Do You Know What You Don’t Know?
Remember that old saw: “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story”? It’s funny, but ignores a basic truth: What constitutes fact isn’t always clear. As June segued into July, everything I read seemed to demonstrate the same theme: Facts are often just the fictions that most of us agree upon.
On July 1, I finished Columbine, Dave Cullen’s book about the famous school shootings that took ten years to write and got great reviews. The recommendations promised a new perspective on the old news, and the book delivered.
Cullen maintains that in the months after the tragedy at Columbine, everybody – the police, the reporters, the onlookers, and the public — got nearly everything wrong. According to Cullen, the perpetrators weren’t members of the Goth group that students had labeled the Trench Coat Mafia. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had merely worn dusters that day to conceal their weapons.
Nor were Harris and Klebold friendless outcasts who snapped. They had been planning their murderous rampage for a year.
Nor were the boys only targeting jocks and Christians, as was frequently reported. Dozens of pipe bombs and several larger bombs hooked to propane tanks were found in the school. If all of that homemade weaponry had been correctly wired, hundreds of students would have died. That was the plan Harris and Klebold laid out in their notebooks and basement tapes.
And the police were not, as assumed, totally in the dark about the boys’ proclivities. A year before the killings at Columbine, an investigator who had seen Harris’s website filed a two-page affidavit for a search warrant because the site included details about making bombs of a sort that had turned up in Eric’s neighborhood. That warrant, however, was never acted upon.
After the tragedy, a group of local officials decided the existence of the would-be warrant could prove embarrassing – or worse – so they conspired to keep the affidavit secret and managed to do so for five years. And the book goes on, toppling one established notion after another.
But when it comes to challenging presumed truths, Columbine is a piker compared to the book I picked up next, The Last Well Person by Nortin Hadler, M.D. Hadler examines medical studies and statistics and concludes that an astonishing number of standard American medical tests, treatments, surgeries, and drugs are more harmful than helpful.
Hadler, however, is no naturopath. He champions modern medical practices, but believes that American medical standards have been skewered by monied interests, poorly designed scientific studies, and lax scholarship. Hadler thinks pharmaceutical companies conduct too many of our trials and tests; and medical associations, insurance companies, and surgeons determine too much of our treatment.
Health care complaints are hardly new, but Hadler’s book offers a sobering view of a system that advances exorbitantly expensive treatments which frequently don’t work. If just a fraction of what Hadler claims is true, fixing our health care system will require a lot more than cutting costs and expanding insurance coverage.
Salidans, however, have recently been focused on another problem. Here in Chaffee County, Nestlé is proposing to truck 200 acre-feet of spring water, or about 65 million gallons annually, from Nathrop to a bottling plant in Denver. That’s considerably more water than any household would use, but not out of line with what a single farm or ranch might consume.
Thus Nestlé’s proposal is fairly modest – but definitely not popular. In Michigan and California, Nestlé has seriously depleted the water supplies in two small communities. So locals are worried. What will the company do here?
And they’ve got cause to worry. Nestlé is a huge corporation that can out-lobby, out-spend, and out-lawyer us, and it has proven itself to be a bad neighbor to small communities in state after state: Michigan, California, Maine…
Yet some of our anxiety seems over the top. What happened in Michigan and California probably can’t happen here. In Michigan, the company’s plan to take 560 million gallons a year didn’t raise serious objections — until an area that was darned near drowning in water started going dry.
And in California? McCloud officials readily agreed to let Nestlé have 1600 acre-feet of spring water per annum and an unlimited amount of ground water for 50 years – which left the citizens beating back that plan for half a decade.
What’s clear about the cases in Michigan and California is that some people have more water than is good for them, and therefore don’t question a bad water deal until their wells go dry.
But it’s almost impossible to imagine such a scenario in Colorado. In Chaffee County, protesters were clamoring before a single drop of water was lost. And our commissioners were listening. On July 2, the Mountain Mail reported that stipulations had been added to Nestlé’s application requiring extra water monitoring, a mitigation fund, wetlands restoration, and a limit on truck traffic during peak times – and the commissioners still harbored reservations about the plan.
Colorado law is designed to protect senior rights holders and downstream users, and Nestlé’s usage will require augmentation (which means Nestlé will have to put as much augmentation water into the river as it takes out of the spring, in order to ensure that its use doesn’t deplete our water supply).
But even though Colorado law safeguards water users, it also encourages commerce, which makes it hard to just say no to new enterprises. Whether Nestlé can be ousted remains to be seen. But whichever way it goes, local activists have inspired a better, safer plan – and we owe them. It’s enough to make you proud to be an American. For a day or so, I thought, “Wow, democracy really can work.” Then I started thinking about something County Commissioner Tim Glenn pointed out in that same Mountain Mail article, which reiterated something Terry Scanga, the director of the Upper Arkansas Water Conservancy District (UAWCD) had said earlier: With 200 acre-feet of water committed to augmentation, Aurora might be more inclined to use its water during a drought, which could make things very difficult for junior users downstream.
That’s a fairly convoluted idea which I didn’t take too seriously (since Glenn clearly doesn’t want Aurora to supply the augmentation water and UAWCD sells augmentation plans). To tell the truth, it struck me as a clever effort to assign the risk that Aurora poses to Nestlé.
Then it occurred to me: Even if the activists prevail, and Nestlé moves on to exploit another vulnerable community, Aurora will still pose the same risk. After all, Aurora could lease augmentation water to someone else – or just need water because of a drought. So does that mean Aurora poses a bigger threat than Nestlé?
And what about Colorado Springs? They’re bigger than Aurora and just as thirsty. If there’s another drought, might they start eyeing our water again?
Come to think of it, I’ve never heard of a basin in trouble due to one 200 acre-feet per year consumptive use that’s augmented. But I’ve heard about plenty of them floundering because of overdevelopment, and high ag water consumption, and contamination from septic systems or farm run-off or industrial waste. So what about us? Are we actually the biggest threat to our own water supply? Will our homes, businesses, sprawl, and wastes eventually do us in?
Or are there even bigger threats to our water?
By July 4th, I was back to fretting about democracy. How can democracy work when we have so many problems? And when there are so many schemes? And so much misinformation? And so much that we don’t know?
It’s a nightmare, because you know what they say, “It’s not what you know that counts, it’s what you don’t know.”
Martha Quillen lives in Salida where she’s CEO of a faltering housekeeping and weed-herding venture.
