They can have my dish soap when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.
OK, maybe it’s not quite that bad, but a new environmental law in Spokane has citizens smuggling illicit dishwashing soap from neighboring Idaho. While the environmental soap opera — sounds like a bad episode of “The Housewives of Spokane County” — is far away from Federal Way, it serves as a reminder that our environmental laws have to make sense if we want them to work.
Our nation’s waters have been taking a beating from phosphate in soaps (not just dishwashing soap, but laundry as well) and agricultural fertilizers. After the washing, waste water containing the mineral gets into groundwater and surface water. When populations are dense enough, all that phosphate-containing dishwasher waste water adds up to trouble.
Phosphate is a nutrient that, like nitrogen, can cause troublesome algae blooms, toxic cyanobacteria and eventually dangerously-reduced oxygen levels in the water. Fish and other aquatic animals don’t do so well when they can’t get oxygen out of the water. Spokane River salmon are endangered, in part because of oxygen-starved waters.
Federal and state environmental agencies have been moving the nation toward phasing out phosphates for some time. National soap manufacturers now say that by mid-2010, there will be a new generation of effective phosphate-free soaps to replace the polluting soap. Problem is, Spokane County decided to enact a total ban on phosphate soaps last year.
The intent was good: Spokane River is being asphyxiated by the oxygen-sucking nutrient. The implementation, though, did some sucking of its own.
A lot of people don’t have faith in the current phosphate-free soaps on the market.
“With the ‘green’ stuff, the dishes come out with a real slippery texture — like somebody poured a cup of grease in some dishwater… Just really gross,” said Spokane resident Patti Marcotte in a Los Angeles Times article about the soap ban.
The result is that there are a fair number of Spokaners who feel that adhering to the ban comes with an unacceptable price: Dirty dishes. So, off they go to Idaho for illegal dishwashing soap.
That might seem, at first blush, to be trivial when compared to the fate of the Spokane River, but it’s not. There’s an important lesson for any of us concerned with environmental policy: Our environmental laws have to pass the common sense test.
Recent focus group research conducted in the Puget Sound region by conservation groups underscores how highly we rate environment in supporting a high quality of life. Perhaps not surprisingly, respondents were ready to throw the environment under the bus in cases where they felt those values conflicted with more closely-held values like security or health. Dirty dishes would fall into this category.
The lesson is clear. If we want to create good environmental policy, it has to speak to multiple values and not conflict with other values that are perceived as more important.
In the case of Hylebos conservation, we’ve worked hard to demonstrate that there are multiple benefits to preserving open space and forest habitat. In addition to protecting clean air and water, and providing places for native birds and fish, protected natural areas provide walking and hiking activities, have demonstrable positive effects on mental and physical health, and support a strong economy.
When it comes to hoped-for new environmental measures, like green buildings and low-impact development, the approach has to be more sophisticated than passing laws that require builders and landowners to include these things. If we want to see green buildings in Federal Way, we should focus on creating incentives that, in turn, make green building the best choice.
As Spokane’s soap troubles have taught us, it’s not enough to just tell people to be green.
