this same question, I at least managed to get “water” in my tangled response.

Coleman, my brother’s son, a bona fide adult with three decades of education and an impressive biotech job doing something I’ll never fully understand, had a response that stopped me dead in my tracks. “People will want to read what you have to say,” I heard him reply, seeming to actually mean it. Continuing, he landed his punch. “Water is the most important molecule”. I couldn’t vouch for my nerdy nephew’s assessment of popular interest, but he was absolutely right about the chemistry. Water is the most important molecule. I just hadn’t thought about it that way. As a molecule.

I knew that water was important to me, but my brain gravitates to water in its bulk form – lakes, storm clouds, the clear liquid that flows from my tap, that sort of thing. But the molecule itself? I’d taken it for granted, the same way that many people assume that water in other manifestations will always be there for them. But none of those things would exist – nor would we – if it weren’t for H₂O, life’s molecular lubricant. Cooked up from two helpings of hydrogen and a single oxygen molecule, bound together through the atomic properties that guide all matter, this miniscule mote sets in motion everything we’ve ever known or experienced.

Water was present from almost the very start. Billions of years would need to transpire before sunny beaches and babbling brooks would paint Earth’s surface. But from the moment of conception, our planet began to accrue water.

Initially, 4.6 billion or so years ago, water came by way of asteroids. Our solar system was a raucous scene in those early days, with loads of big rocks still running wild. Like the windshield of a speeding car driving through a 17-year cicada swarm, Earth was under constant bombardment from asteroids. While these mega-rocks may not have been “wet”, they carried, according to science writer Johanna Thompson, “the atomic ingredients for water: a 2:1 hydrogen-to-oxygen ratio.”[i] With these building blocks – hydroxyl ions, OH^-, and hydrogen ions, H⁺ - and their inherent tendency to snap together given the right conditions, Earth’s initial water endowment came to be.

Given that the infant Earth was quite hot– as much as 3600 degrees Fahrenheit – much of the original water leaked back into the solar system. However, over the next hundred million years, as the planet stopped boiling, gaseous water condensed and fell from the skies. Wet stuff. The makings of oceans. Life’s womb.

Other planets received water during their early days as well, but without the right combination of gravitational pull and temperature they couldn’t hold onto it. Earth fell into what’s come to be known as the “Goldilocks Zone”. A region around the sun that’s not too hot, not too cold, but is just right to hold liquid water.

It could have gone along like that forever – a wet but lifeless planet tumbling through space. But, as we all know, that’s not how it played out. Molecules and atoms have a habit of rearranging themselves, especially given enough time and energy. Liquid water, surrounded by an atmosphere of carbon dioxide and pummeled by light from the sun, set the table for the creation of life.

First to coalesce were the cyanobacteria. These single-celled organisms used light’s energy to recombine the atoms in water and carbon dioxide into sugars, releasing oxygen in the process.[ii] Not only did they need liquid water as their medium, their habitat, but also as their molecular feedstock. In other words, it’s not just that today’s life needs water. Life as we know it could not have taken its very first breaths without water.

Though it was a slow start, once the first life forms took hold in shallow, primordial seas the evolution of new and more complex arrangements picked up steam, bringing us to where we are today. While I’ve long internalized the fact that my ancestral tree has its roots in the ocean, I’d never thought about the fact that I carry some of that sea with me in each and every cell until I read Peter Godfrey Smith’s “Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness”. Having been an evangelist for the 2020 film “My Octopus Teacher”, telling everyone I knew that they absolutely had to see it, I was hoping for a similar rush with “Other Minds”. It was not to be. However, the final pages left me with this mind-blowing sentence:

“When animals did crawl onto dry land, they took the sea with them, all the basic activities of life occurring in water-filled cells bounded by membranes, tiny containers whose insides are remnants of the sea.”[iii]

I’d never thought about it that way. Though the cytoplasm in most cells isn’t nearly as briny as the sea, it’s still a broth of salts, minerals, and a complex soup of biological compounds not unlike the oceans. Water is again the key ingredient, lubricating the intracellular machinery of life. Is this enough to make it the most important molecule?

Splash Zone

I recently started Robin Wall Kimmerer’s latest book, “The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World”. This excerpt (pp 23-24) is out of context, but even so, it served as a wake-up call for me. A splash in my face, if you will. When was my last drink of wild water? And yours?

“I’m thinking of a spring I know where the water is icy cold and gushes out of the ground. It almost makes you dizzy with its cold vitality. I drink from my cupped hands, splash my face, and fill my canteen for later. Isn’t this how water was meant to be – free and pure? How long has it been since you drank wild water?”

[i] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-earths-water-come-from-meteorites/

[ii] Many people know cyanobacteria by the misleading name “blue-green algae”. While cyanobacteria are blue-green as the “cyan” in their name implies, they are not algae. Instead, they are bacteria, simple cells without nuclei or chloroplasts, whereas algae have complex cellular structures more akin to multicellular plants. Public health officials often monitor cyanobacteria concentrations because some species excrete toxic byproducts that make it dangerous to swim in or drink water with active outbreaks.

[iii] I am waiting for the book to become available from my library so that I can make sure I got the quote exactly right.

(As I said last week when I first posted this photo … Yes, Drink Up! But please, not bottled water! If you haven’t yet read my piece on microplastics, with the stats on nearly 240,000 particles per liter of bottled water, do it now!)

This is a continuation of last week’s post on why those eight or so cups of water a day really do matter. As a friend told me after reading a draft of these two pieces, “I always knew I was supposed to drink water, and now I understand why!” If you were busy marching in parades or eating hotdogs on July 4^th and missed Part 1, you may want to circle back and read it first.

As important as I know it to be, getting my requisite two or three quarts of water every day is a chore. An annoyance. I comply because I know it’s good for me. But for some people – especially little ones – fluid intake is a deadly serious matter. According to the World Health Organization, gastroenteritis – i.e. diarrhea – kills nearly half a million kids every year, mostly in countries without access to the types of sanitation and clean water most people reading this take for granted. Those half-million deaths are overwhelmingly borne by children under five years old. Their little bodies simply can’t handle the massive loss of water and electrolytes that accompany the few days of intestinal infection. My husband Marc has seen these impacts first-hand.

Marc saw all manner of kids in dire situations during his twenty-five years of practice as an emergency pediatrician. Injuries covering the gamut from playground accidents and sports injuries to gunshot wounds and parental beatings. Mysterious illnesses that required Inspector Jacques Clouseau – level detective skills. And illnesses, some of which caused life-threatening intestinal distress.

With all these young patients, but especially the ones with gastro-intestinal problems, Marc and other medical professionals needed a rapid way to get a bead on whether the patient, often too young or too sick to speak for themselves, was dehydrated. And how extreme their dehydration was. That’s what motivated Marc, back when he was a fellow at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, to develop what became known as the “Gorelick dehydration score”. The test does not require any specialized equipment, only someone with enough skills and experience to assess a list of characteristics like tears, mucous membranes, eyes, pulse, etc. and rate them on a ten-point scale. Each of these items is impacted by fluid levels.

Two of the assessment criteria ring familiar to me. Capillary refill, measured by gently squeezing a fingertip and seeing how long it takes for color to return, has a direct corollary with my experience as a dehydrated blood donor. Before I drank the bottle of water, my blood flowed slowly. Similarly, the capillaries of dehydrated kids take longer to refill. Another assessment, skin elasticity, is something I learned about more recently.

