your complacency, if you listen. But there is no benefit for you in listening to this harsh message, and surely no help Coyote will offer. Just a complaint. Then he will go off howling about it.

Those who hear Coyote bark are blessed, in one way; but listening to this sort of thing will disturb your peace of mind around ancient Native American burial sites. Perhaps the ancient ones buried there in forgotten ceremonies are speaking through Coyote's barking. Or maybe you will get that feeling when looking up at the massive cliff-dwellings stuffing down on the hills, crowding Crystal Cove, or when looking at a new tract -- knowing that scores of rabbits, mice, burrowing owls, died in their holes, buried alive by the bulldozers, and migratory birds will hover in confusion, looking for the lone tree that sheltered them for generations. Or when you realize that great stretches of beach are now off-limits to creatures and plants that once thrived there. When you see the pickle-plant in old filled-in ditches, still striving to come back, and each year, they spray it with Agent Orange. But it still comes back. When you think about the 1800 tons of DDT dumped off White's Pt.

Coyote, as trickster, will lure you into thinking that you have an ally. But just as often, resolution involves acceptance, even of violating ancient graves and death of homeless skunks and oppossums.

Coyote legend, like the idea of "thanatos", or the death wish, validates our ancient axiom that "there's a fly in every ointment".

Just when things are going well, the economy is soaring, we are dealing with all foreign crazies, up pops George W. Bush to inject insanity, potlatch and radioactive waste onto the landscape.

Here in California, what once was a budget surplus was drained off by Texas "energy company" scams, and the crisis trickles down to the local level. This is right in tune with the Bush agenda, which is to decrease taxes, borrow money, and create fiscal crises that lead to reduction in spending and abandonment of public benefit services.

Carried to its extreme, this idea would have you contract for your own police, fire, electricity, defense and other services; and if you choose the wrong provider, just too bad.

This same sort of crazy, non-utilitarian thinking is now attacking the Orange County Sewage District (OCSD). It is acknowledged by all that the OCSD has operated, for many years, with the minimum of waste treatment allowed by a stretch of the law. Fiscal shenanigans, arguable "bond arbitrage", sludge-processing sleight-of-hand, and the luck of wind direction usually carrying away excessive stench from antiquated tanks have carried them so far.

The Ocean has taken the burden of the "LOAD" (that's the word the EPA uses) of fecal solids, chemicals and treated wastewater, and the untreated "B" class sludge was dumped anywhere convenient, until it was chased out of Riverside, Kings and Kern Counties -- now, it is sent to Arizona and to the Indian Reservation, where you can, apparently, get away with murder, allegorically.

Last year, the past caught up with OCSD, and the Board of Directors agreed that a crowded Orange County needed a completely new approach to water policy -- both fresh water procurement, and wastewater treatment.

Each new citizen requires 200 gallons per day (gpd) of fresh water, and generates about 100 gpd of sewage. Getting fresh water is not as easy as it was in the old days. Aquifers are contaminated with new and strange chemicals, such as MTBE, that don't belong in a healthy biosphere. Salt water from the Ocean, and contaminated water from other aquifers, leaches into underground water lakes that once held the
freshwater bounty of centuries of slow, filtering accumulation.

Water reclamation is not an easy task. San Diego, for example, is looking into using the Ocean Outfall from San Onofre Unit 1 for a desal plant, as well as complex water swaps that involve water law litigation, and even floating giant plastic bags of water down the Coast from NoCal. There is no easy way to get more fresh water, as San Diego is finding out, and there is so far no economically proven desal plant. Moreover, the input to such plants cannot be fouled with radiation, small toxic molecules, or sewage.

OCSD took a proactive, prudent approach of fixing most of the deferred maintenance -- after all, concrete sewage structures are only amortized over 30 years -- and of tackling this big problem of revising our water policy. For too long, we have thought that we could get unlimited fresh water from "somewhere else", and dump our detritus "somewhere else" with minimal treatment.

Coyote howls, and barks. And if you don't hear that barking, you must be deaf.

The OCSD Board heard, and took the inevitable, necessary step, required for the public health -- and the health of what's left of our Coast and Ocean -- of upgrading the plant, fixing some of the leaky pipes and broken infrastructure, allocating resources for dealing with Urban Runoff of Oil Economy toxins, and for moving to at least secondary treatment standards for sewage released into the Ocean. This is not
excessive, this is just a start.

Unless you pay for the basics of public health, you cannot afford to have a complex, crowded society. And OC has one of the richest, wealthiest, and even prettiest crowded biospheres, still. But it was disgusting to hear those living in multi-million-dollar houses complaining about spending $200, or $400, for sewage treatment. Really, does it matter to those folks? Does the apartment house owner, whose highly leveraged investment now may return 30% or more per year, really have an interest in avoiding better sewage treatment?

Would these skinflints also beggar the Fire Department, refusing them new respirators and rigs, and short-change the Police, taking away their radios, cars and pistols?

Such selfishness, such irony, must have Coyote Howling. That's why these twerps, seemingly orchestrated by the Orange County Register and its bogus editorial staff, can't hear the barking, because Coyote is still not done howling, laughing at us.

/Doug

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