This article written for Public Administrations Times by planner Rebecca Bryant gives lots of good information about the wastewater possiblities for Eureka Springs. - Barbara Harmony, 12/14/98 Eureka Springs, Arkansas: Where Anal Retentive May Become a Compliment by Rebecca Bryant Patricia Michael announced, "Today, we will not use the word 'waste.' Today, feces and urine are nutrients, and there's no reason your nutrients should be going somewhere else." "Bigger is not better, continued Ms. Michael, who hailed from Austin but was obviously not a native Texan. "Pollution only becomes unmanageable when you have large amounts of contaminants. Pumping waste, putting pipes across the ground is a dinosaur. Chlorine is out; it's a type-one error." Sets of bleary eyes, watching the coffee maker drip its brew, perked up. We'd woken early to attend a workshop about alternatives to wastewater treatment sponsored by the City of Eureka Springs Department of Public Works. Crowded into the Cottage Inn Restaurant, the 45 or so of us--property owners, homesteaders, developers, public officials, environmentalists and engineers--would learn by day end that the mysterious type-one error was to be avoided at all cost. Developed by Australian Bill Mollison, permaculture is the integrated design of shelter, food and energy systems. Permaculture employs what is called "appropriate technology"--small scale, easily replicable tools and techniques that treat the environment well and, ideally, use local materials and labor. Examples are passive solar heating systems, organic gardening and composting toilets. A graduate of the New Alchemy Institute in Massachusetts where John Todd pioneered appropriate technology and of the International Permaculture Institute in Tyalgum, Australia, Patricia Michael has been working for the past ten years as a site designer in central Texas. Her credits include Deer Ridge Subdivision in Lavernia, Texas and Brookside Subdivision in San Antonio. Both subdivisions feature rainwater harvesting, wildlife habitat and corridors, gray water bioremediation, aquaculture, edible landscaping and building orientation to maximize energy efficiency. Ms. Michael has presented an impressive number of workshops and lectures on permaculture. Barbara Harmony, coordinator of the Water Center in Eureka Springs, met Michael years ago through the bioregional movement, the advance guard of a new order where geographic boundaries will be defined by ecosystems, not politics. She introduced Michael to Eureka Springs officials, who are confronting the problem that a large portion of the city is sewerless. McClelland Consulting Engineers, a Fayetteville firm, has presented Eureka Springs with an $8.7 million solution: more pipes, more pumps and expansion of the existing Leatherwood treatment facility. Ms. Michael and others at the workshop have a different vision for Eureka Springs: a series of innovative neighborhood treatment facilities sited at schools, businesses or public parks. Proponents of this vision believe that using the wastewater facilities as educational outlets might leverage Eureka Springs into the ecotourism market. "My dream," says Barbara Harmony, "is to reclaim the springs in Eureka Springs and to have a model system for water and nutrient recovery." After forming a circle and introducing ourselves, Michael talked with a quiet fervor about how society is in recovery from thinking that we are separate from or better than nature. In what she called her akido metaphor, Michael said that mechanical systems push the river. "We create machines that sit on the landscape, when, really, the landscape is already the solution. If we work with the landscape, observing how it cleans, then we can live in healthy designs with few inputs and where yields (nutrients) are used on-site." Nature cleans itself with light and dark, by movement and oxidation, by heating and cooling, by changing pH factors, by filtering and by alchemy, she explained, her blue eyes flashing. Armed with a four-hour slide presentation, interrupted only by questions and lunch, Patricia Michael translated her ideas into visual solutions. What Eureka Springs engineers call neighborhood modified septic systems, what the Arkansas Department of Health calls rock/plant systems and what Michael and others call alternative wastewater treatment or bioremediation are elaborations on the basic septic system--a holding tank that overflows through lateral lines into soil, which theoretically strips away bacteria, feces and other pathogens. With at least thirty inches of soil depth, an excellent soil morphology or structure and a water table that doesn't rise to the surface during heavy rains, septic systems work fine. Under all other conditions, they pollute groundwater. Among Michael's first slides was a pond lined with grasses, bulrushes, and irises on the campus of Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos. It was one of four detention ponds, receiving all gray water (wastewater from showers, sinks and laundries) discharged at the university. Michael described how she had inoculated the pond with microbial bacteria by fetching water from mud puddles. Through aerobic and anaerobic digestion, bacteria contribute to the remediation process. Plants like bulrushes extract contaminants from wastewater; some plants specialize in the extraction of heavy metals while others prefer nitrogen or salts. The species Alyssum has a thing for nickel. Below the pond's surface were layers of gravel, straw, crushed limestone, more straw and sand. Gray water filtered through the strata before flowing out a pipe at the base of the pond and eventually into the San Marcos River. "Urine is another whole workshop," stressed Michael, pointing next to a urine-separating toilet. A woman in the audience, who once owned the second organic plant nursery in the U.S., interjected that urine mixed with twenty-five parts water was a complete fertilizer. At a ten-unit cohousing complex in Germany, we learned that urine and laundry water (rich in phosphorous) fertilized an orchard. Water from showers and sinks, rigged with charcoal filters to trap grease, flowed straight from the building onto the landscape. Effluent from low-flush, urine-separating toilets filled a tank aerated with an aquarium bubbler, then flowed into plant beds in an attached greenhouse, settling through sand, aggregate and a permeable liner, before trickling outside into a