I was standing in line at a hotel Starbucks. It was 6:30 a.m. and I’d stumbled down to the lobby to get coffee before donning my suit and heading into the opening session of a gathering I go to every fall. Along with more than twenty thousand other water geeks from around the world, I was in New Orleans for the world’s largest water-focused conference and exhibition. But unlike the others who were strategizing about which presentations, which booths they’d head for when the doors opened, I opened my phone to see multiple missed messages from family members and a text from my brother that said, “Call me ASAP”.

When I reached him, he delivered the bad news. Our otherwise healthy, 86-year-old mother had suffered a massive stroke overnight, and it wasn’t looking good. He and my sister-in-law were packing their car for the drive from Virginia to Charleston, South Carolina, where Mom was hospitalized. Our sister was flying in from Michigan. Suddenly, my conference didn’t seem important. Mom came first. Coffee in hand, I called Delta Airlines and found a flight that would get me to Mom’s bedside before dinner.

At the airport I had a chance to call the emergency doctor who was caring for our mother. He explained that a large clot was blocking her M1 cranial artery, paralyzing her left side and making it almost impossible for her to speak. Help had arrived well after the three-hour window when clot-busting drugs could have reversed the stroke’s impact, so our hopes for her recovery were slim. At her bedside ten hours after receiving the news at Starbucks, it was humbling to see our Energizer Bunny of a mother in a hospital bed, barely able to open her eyelids long enough to confirm that I’d arrived.

As anyone who’s ever been through this knows, the next hours were touch-and-go. We hoped for the best, but we certainly weren’t placing bets on what pieces, if any, of our family’s matriarch would emerge from the depths of her injured brain. Meanwhile, there wasn’t a lot the medical team could do except keep their patient comfortable, pump her with intravenous fluids, and wait.

The next morning, we saw hope. Mom was weak, for sure, but she could move her left foot and hand. And, though she was confused, she could talk, or at least mumble. Much to the neurologists’ amazement, over the next six days, their patient continued to improve. Our mother, who’d been strong enough to haul kayaks just the day before her world changed, was still just a shadow of her former self, but the doctors and nurses reminded us that the brain will keep rebuilding for at least six months after a stroke. Based on what they were seeing in those first few days, they were optimistic about her recovery.

While they were optimistic, they were perplexed. This 86-year-old woman had suffered a massive stroke, and five hours had elapsed from the time of her initial symptoms until her husband, who was dealing with early dementia, had called 911. CT scans taken when she arrived in the E.R. clearly displayed a large clot blocking a critical cranial artery. The blockage prevented oxygen-rich blood from feeding the right side of her brain. Slowly, the neurons that controlled muscles on the body’s left side and some aspects of speech were dying. But by the next day, new CT scans showed that the clot was breaking up. Blood flow was starting to return to damaged areas of the brain. How could this be, given that she arrived too late to receive tPA, the enzyme-based drug that can dissolve blood clots if administered early enough? It all comes back to water.

Though the E.R. docs couldn’t resolve Mom’s ischemic stroke with drugs, they gave her intravenous fluids. Once Mom could drink on her own, the I.V. lines were removed. The nurses and doctors urged Mom to drink even when it was a struggle. Whether through a needle or down her esophagus, the medical professionals were vigilant about fluids. Though we’re more used to thinking about the perils of high blood pressure, Mom’s had dropped dangerously low. She needed hydration to boost her blood pressure, providing the extra “umph” to push her blood through the brain’s arteries and capillaries, washing out bits of the stroke-causing clot and opening up pathways for brain repair. Lack of fluids didn’t cause her stroke, but hydration was a key part to her recovery.

Every day the attending neurologist in South Carolina used a slew of tests to track Mom’s status. Blood pressure, heart rate, urine output, speech quality, etc. But she also had one that I’d not seen before – she would gently pinch the thin skin on the back of the hand, raising it as if putting up a tent, and then watch it fall back into place. The faster it rebounded, the better Mom’s hydration status. Before Mom was discharged, her neurologists taught us this as a do-it-ourselves way to monitor Mom back at home.

While we bipeds don’t show the signs of water stress as flagrantly as my desiccated rhododendrons with their tightly rolled leaves, if we know what to look for, the signs are there. Skin that doesn’t bounce back. Headaches, backaches, and general lethargy. Not peeing very much. We only need to pay attention, to listen to the language our bodies speak. The language of plants is much easier to understand. Both withered plants and parched humans can, however, revive fairly well if given the chance.

Before the rains returned during that parched summer, Marc and I enjoyed a backyard dinner, one of the upsides of drought. Against the fence that separates our yard from our eastern neighbors, the rhubarb’s elephantine leaves were dull and drooping, probably exhausted from yet another sunny day of photosynthesis. Storing sunlight’s energy requires that plant cells relinquish water molecules, disassembling them so that their hydrogen atoms can be used to build sugar molecules. Meanwhile, water also escapes through open stomata – the microscopic gateways under plant leaves that allow carbon dioxide to migrate in, and excess oxygen to evacuate. With all that activity, it’s no wonder the leaves were drooping by day’s end. Dogs rummaging through the leaves in hopes of finding rabbits probably didn’t help.

But by the next morning, despite no precipitation, it appeared that the rhubarb’s water balance had been restored. Pulled up from deep roots, water moved up the stem to return cells to their proper inflation. Stacked side-by-side like minute bricks, the now turgid cells returned the stalks to proud stature while the leaves cockishly proclaimed the benefits of overnight beauty rest. All of this I could see while standing at the kitchen window fifty feet away.

Closer observation presented more evidence of the night’s refreshment. The majestic rhubarb leaves, along with the more modest vegetation of the jewelweed, black-eyed Susan, and sedges that they share the garden with, flaunted beads of dew dotted along their edges, as if they donned rhinestones overnight. Our two dogs, whose morning ritual includes running through the depths of their backyard jungle, noses to the ground, emerged with wet backs. I think all would agree, even those who speak only the languages of greenery and tail wags, that Richard was right. Hydration really does solve a lot of problems.

A somber note

While getting enough water is critical to life, this week has been a somber reminder that too much water can take life away. My heart goes out to the Texans who lost their lives to the Guadalupe River’s floodwaters, and to the families, friends, and coworkers who loved them. For every life lost, there are an untold number of survivors who were injured, lost their home, or were otherwise directly traumatized. They need our support as well. And of course, let’s not forget to give thanks to all the first responders – both the trained ones, and those who were called to action on the spot. If you are able to help, this article has links to a number of Texas-based organizations that are assisting with the aftermath. Even if you can’t help, the list is worth reading – it's a somber indicator of the disaster’s ripple effects.

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(Regarding this photo ….. Yes, Drink Up! But please, not bottled water! First, notice the $6 price-tag. Second, if you haven’t yet read my piece on microplastics, with the stats on nearly 240,000 particles per liter of bottled water, do it now!)

It’s July 4^th and it’s going to be a hot long weekend pretty much anywhere. Lots of us are going to be outside, hanging out in the sun and flipping burgers by a hot grill. On top of that, what some folks will be drinking may cause a net loss of liquids rather than replenishment. (Is that a beer I see in your hands?). Life is better when we’re hydrated, though I’ve been slow to learn the lesson. This is the first of two postings on my conversion to being a true believer.

