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Lynne Glazer said:

> The horse poop conundrum is about the water runoff 
> into the OCEAN, 
While I'll agree that a few horse piles aren't going to do any real damage,
I can tell you how we've ended up worrying about things like this. When
waste water is treated, the first point is a settling pond with filtration -
not very fine, but enough to get out things like lawn chairs, since most
places storm runoff gets treated too (which can be a disaster, but that's
another story).

The effluent then normally goes into several phases of biological reactors,
and what comes out the other side is very clean - in many cases cleaner than
the water we're dumping into. It would actually be easier to turn that back
to drinking water in most cases than to turn river water into drinking
water.

Where we run into problems is that in some places we've skipped the
biological reactors and pumped what is essentially raw sewage right into the
ocean. Despite the ocean being a big place, a continuous stream of nearly
raw sewage causes a lot of damage, and does result in human health hazards.
I'm fairly sure most places have treatment in place by now, but I was amazed
to find out there were several places in CA 10 years ago when I was studying
this that did dump settled sewage right into the ocean.

The storm runoff and streams are another problem - excess nitrogen from
people over-fertilizing their lawns (farmers are in general less of a
problem than homeowners - fertilizer costs $$), oil from roads, and all
sorts of things create a significant pollutant load.

Once you've gone and screwed up a water body, the rules about what you can
put into it get much stricter than if it isn't in a problem state. Same
thing with air. I know of a water treatment plant in Georgia where the
output is required to be cleaner than the river - it would actually be
illegal to take in water from the river and pump it back out. So if they'd
taken care not to screw up the water quality in the first place, no one
would be worrying about things like a few horse piles. That same population
density that causes your property values to be ridiculous also pose some
really interesting challenges in terms of both providing enough drinking
water and getting rid of the waste.

I also think that CA tends to take many things to extremes, and some of the
very worst environmental problems in the US have been in CA, so there's a
corresponding hyper-sensitivity.



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