small lagoon adjacent to the complex. The Cottage Inn is one of the finest restaurants in Eureka Springs, and for the lump sum of $10, workshop participants selected Greek salad or pasta or chicken sandwiches. Sipping coffee, Eureka Springs City Council Member Bill Rubley said that he decided to attend the workshop after hearing a brief presentation by Michael at the council meeting the previous night. Mustachioed and good looking like a sheriff from the old West, Rubley admitted interest in Michael's wastewater solutions. They had possibilities, he thought, for Eureka Springs. The problem was state and federal mandates required Eureka to meet certain water quality standards. The city can barely stay on top of those mandates let alone try something new. Though home to a substantial population of environmentalists and free thinkers, Rubley wasn't sure that Eureka was ready for Michael's ideas. Waiters served chocolate cake with dollops of real whipped cream. Kirby Murray, Public Works Director, said that he had decided to sponsor the workshop because Eureka Springs was faced with upgrading its wastewater plant and sewering the unsewered parts of the city. He believed that Michael's ideas were viable for Eureka Springs but, like Rubley, didn't know how well they would be accepted. "We're a flush-it-down-the-hole society," said Murray. The best approach "is to try one alternative system, then if it works, four more. Then ten systems." Murray speculated it will be years down the road before the Arkansas Department of Health allows alternative municipal systems. "Just to compost the city's sewage sludge was a marathon of paperwork and permits," said Murray. "It had been done for years but never in this state." Only a few years ago, you could build any way you wanted outside city limits in northwest Arkansas. Land was plentiful and people, scarce. There may have been laws, but they certainly weren't enforced. Many a Ozark domicile lacked indoor toilet. For old timers that was the way it had always been. To the waves of back-to-landers that came to the Ozarks in the 1970s and 1980s, outhouses represented a certain alternative chic. People wanting indoor facilities hired a backhoe operator to dig a hole for a concrete tank and scrape away topsoil for plastic pipes. Millions of feet of leach fields--some soundly installed, some not--lace the Beaver Lake watershed. Even today, for parcels over ten acres, you still don't need a septic system permit. Only on smaller parcels does the Arkansas Department of Health come into the picture. Roy Hebert is the Area One (Benton, Boone, Carroll, Crawford, Franklin, Madison, Newton, Sebastian and Washington Counties) Environmental Program Specialist responsible for permitting septic systems. According to Hebert, "All the good soils is gone. Developers are going further and further out into marginal soils. We see a great number of subdivision proposals in unsuitable soils for septic systems." Combine exponential population growth with finite soils and pressure builds. The traditional solution is large-scale treatment facilities like the expansion that citizens of Eureka Springs are warily eyeing. Hooking low-density rural areas into sewer treatment plants can be an impossibly expensive proposition. Because modified systems work in marginal soils and other situations unsuitable for septic systems, because they are considerably more effective than septic systems in cleaning effluent, more people are installing them. The downside is that a rock/plant system costs about $4,000 for a household installation in Arkansas. Add a sand filter and the price rises to $5,000 or $6,000. Septic systems, on the other hand, run $1,500 to $2,000. People don't install rock /plant systems to protect they environment; they do it when it's the only acceptable option to the Department of Health. The more extensive use of alternative treatment systems in Europe is due partly to government subsidy. After lunch, the slides continued. We saw a traditional Chinese pond and dike system, Austin's water hyacinth treatment plant, a village system in Africa, a school system in Sweden. In Norway we saw innovative wastewater applications at a public housing development, a multi-story office complex and apartments. To intermittent questions, Michael explained that bacteria are such large molecules that they are easily filtered out. In removing feces, "there's no question that a soil-based system works better than an aquatic system." Funguses and mushrooms degrade viruses. As for other pathogens, Michael made two points. First, if you emulate natural systems, pathogens will not exist long. In the traditional Chinese pond and dike system, the only problem encountered in 4,000 years was parasites. By adding a biogas digestor as the first step, the Chinese eliminated parasites. Their ponds produce marketable fish, shellfish and ducks. Second, Michael advised participants to put earthworms into compost toilets to deal directly with pathogens. Compost toilets are self-contained indoor systems that convert feces into fertilizer. At midafternoon Michael divided participants into four teams to design systems for a hypothetical school of one thousand students in Eureka Springs. Teams dutifully separated gray water, black water and urine, using nutrients on-site. Proposals turned Eureka's steep slopes into water sculptures, oxygenating effluent. Wastewater systems became a science teaching tool. Michael invited Ray Hebert to explain the Department of Health's official position on bioremediation. "The technologies presented are a direction the world is going in," said Hebert. "The Health Department is aware of that. We've made treatment with aquatic plants and sand filters available for seven years. In rural areas and Eureka Springs, the Health Department permits any NSF-approved compost toilet. Innovation is essential to resolving wastewater problems. My office and the state office are open to any viable options you may want to present through a licensed designer." At the workshop's conclusion, a committee formed, calling themselves a special committee to the City Council, and scheduled their first meeting several weeks later. The afternoon dwindled quickly, but no one rushed out the door. With a new frame of reference about the byproducts of our lives, we milled about in small groups, concurring what it was a shame to flush nutrients down the toilet. The End. Return to Eureka People