My friend Richard is fond of saying “Hydration solves a lot of problems.” He’s right. In fact, he’s probably more right than he realizes.

During a drought a few years back, my neighbors and I had regular commiseration sessions about the lack of rain. The ground was dry, the nearby creek was nothing more than a ribbon of sand, and plants were thirsty. The rhododendrons at the corner of our house displayed their misery by curling their leathery leaves tight along each midrib, a protective adaptation that minimizes their exposure to dry air and helps retain moisture. As fall settled in and rains finally came, we emitted a collective sigh of relief. With nearly five inches of precipitation spread across multiple days, the creek started to flow again, and plants and soil started to revive. The rhododendron leaves relaxed, showing their appreciation and telling me that they were out of danger for now.

Though plants and animals are equally dependent on water, the two kingdoms have different ways of showing when they’re running low. When water gets scarce, plants get droopy, at least their non-woody parts do. Their leaves may discolor or start to drop ahead of schedule. Fruit ceases to ripen or falls to the ground while still green. Cacti – which make a habit of living in scorching conditions – make it through the annual cycle by shrinking or shriveling when they’re low on fluids. With humans – and presumably other animals – the signs of dehydration are more subtle but just as important.

We can’t see the blood flowing in our veins, yet it’s one of the first places to be affected when liquids run low. Plasma, the fluid that transports blood cells, is 90% water. When we run short on water – usually because we don’t consume enough or because we’re sweating more than usual – plasma volume literally decreases, which impacts blood flow. I learned this first-hand during a blood donation, something I did every few months over the seventeen years we lived in Wisconsin. On this occasion, I checked in for my appointment immediately after a particularly intense workout. The phlebotomist hooked me up and went off to take care of other donors while my pint bag slowly filled with my ruby red offering. Emphasis on “slowly”. I hadn’t known this before – it had never been an issue – but blood center protocol sets a time limit for filling the bag, and at the rate I was going we were going to blow through the time limit and void the entire donation.

The white-coated technician attending to me gave me two options. One was to pull the needle from my arm, toss the half-pint they’d dripped out of me into the biohazard wastebin, and call it a day. The other was to rehydrate and get that blood flowing again. The choice seemed obvious - I opted for the latter. I’m not normally a fan of bottled water but given that there was a large needle in my arm, I was hardly in a position to run to the rest room and slurp from the sink. I quickly drank the water he offered and kept my thoughts to myself.

I was amazed at how immediately my body responded. In what seemed like minutes, my blood, now rehydrated, returned to a normal flow rate and we got the pint we were aiming for. I later read that water can move through the stomach into the small intestines where it is absorbed into the bloodstream in as little as five minutes, especially if the stomach is empty, which mine was. We hear the phrase “water is life” all the time, and it hit me that for the anonymous patient who would be receiving my B+ blood, perhaps that bottle of water I drank truly was life for them.

If I hadn’t been giving blood that day, I would have had no way of knowing I was dehydrated. There have been other times when my body has signaled its lack of water though I didn’t necessarily pick up on the cues right away. You’d think it would say “Hey – we’re a little low in here. Drink!”, but it doesn’t, at least not in a language I’d yet to learn. Instead, it sends cryptic signals that it’s taken decades for me to decipher. For close to twenty years, I lived with headaches, sometimes crippling ones, before I realized that imbibing went a long way toward loosening the vise that gripped my skull. One particularly vivid memory took place during a summer visit to my mother’s while she was still living in Virginia. Having built-in childcare for our young sons, my husband Marc and I took the rare opportunity to run together along the rolling gravel roads surrounding her home.

I was dragging on the final hill, the summer heat getting to me. Even after I was back inside, as the next hour wore on, my head felt like it was going to explode. Almost like there was a small volcano trying to erupt through my temples. Curled up in bed, shades drawn and wet washcloth on my head, I thought to myself “If there were a gun in this room I’d use it – anything to end this pain.” Fortunately, there was no gun. And slowly, as I sipped water and nibbled on crackers over the next few hours, the pain subsided sufficiently for me to get on with my day. And as the years piled up, I came to realize that the best medicine for my crippling headaches was water – quarts of it. But it wasn’t until my fifties that I pieced together the clues that many of my garden-variety headaches could also be avoided by drinking more water.

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Those pains may have been in my head, but they were not in my imagination. There’s a physical connection between water and what’s going on upstairs. The brain, like any organ, needs fluids – a healthy brain is about 75% water. Water keeps brain cells working properly, facilitates the movement of nutrients into the cells and waste products out of them, and also provides physical protection for the brain which otherwise would rattle around inside the skull. When our grey matter starts running low on the liquid it needs, it begins to shrink, which is not fair. The brain is the one part of my body that I do not want to shrink. As it deflates, this precious organ pulls away from the skull which in turn, puts pressure on nerves. That’s the source of the pain. Or at least that’s my understanding.

The list of hydration’s blessings goes on. I can’t help but think of the times when I lost my voice, which happened more than once. I don’t mean I was hoarse, I mean I couldn’t speak. There was probably a combination of seasonal allergies, too much talking, and, of course, dehydration to blame. This was in the days before video conferencing, and even before texting, so without my voice I had to get inventive about communicating, especially when it was my turn to run meeting via voice-only conference calls. The thing I remember most, however, was advice from a colleague who had been trained as a speech therapist when she was in college. Talking to me by phone she advised – while I dutifully listened and quickly typed her an email if I had a question – that I needed to stay completely silent. Whispering was absolutely forbidden – too stressful for the vocal cords. Instead, she admonished that I could hasten the healing by keeping my vocal cords bathed in water by slowly sipping water all day. In school I’d learned that water was the universal solvent, and now it was starting to look like water was also the universal solution, at least for keeping me healthy.

Traveling makes it especially hard to keep up on hydration. Fruits, vegetables, and salads – all of which are water-rich - can be in short supply on the road. Between disrupted routines and distractions, I’m sure I’m not the only one who doesn’t get enough fluids when I’m away from home. And because water is what keeps things moving – literally – when I forget to drink, the intestinal trains stop running. For days. But dehydration can show up in other ways as well.

Not long ago, Marc and I had a chance to spend a week in Spain. He had meetings in Barcelona, so I tagged along, and we extended our stay on either end. We wanted to use our last day to explore the city on foot, winding our way through markets and down to the port, eventually ending up back at the Paulau de la Musica Catalana, the 120-year-old music hall known for its fantastical colors, ceramic moldings and stained-glass skylight, to say nothing of its acoustics. As with every day of our visit, the wind was brisk, and the sun was strong. The region was in the midst of a lengthy drought, so decorative fountains were empty, and humidity was akin to a desert. Because we’d been abroad for more than a week, my system was well out of whack.

A mile or so into our rambles, my back started to ache. I’d pulled my lumbar muscles ten or so days earlier, just before our trip began, but that was largely healed. Not “I’m ready for handsprings” healed but perfectly fine for a day of walking. Besides, this felt different. Stretching and ibuprofen offered little relief. By noon, I was continually scanning for places to sit even if it was just a curbside, and was eventually in enough distress that I was stopping for a short rest every block. Something was very wrong. Sensing a need for water, I slowly sipped from our shared water bottle. The more I drank, the thirstier I got. Thank goodness Barcelona has public fountains – not as many as Rome, but enough that Marc could easily find places to top off our vessel. I kept drinking.

And then, probably thirty minutes after I got serious about rehydrating, and just as I was starting to wonder whether this is what a kidney stone feels like, the misery started to lift. It felt like a miracle - all I needed was water, and I felt like myself again. Water to re-hydrate my injured muscles, lubricate my kidneys, and re-energize my brain. For the record, I don’t at all think that I had a kidney stone – that’s a torture I hope to never experience – but I’ve since read that dehydration, which reduces blood flow to the kidneys, can cause a kidney-ache in the lower back. Bingo. Also for the record, if you, like me, want a kidney stone about as much as you want a shark bite, drink water. Hydration is the number one recommendation for avoiding that calamity. Without enough water, urine becomes more concentrated which allows crystals – the building blocks of kidney stones – to precipitate within the organ’s narrow ducts. Think of it like making maple sugar, but rather than getting a sweet treat as the sap is boiled down, as urine concentrates what had been dissolved salts, especially calcium oxalate, precipitates out as crystals. Those crystals, if allowed to build up long enough, grow into “stones”. Let’s not let that happen to you, or to me.

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If you think you may be prone to dehydration, don’t take it from me. I’m just someone who’s curious about water. This link from Healthline is a much more reputable source.

And if you’re looking for a riveting summer read, I’ll suggest The River, by Peter Heller. Last weekend Marc and I read it out loud to each other during a marathon, cross-country drive and could hardly put it down. It’s a thriller, for sure, but is also good literature. It’s not often that those two characteristics show up in the same book.

Image by Szabolcs Molnar from Pixabay

I try to minimize contact with plastic, but there’s no escaping it. I shun bottled water, and the saran wrap I bought in 2009 has barely been touched, but I put contact lenses in my eyes every morning, I’m wearing leggings woven from nylon and Lycra, and I’m typing this on a plastic keyboard, so who am I kidding? Even my tofu floats in a plastic tub. I’m bathed in the stuff. But does it really matter? Any particle too small for me to see – the kinds that slough off during my daily encounters – can’t be a problem for me. Right? Since they can’t be digested, don’t they just pass on through, like the summer corn I ate too quickly?

I can’t remember who or what I was listening to, but a podcast guest last summer got my attention with his summary of a study that linked microplastics to cardiovascular “events” – i.e. heart attack, stroke, or death. It was in the New England Journal of Medicine, so I figured it had to be legitimate. I tracked down the original article and, with the help of a dictionary, was able to boil it down to this: the authors tracked a cohort of patients who came in to have their carotid arteries surgically cleaned out. Normally the harvested plaque, what I prefer to call “crud”, is scraped into a biohazard bag never to be seen again. But for the 304 patients enrolled in the study, the crud was analyzed with fancy scientific equipment to determine how much plastic it contained. Specifically, the authors were looking for microplastics and nanoplastics – the tiniest of particles, so small that you need an electron microscope to see some of them. Lab studies had suggested that these tiny plastics could induce inflammation and even the dreaded foam cells that are associated with hardening of the arteries, but would that hold true in vivo, in living human beings?

The researchers found that some of these patients – more than half – had “detectable” microplastics (less than half a millimeter in diameter) and nanoplastics (so tiny you’d think they don’t matter) in their arterial plaque. Perhaps that’s not surprising because, after all, plastic is everywhere. But here’s what got me to rewind the podcast and make sure I’d heard correctly. The patients that had micro- and nanoplastics – MNP for short – in their plaque were significantly more likely to have a cardiac event in the three years following surgery compared to those with virtually no MNP content. In fact, they had a “hazard ratio” – an adjustment that accounts for people dying early in the study – of more than four times what the “clean” patients had.

Why would that be? Who knows, but the authors hypothesized that the MNPs caused inflammation from physical irritation at the microscopic level – mirroring the results from lab experiments - which in turn increased the risk of a cardiac event. Said more simply, teensy, tiny bits of plastic – entering the body through eating, drinking, inhaling, absorbing – has a huge impact on the likelihood of having a heart attack, a stroke, or even death. Even in young adults. Plastic suddenly moved up on my anxiety top hits list.

If it were just this one study, maybe I could shrug it off as a fluke, but there is a growing body of similar evidence. Yet another podcast – Living on Earth – corroborated the cardiac disease-MNP correlation and took it further. Knowing that plastic food containers, when heated, release the contaminants public health officials worry about, researchers in China found that people with high-frequency exposure – i.e. those who frequently ate hot take-out meals packaged in plastic containers – had a higher incidence of congestive heart failure. Knowing that there could be other lifestyle reasons for that, the researchers ran an experiment on rats.

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Over three months, rats were given one of four types of water – one where boiling water sat in a plastic container for one minute and then cooled, another group where the hot water sat for five minutes, another for fifteen minutes, and a control group where water had no contact with plastic. The rats that drank plastic leachate had biochemical markers associated with heart damage. Even more shocking was the physical changes in the heart muscle as seen through a microscope. The muscle cells lined up with textbook regularity in the rodents raised on untainted water. All systems “go” for these clean-water guys. Not so with the ones who drank the plastic tea. As the concentration of plastic leachate increased, the cells got more and more disordered, as if the traffic cop had taken the day off when those hearts were made.

To be clear, hearts and arteries aren’t the only places where flotsam from our “better living through chemistry” lives is accumulating. Other studies have shown that MNP particles are in all parts of our bodies – testicles, placentas, livers, basically everything. But the brain has the motherload, with ten to twenty times more microplastics than other organs. The impact on these organs isn’t yet known, but a reasonable person would suspect that it’s not good.

Where did all this plastic come from? How did we get in this predicament? While there is no single answer, certainly the invention of the plastic bottle played a role. Most people alive today don’t even remember a time before plastic bottles, that’s how ubiquitous they’ve become. It all started with well-intentioned Dupont engineer Nathaniel Wyeth – brother to the famed artist Andrew Wyeth – who was convinced he could develop a synthetic, lightweight alternative to glass. The plastics available at the time – i.e. the ones used for detergent bottles – couldn’t handle the pressure of carbonated beverages. But, after years of inspired tinkering, Wyeth developed a method for extruding polyethelene-terphthalate – what we now know as “PET”, or “number one” recyclable plastics - in a way that aligned the molecules in two directions rather than one, which gave the plastic polymer the strength he was looking for while also being lightweight, affordable, and recyclable. For better or worse, PET rapidly revolutionized packaging for carbonated beverages and soon helped catalyze the market for bottled water. Whereas in 1976 the average American consumed one-and-a-half gallons of bottled water per year, by 2021 the number skyrocketed to 47 gallons per person. And PET started showing up in all manner of food and beverage packaging, as well as a wide range of industrial applications.

Along with the plastics themselves came chemical additives – plasticizers (i.e. phthalates), flame retardants, stabilizers and antioxidants, pigments, antistatic agents, thermal stabilizers. The list goes on. Microplastics are also able to absorb and even concentrate many pollutants including heavy metals, PCBs, antibiotics, endocrine disruptors, and even bacteria and viruses. It’s often hard to distinguish between the effects of plastics themselves versus the things they carry. Probably because of the high surface area compared to volume, the smaller the particle size the higher the impact.

But how do these tiny trouble-makers get into us? The routes are so numerous that it’s impossible to enumerate them, but an easy place to start looking is bottled water. I’ve got a long list of reasons for steering clear of bottled water – the expense, the energy footprint, the impact on local watersheds, the inconvenience of lugging it home from the grocery store – but basic human health might trump all of those reasons combined. Think about it. Most containerized water is shipped in plastic bottles, which puts water and PET in close contact for probably months or even years before the cap is unscrewed. Between warehouses, long-haul trucks, and sunbaked cars, the cargo has perhaps spent at least some time in the temperature zones that accelerate the creation of microplastics and concerning leachate.

Researchers have looked into this very question and found that, indeed, bottled water is chock full of plastic debris. In fact, there have been enough such studies that there is now at least one “review” article – i.e. a study which reviewed and summarized other people’s work. Whether looking at the individual studies, or the bundled conglomerate, the answer is clear: bottled water has lots of plastic in it, and it seems that plastic is coming from the packaging itself. Contrary to my expectation, this is true even for water in glass bottles or cartons though the effect is significantly attenuated. Tap water, not surprisingly, had less plastic than bottled water, and, thanks to filtration at the treatment plant, also had less than natural sources of water.

More recently, scientists from Columbia University looked deeper. They developed a new technique that allowed them to get a better handle on the nanoplastic component, the tiniest particles. They found – brace yourself – that a typical liter of bottled water has nearly 250,000 bits of plastic in it.

Some of those plastics get into the water from leaching. It just happens. But we now know that a big contribution comes from the act of opening and closing the cap. With every on-and-off cycle of the bottle’s lid, roughly 500 tiny pieces of plastic are scraped off and fall into the liquid you’re about to drink. Presumably this is true of bottled soda as well, and a million other food products that come in bottles with screw-on tops. The moral of this story is that if you must drink bottled water, don’t fiddle with the cap. Just leave the bottle open and drink it down. In fact, I think I’m going to take mayonnaise off my grocery list because I can just make it at home and store it in a glass jar with a metal lid. My Diet Pepsi habit presents a larger challenge.

But let’s be real. Bottled water isn’t the only way to ingest plastic. At home, my morning coffee is always in a large, white ceramic mug. Nothing fancy, just a Crate and Barrel standard that my husband and I have come to love. We like the way it feels in our hands, and it’s big, so the coffee stays hot longer. The flip side is that the mug itself absorbs heat, a problem we take care of by pre-heating it with boiling water or microwaving the mug of java for a few seconds. Most coffee shops, however, don’t pre-heat their cups, don’t offer a microwave, and rarely have giant mugs. Which is why I usually ask for a paper cup. I know it’s better for the environment to opt for a ceramic mug, but tepid coffee is a total bummer, and coffee-shop coffee is almost always tepid in a ceramic mug, especially if you add half-and-half, which I do.

On a recent morning, I treated myself with a stop into the French bakery that’s mid-way between our house and the highway. When my name was called, I noticed that the paper cup with my very hot decaf skim latte was decorated with the green outline of a leaf, signaling that the cup was compostable. You’d think that all paper cups are compostable, but you’d think wrong. They’re not recyclable either, but that’s another topic. To keep cups from getting soggy, the paper needs to be coated with a waterproofing substance. Back in the old days paper cups were coated with wax. When I remember back to the Dixie Cups from childhood birthday parties and Girl Scout meetings, I can still feel the wax that would accumulate under my fingernails as I scraped the bottom of the cup.

These days most paper cups are lined with a thin layer of polyethylene, the same material that plastic bags are made of. You can’t see it, but it’s what gives the cup a slick feel on the inside. It’s probably not all that bad for cold drinks, but hot drinks are another matter. When hot beverages or soups come in contact with the polyethylene, plastic particles leach into the contents. The good news is that most of them come out the other end of your digestive tract, but the bad news is that the other 10% or so end up in your arterial “crud” and pretty much every other body part. If you’ve got a daily coffee-to-go habit, maybe it’s time to carry an insulated steel coffee mug with you.

But back in the bougie French bakery I could drink my latte without fear because my paper cup was constructed without plastic. By following the URL printed on the cup’s bottom lip, I learned that the compostable cups are lined with a plant-based polymer that biodegrades right along with the paper. Though the manufacturer doesn’t make any health claims, I breathe a sigh of relief. But maybe at my next coffee shop visit, I should give the ceramic mug another chance.

Most adults get to choose what and how they drink. Not so with infants. The preponderance of baby bottles – a bit more than 80% from what I can tell – are made of polypropylene, a form of plastic. A few years back, scientists in Ireland asked the question “How much plastic is going from those bottles into babies?” The answer, not surprisingly, is “a gob-smacking awful lot.” It’s not just that the bottle is plastic. It’s because, to kill off any lurking bacteria, it’s recommended that the formula be heated to 158 degrees Fahrenheit and then cooled back down a bit before giving it to the baby. Plus, there’s a lot of shaking to dissolve the powdered formula. All told, a bottle-fed baby could be getting well over 2 million microplastic particles per day. At the time the research was published, folks were still waffling over the health impacts of microplastics. Not so anymore.

It's too late for my sons and millions of kids raised on plastic – we can’t turn back the clock. But fortunately for parents today who are paying attention, there are options. Pediatricians love to say, “Breast is best,” and it is. But that’s not always possible. Even breastfed babies occasionally take their milk from a bottle, but it need not be a plastic bottle. Glass baby bottles never fully disappeared, and in some countries, including China, glass has long been the preferred option. I haven’t shopped for baby bottles for at least three decades, and when I did, they were plastic ones. Today, knowing what I know now, even though they’re a bit pricier, I would opt for glass.

In what is perhaps the most quoted piece of career-launching advice ever given, Walter Brooke, playing the role of wise, middle-aged white dude in the 1967 film “The Graduate”, has one word for newly minted college graduate Dustin Hoffman. “Plastics.” Adding a few more words, he continues, “There’s a great future in it.” My guess is that the screenplay writers had no idea just how right they’d be. Or how wrong. Plastics have wormed into our lives in ways beyond the wildest 1960’s imagination, not all of which are appreciated. Maybe if there were to be a remake of the film, Brooke’s one word of advice would be “Glass.”

Splash Zone

The summer issue of UCSF Magazine has the best overview of plastics and health that I’ve come across. “The Plastic Inside Us” addresses plastic in clothes and car tires, the challenges with recycling, health implications, fertility, and things you can do to reduce one’s exposure, and includes simple graphics that hammer the message home.

Ever wonder how much a cloud weighs? Printed on the mylar snack mix bag of my weekend Delta flight was this interesting factoid: “A typical fair weather cumulus cloud weighs about 1.4 billion pounds.” Proof that water really IS heavy!

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There was a time when plastic fascinated me. I grew up in a tight neighborhood of two dozen newly built homes surrounded by farmland. We were the first wave of suburban sprawl but didn’t know it. Our dads – and one or two of the moms – commuted to office buildings in Washington, D.C. or Arlington, Virginia for their white-collar jobs, many of them government related. Manufacturing was something we kids didn’t think much about. My stepfather, who was in the car business, once took us to Detroit where we saw a Ford assembly line, but otherwise my mind was in the out-of-doors. Even through college, my free time was spent on or in the water, riding bikes, hiking, weeding vegetables or shoveling manure. All that changed when I moved north and landed my first salaried job.

The energy crisis of the mid-1970’s was still fresh in everyone’s mind. The solar engineering class I took in college included enough thermodynamics and heat-transfer homework to land me a position in energy conservation. My new employer, a community organization in Lawrence, Massachusetts, provided low-income households with a variety of services including help with their winter energy bills. My job was to help those same clients lower their bills and make their homes more comfortable by giving them weatherstripping, caulking, and insulation to stop drafts from blowing through electrical outlets. I also gave them plastic to cover their windows, creating a cheap imitation of double-paned glass.

Lawrence was a city that made things – textiles, garage doors, and a long list of life’s necessities that I’d always taken for granted. Mostly I just saw these places of production from the outside, but somehow, in the search for plastic window coverings I wrangled my way inside a factory that produced plastic film. I was fascinated by the mammoth machines that blew air through liquefied polyethylene, stretching it into long tubes of clear plastic. So, this was how plastic bags were made! Like Alice, I’d stepped through a looking-glass into a whole new world. If this was what hid behind the façade of the plastic factory, what went on in the garage door factory? The mattress factory? What other magic hid in the crevasses of cities?

In time, I, like plenty of others, developed a certain wariness about plastic. Cautious as I was, however, I didn’t rank it among my top ten environmental worries. I reduced, reused, and recycled but I didn’t get my undies in a bundle over floating islands of marine debris, and certainly not over the itty-bitty pieces floating around in lakes and oceans. It’s not that I thought it was okay, it’s that there was a limit to how many things I could fret about at one time and plastic didn’t make the cut. But notice that my verbs are in past tense. That was then. Now it’s another ball game. One I’d like to play with a leather ball while wearing a cotton T-shirt and taking refreshment from a stainless-steel water bottle.

A dozen or so years ago, while still living in Wisconsin and working just a short stroll from Lake Michigan’s inviting swells, scientists started finding large concentrations of microbeads in the Great Lakes. Up until then I’d never even heard of microbeads, much less had reason to worry about them. But I quickly learned that the term refers to tiny spheres of plastic, one millimeter or less in diameter. They have a role in biomedical research, but most of the attention focused on their role in personal care products like exfoliating scrubs, soaps, and shampoos. Some toothpaste brands added it to boost scrubbing power. Though I’d never knowingly seen one, microbeads were hiding in medicine cabinets and shower stalls across the continent, including mine.

Even though the health ramifications were still relatively unknown, there was a general consensus that microbeads couldn’t be good - for people or for fish. The public demanded protection. With uncharacteristic speed, by 2015 nine states had banned plastic microbeads in “rinse-off cosmetics”, and by the end of that year the federal government passed The Microbead-Free Waters Act, phasing in nation-wide restrictions for rinse-off cosmetics as well as non-prescription drugs. At least a dozen countries around the globe followed suit, prompting some cosmetic manufacturers to phase out their use entirely. However, those bans, as important as they were, were only a drop in the proverbial pool of plastic problems.

Plastic pollution started showing up in ocean surveys as early as the mid-1950s, began to climb in the 1970’s and 80’s, and then shot up like a meteor after 2000. Initially the attention was on “macroplastics” – big stuff like bottles, plastic straws, fishing nets, frisbees – but post-millennium we have a new worry: microplastic and nanoplastic particles. For the most part, plastic does not biodegrade or decompose, it just falls apart into smaller bits of plastic. All forms of plastic debris are potentially deadly to aquatic animals, but the super-small plastics are the ones that are a gut-punch for us humans.

Next week I’ll share what I’ve learned about what those plastics do once they get into our bodies. They’re not as benign as I’d allowed myself to believe. If you’re not already a subscriber, please sign up so that you’re sure to get the next installment.

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Splash Zone

If you want to read more on microbeads or the rise in plastics, here are a few links to get you started:

· One of the first alarms about plastics, and microbeads in particular, showing up in the Great Lakes, published in 2013: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0025326X13006097

· The rise in ocean plastics evidenced from a 60-year time-series: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09506-1

· This article says sort of the same thing as the one above, but with more accessible language: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2363320-scientists-warn-of-alarming-rise-in-ocean-microplastic-pollution/

On the other hand, there is still magic in this world. This post from “Leslie’s Farming with Nature” reminded me of the time, eleven years ago, when my extended family convened in rural Virginia to mourn the loss of someone dear to us. The evening before the memorial service, as we reunited under the oaks, my then 4-year-old niece - who lived in Santa Barbara at the time and had never seen fireflies - saw the tiny lights flickering above the grass, twinkling among the branches. In the most honest sense of wonder I’ve ever heard she turned to my sister and said “Mommy! REAL fairies!”.

There are real fairies, but they are at risk. Leslie’s farm is a good reminder that we have the power to keep them among us. Fireflies and soil health - Leslie's Farming with Nature

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Image by Szabolcs Molnar from Pixabay

You can’t travel to the Mediterranean and not face the bidet. Is it a toilet, a sink, or something else entirely?

A few years back at a truck stop in, of all places, Western Nebraska, I was surprised to find that the women’s bathroom – but not the men’s, per my husband’s testament – was outfitted with a fancy toilet that, in addition to having a heated seat, could play music, bathe my privates with temperature-controlled water and massage my glutes. For all I knew, it could probably even fill out a college application. I didn’t need or want any of these functions, but at least the seat came with clear instructions. Not so with the bidet.

On earlier European travels I’d figured out that bidets are useful for soaking and washing small bits of laundry – a handy function for itinerant folks - but this is certainly not their primary purpose. To get an answer to this nagging question I turned to the interwebs and was immediately served up a smorgasbord of videos, all humorous. Potty humor for grown-ups.

The first video featured a 50-something woman traveling with her husband for a solid year. Like me, she wanted to figure out what the big deal was. Unlike me, she made a video. In addition to figuring out how to clean her lady parts European-style, this world-traveling YouTuber realized that a bidet is perfectly designed for shaving legs or washing feet. The latter tasks are accomplished by sitting sideways on the toilet with feet in the adjacent bidet. It’s the perfect setup! And it saves water if you’re one who otherwise shaves in the shower. Before heading out to dinner, I gave the concept a test drive. My tired, dusty feet – I’d been walking all day in sandals – liked this new arrangement.

And then there was Dr. Chung, “The Friendly Proctologist.” Just the title is enough to make me love this guy. With aplomb, he spoke about poop, bowel movements, incontinence and hemorrhoids, shedding light on topics everyone else over seven is too embarrassed to talk about. From my new “friend” I also learned that bidets can be used before going to the bathroom to stimulate the bowels. TMI, I know.

This evening, after wandering the streets of Napoli’s central historic neighborhood where the first five restaurants we tried were overflowing as if it were Saturday rather than Tuesday, our party of four landed in Cantina Del Sol where we enjoyed a magnificent dinner for half the price it would have been at any of the places that didn’t have room for us. The magnum of a 2009 Campania wine wasn’t so bad either.

While the staff were in the kitchen wrestling with the fourteen-year-old cork, we had a chance to speculate collectively on the bidet. Evan, our 30-something son known for his out-of-left-field musings, asked “Which American presidents do you think have used a bidet?”

Our quick research revealed that the bidet originated in France in 1710, at a time that baths were generally a weekly undertaking. The bidet provided a compromise with its ability to cleanse and refresh certain critical areas while not subjecting the entire body to - probably cold - water of questionable purity.

Knowing that the bidet preceded the American Revolution, we were able to give a clear thumbs-up to Thomas Jefferson, who had been Minister to France before ascending to the presidency. We also gave honorary recognition to Ben Franklin who, though never a president, was surely driven by his curiosity and worldliness to try one while he was on the Continent.

Fast forwarding through top-of-mind presidents, the consensus among the four of us was:

· Teddy Roosevelt – yes

· FDR – would he have been able?

· Truman – Nope. Too midwestern.

· Kennedy – Absolutely yes. If he hadn’t been introduced as a child, Jackie would have sealed the deal.

· Johnson – Probably so, but he was a Texan, so there’s that.

· Nixon – No. No how, no way.

· Ford – No. Grew up among the Dutch Reformists of Grand Rapids (which included my step grandfather, Ford’s high school classmate and good friend, so I have a bit of inside perspective).

· Carter – Yes. He was always up for an adventure, curious to a fault.

· Reagan – No, but Nancy did.

· Bush 1 – No. He didn’t even know what a bar code was so how could he know about bidets?

· Clinton – Yes, yes, yes.

· Obama – Yes. Very worldly, so he would certainly have tried it, even if it was only because Michelle made him do it.

· Trump – Are you kidding?

· Biden – For sure! Think of the stories he could tell back at the Union Hall!

I hope this gives you something to think about the next time you encounter a bidet!

[1] In case you’re looking to find it: Cantina del Sol, Hosteria Napoletana, Via Giovanni Paladino, 3, 80138.

Image credit: sferrario1968

The mechanics behind the Roman nasoni that I wrote about last week are pretty straight forward. There are no moving parts – just pipes, water, and gravity. The water moves through the pipes with enough momentum – historically supplied by gravity, though now-a-days I wouldn’t be surprised if there were pumps somewhere further back in the water distribution system – to come through the nasone’s orifice. Without an on/off button the nasoni are cheap to build and easy to maintain.

Though not nearly as comically named, drinking fountains at Capon Springs and Farms, the casual West Virginia mountain resort that my family has enjoyed off and on through the decades, are equally simple. Capon, nestled along the western border of the George Washington National Forest, is where it is because of the deep springs that literally bubble up from sandstone rocks. Those springs provide all the water needed by the resort – for the spa and pool, and for mundane purposes like guest rooms, laundry, and kitchen – and also feed the creek that runs through the middle of the campus, eventually joining forces with the Cacapon River. The spring water also flows through drinking water fountains that line the verdant grounds.

Like the nasoni of Rome, these fountains run continually. For first-time visitors – particularly those from arid regions where water conservation is a civic duty – it can be unsettling, but there’s nothing wasteful about it. The fountains are just an extension of the springs, a temporary diversion for water recently emerged from the depths before it joins the rocky stream it was destined for all along. West Virginia being the Mountain State, there is plenty of elevation change for the water to flow by gravity alone. No pumps needed. The only mechanical embellishment is a valve on the pedestal that, when opened, redirects the flow to a jug-filling faucet.

But most water fountains are more complicated than that. There are pumps, filters, and chillers. Early fountains shot the water straight up, but that design turned out to be problematic. When you drink from a fountain, some of the water falls back after touching your lips. On those original “straight up” fountains, the water – and sometimes germs picked up from lips – fell back into the spout, creating a health hazard. This was a big deal in pre-World War I days when cholera, dysentery and typhoid were existential worries, and water chlorination – the water revolution that played a huge role in the development of the modern city – was just beginning to take hold.

Fortunately, Halsey Taylor – this name should sound familiar – had another idea. As a supervisor for the Packard Motor Car Company, he noticed dysentery spreading through the plant’s workers and suspected that drinking water was the problem. After nearly fifteen years of tinkering, he invented the “double bubbler”, the two-stream fountain that we all recognize today. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look more closely the next time you bow your head at a bubbler.

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Not all safety improvements are visible, however. Backflow preventers, pressure-sensitive devices with shut-off valves that can prevent water from going in the wrong directions, started coming into use in the 1930’s, but didn’t become widespread until the 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act required them. “The Way Things Work” doesn’t explain what a backflow device is, so I had to go looking, which is where I came across the US EPA’s Cross-Connection Control Manual. It’s never been on the best-seller list, but the “Human Blood in the Water System” example could make it a candidate. Though this has a “Twilight Zone” ring to it, the manual is nonfiction. The “human blood” example really happened.

Some years ago – but we’re talking post-Sputnik era, not outhouse and cholera times - a funeral home was minding its own business, doing what funeral homes do. That included using a hydraulic aspirator to drain - though I think the word “suck” is more apt - fluids from human corpses as part of the embalming process. (And if you want to know how a hydraulic aspirator works, here you go.) The bodily fluids were drawn up through the aspirator and then down through a hose connected to the cold-water faucet at a sink. Cold water flowed down through the hose, pulling the blood and other bodily whatnot down the drain with it. Except when it didn’t.

The first clue that something wasn’t right came when a thirsty visitor noticed blood coming out of the mortuary’s drinking fountain. A bit of plumbing detective work revealed that at times the cold-water pressure was insufficient to keep fluids moving in the “away” direction. When pressure dropped, cadaver fluids flowed backwards into the building’s water distribution system and eventually some of that emerged through the water fountain. A backflow device would have kept that from happening, and it’s examples like this that make plumbing code enforcers take their jobs seriously. Meanwhile, the rest of us are just grateful for clean water.

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Want to read more? Here’s a quick history of Halsey W. Taylor’s invention of the double-bubbler.

Splash Zone

Last week’s post on Rome’s nasoni, which I shared on LinkedIn, elicited this response which I just love. It’s from friend/colleague Adriana Alejandro Osorio who grew up in Puerto Rico but visited Rome as a teen:

“Still remember the first time I visited Rome, back in the '90s, when my aunt (who lived, I kid you not, on my favorite Roman address: Piazza Adriana) first told me about the nasoni. I was so quizzical, even a bit distrustful. Public water? Flowing all day? For free? It felt too good to be true. But it didn’t take long before I became a full convert; grateful, as I poured water on my hand to drink (water bottles weren't the norm way back when). It stayed with me. The idea that water should be so accessible, clean, and cared for as a public good. I found myself wondering why that wasn’t the norm everywhere. Rome taught me something quietly radical, that dignity can flow from a simple spout on the street corner.”

In other news of the week … almost every day, my feed includes something about the growing challenge of data centers. This post from River Network, which includes tidbits like “writing one email with ChatGPT uses 16.9 oz of water,” is worth the read.

Finally, some of my readers may be too squeamish for this, but I loved seeing how Elk River MN’s wastewater plant, plagued with waterborne flies, is giving up larvicide (i.e. pesticide for fly larvae) and handing the job over to native fish.

The need to carry water got me thinking about Rome and its fountains. I was last there in October of 2023, playing tourist along with a few family members. The leaves may have been changing back home, but in Rome the Mediterranean sun followed us everywhere. Despite the heat we never had to worry about water because of the plethora of public fountains.

David Sedlak’s first sentence in “Water 4.0”, his seminal book on the evolution of water infrastructure, lays out the maxim that Rome exemplifies: “If water is the essential ingredient of life, then water supply is the essential ingredient of civilization.” By extension, creating and supporting a world-class city required world-class ingenuity and engineering applied to water.

Two millennia ago, Romans famously re-defined the possibilities for water infrastructure, both to supply the city with clean drinking water, and also to flush its waste, eventually out to sea. They were able to tap into natural springs within the city walls, but the Romans are most remembered for their aqueducts – some elevated, most buried or enclosed – which carried water from springs, lakes, and rivers as far as fifty miles away into the center of Rome. Thanks to elevation changes, they were able to do all of this, sometimes with the clever application of siphons, without pumps.

Once the water made it into the city’s walls, it was distributed as a public good, available to all. In addition to grand displays – after all, what good is all that water if you can’t show it off - they installed public taps throughout the city. Maybe a few of the elite had water piped directly into their home – I don’t know, I’m just speculating – but it seems that everyone had access to a nearby public fountain where they could collect what they needed and carry it back home.

In the centuries after the Roman Empire collapsed, most of the city’s famed buildings fell into disrepair, often getting buried in the sands of time – literally. Along with that went the public fountains, large and small. But for the most part the underlying water engineering remained, waiting like a hidden treasure until someone had the right combination of inclination, smarts, and money to tap back into it. That started to happen in the 1870’s, shortly after Italy’s unification, when the city began installing “nasoni” – nasone in the singular - to serve the dual purpose of supplying a public water supply for its residents, while also preventing stagnation and providing ventilation valves for the revived Roman water-supply system.

The nasoni that I saw all looked roughly the same. From about two-and-a-half feet up the cast iron base, a pipe – a bit less than an inch in diameter - exited horizontally and then artfully bent earthward, evoking the image of a large nose, a “Roman” or Aquiline nose to be precise, from which ran a constant stream of water. This explains the name – nasone/nasoni comes from an Italian word that originally meant “big nose”. Clearly the Italians have a sense of humor! It’s tempting to call it a runny nose, but that hardly instills confidence in the water’s quality.

During our visit, there was a steady stream of people filling water bottles at the first nasone we encountered. But after watching an experienced native we realized how the clever design converts the tap into a true water “fountain.” In a move taken straight out of a second-grader’s joke book, to make the conversion you plug the tap’s opening with your index finger, essentially putting your finger up its nose. Water pressure then builds up behind the offending finger.

We’ve all done this with a garden hose on a hot day, plugging the opening with our thumb and drinking from the water’s spray. But in the nasone’s case the water spouts out from a small hole – maybe a quarter of an inch diameter - drilled into the top surface of the pipe a few inches back from the “nostril’s” primary opening. Come to think of it, it’s positioned like a whale’s blow hole. But instead of putting forth a cetaceanic spray of water going every which way, the nasone’s slender orifice shoots a broad arc of water out of the hole, transforming the tap into a perfect drinking fountain. Passersby need to proceed with caution – it can also shoot like a high-powered squirt gun!

From what I’ve read, there are about 2,500 nasoni throughout Rome. Over the last decade the city’s water supplier has added a number of “case dell’acqua” or “water houses” which up the game by providing chilled water, both still and sparkling, as well as telephone charging stations. We’re a far cry from that in Minneapolis, but the Italian example is something to shoot for.

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Want to read more? Check out this local’s guide. Her photos are much better than mine! The drinking fountains of Rome: all you need to know about nasoni, fontanelle rionali and free drinking water in Rome - Mama Loves Rome

Bonus – on a topic having nothing to do with Italy or infrastructure, but everything to do with being inspired, check out Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ interview with oceanographer Sylvia Earle. This was her Earth Day 2025 episode in her podcast “Wiser Than Me”.

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I’d known him for a few years before being invited to the home he shared with his woman-friend, the half of the couple that was my introduction to him. The house was of a style typical of cities and first-ring suburbs of the upper Midwest built in the early third of the 1900’s. Like most of the houses in its city, it had a modest yard, which is another way of saying that neighbors were close by.

Knowing that I could be trusted with contraband information, on that first visit Michael invited me upstairs to a small balcony off the back of the house, probably intended as an “airing porch” back in the day. Despite the proximity of potentially prying eyes from next door, Michael had managed to create a private, outdoor shower, up on the second level where it had access to summer breezes – this was a summer-only shower – and views of the setting sun. Despite its nonconformity – to code as well as to convention - I was insanely covetous and for the next two years let my wheels turn on how my husband and I could build something similar.

I still haven’t figured out how to build an outdoor shower at my city house, but shortly after we moved to Minneapolis – almost eight years ago – we implemented a different Michael-inspired project.

When it comes to rain, beyond what can be captured in rain barrels, the goal should be to slow it down and get it to soak into the ground. “Infiltrate” as we water folks are prone to saying. Otherwise, it causes all manner of havoc. Unable to follow its natural course, rain runs off roofs, turf, and roads into storm sewers. It picks up trash and lawn chemicals on its way, and, as it gathers steam, eventually erodes stream banks and pollutes lakes, to say nothing of the eyesore created from floating straws and bottlecaps it carries with it. If the water can instead make its way into the soil, wonderful things happen.

As rain, now “stormwater” because it’s hit the ground, moves slowly through soil particles, the underground microbial community cleans it of most contaminants. Aquifers are replenished, providing a hidden reservoir to sustain plants through dry times and maintain stream flow between rain events. Plus – something that trout anglers know well – it cools the water. Imagine the summer temperature difference between a basement or a cave and the roadway outdoors, and you’ll be able to picture why water that makes it into the ground is cooler once it emerges than water that journeyed across pavement.

Within a year of moving to the Twin Cities, we got to work retrofitting our urban lot to be as rain-friendly as we could manage. Four rain barrels, two raingardens, and the replacement of lawn with native perennials and vegetable beds got us much of the way there. But I still had the problem of the driveway. The concrete slab gradually sloped away from the house out to the sidewalk and, a few feet beyond, connected to the road. We aren’t far from one of Minneapolis’ famed lakes, so it’s pretty much a straight shot from our driveway to the storm sewer to the lake. But I had seen what Michael and Susan had done with their driveway back in Wisconsin, and I wanted the same for ours.

The idea is quite simple though the installation requires muscle and equipment. Basically, I wanted to install a modified French drain at the base of the driveway to divert precipitation into the ground and/or a rain garden before it could hit the street. Our muscley son rented a concrete saw – I was impressed that he knew how to use one – and sliced two parallel cuts about six inches apart across the width of our driveway. We then employed a landscape crew – the ones who were helping us with the raingardens – to pry out the strip of concrete and excavate a trench about eight inches deep. In this they laid a single layer of landscape cloth, and atop that went four-inch black perforated drainage tubing, and finally a layer of small stones.

That would have been sufficient to capture gentle, garden-variety rains which could soak into the soil at the base of the trench, but for gully-washers we needed something more. The crew extended the trench and piping another two feet on one side of the driveway and directed the outflow into the front-yard raingarden.

For the last seven years, this simple system has been keeping our driveway runoff from draining to the street. In the photo below you can see that sand and sediment have filled in the spaces around the stones, but this doesn’t seem to have impeded the absorptive capacity. I clean it out every two years or so, but it’s mostly because I like the look of the bare stones.

We took the easy route by asking other people to implement my vision – Michael’s vision – but most DYI types would find this to be a cake-walk project. For me, it has the added benefit that, in addition to playing its part in keeping the lake clean and the groundwater replenished, it keeps Michael in my life, each and every day. He may be gone, but he’ll never be forgotten.