Your strange addiction: water
New logo, brief hiatus, still culinary alpha right to your inbox. Happy National Water Day.
“From water does all life begin.” - Frank Herbert, Dune
Good morning beautiful readers! Did you miss us?!?!
In honor of national water day and Muad’dib, I thought I’d write a piece on what I’ve been thinking about for the past couple of months regarding our water system. To structure the discussion, I am going to talk about it within Stewart Brand’s Pace Layers framework. I highly recommend reading the full (short) article here, but I will attempt to summarize it below. The concept initially arose from his attempt to explain how large complex systems can absorb, react, and learn from shocks.
The image above shows the Pace Layers of our society. Each slower, lower layer protects the chaotic upper layer from throwing off the entire system, while the upper layer’s faster iteration cycles allows the lower layer to learn/improve on a longer time horizon. Or as he says:
Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.
Once you learn it, you can’t stop seeing this framework everywhere. Freeman Dyson further articulates the concept:
The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival on six distinct time scales. To survive means to compete successfully on all six time scales. But the unit of survival is different at each of the six time scales. On a time scale of years, the unit is the individual. On a time scale of decades, the unit is the family. On a time scale of centuries, the unit is the tribe or nation. On a time scale of millennia, the unit is the culture. On a time scale of tens of millennia, the unit is the species. On a time scale of eons, the unit is the whole web of life on our planet. Every human being is the product of adaptation to the demands of all six time scales.
Sometimes, innovations at the top Fashion/Experiments layer are so game changing, they can trickle downwards and solidify their position at deeper, slower, levels. Think SpaceX winning government contracts to send astronauts to the ISS or the automotive industry adopting Tesla’s nationwide EV super charger network (just finished the Musk biography 🤪). But the more likely outcome is that experiments safely fail at higher layers without disrupting the entire system below it. Think MySpace, crypto Miami in 2021, rainbow bagels, and Carly Rae Jepsen.
Now what does this have to do with our water system?
Every water municipality in the United States is mandated by the government to produce a yearly Consumer Confidence Report. This is the Governance Layer, trying to keep the Infrastructure Layer in check. (Side note: 15% of the United States population gets their water from private wells, which is regulated by no one. That is a story for another day). Further, the increasing privatization of our water municipalities moves key water infrastructure out of the hands of the government and into the hands of the Commerce Layer, which according to this study by Cornell results in an average of homes paying $144 more per year for water bills. Notably, New Jersey has regulations that make it one of the most receptive states to municipality privatization. Regardless, here is an excerpt from my home town’s water system Consumer Confidence Report from 2023:
As you have read in our quarterly notifications to you over the past year, Ridgewood Water has exceeded the MCL for PFOA at 23 of our drinking water treatment facilities and we have exceeded the MCL for PFOS at 4 of our drinking water facilities. We have been working diligently to resolve this issue by installing new treatment on all our wells, with an estimated completion date of 2026.
To better parse what's going on, let’s break down what's happening with the framework we just learned together.
Fashion/experimentation layer: Since the 1950s, companies like 3M and Dupont developed thousands of versions of PFAS, which stands for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, aka “forever chemicals”, deployed in a wide range of “miracle” products. Two versions of PFAS are the aforementioned PFOA and PFOS. PFAS have properties that can resist heat, grease, and water, which also conveniently makes them impossible to break down inside or outside of our bodies. Some examples include fire fighting foam, Teflon, and most water/stain resistant material. Because they last forever, these compounds inevitably find their way into our water system, homes, and tummies. John Lovie has a great series of articles on PFAS and water.
Commerce layer: Despite the significant health costs of PFAS, as cited in this paper, the sale of these chemicals creates a $2 billion industry in the US alone. For some further context, 3M has a market cap of $60 billion. Dupont: $31 billion. If objectionable morals and (their good friend) capitalism can get you to a certain scale, then the Commerce Layer will reward and protect you. These companies have immense staying power due to momentum and magnitude in the markets. Money talks!
Infrastructure layer: Ridgewood Water is a public water municipality, in charge of using water bills and government funding to maintain water sources and treatment facilities. They do important work, and I am not in any way complaining about their lack of agency here. However, this notice is from 2023, and they are now saying it will take 3 years to mitigate the contamination of our water that children, pregnant women, and the elderly are drinking every day. That is the pace of Infrastructure. I then combed through their previous consumer confidence reports, and only found mention of the phrase “PFAS” starting in 2019 (screenshot below). They claim at the time “there are no drinking water regulations for these compounds.” More than 70 years after these chemicals were first invented. That is the pace of Governance.
Governance layer: MCL means the Maximum Contaminant Limits set by the EPA of certain compounds in our water. In 2022, the EPA’s MCL limit for PFOA and PFOS was 4 parts per trillion (ppt). These may seem like tiny numbers, but the EPA acknowledges that the actual amount of any PFAS consumed by a human should be 0 to avoid any health effects (I highly suggest you read Justin Mares’s piece on PFAS here to learn more). However, regulations are often set based on how reasonable it would be for municipalities to follow. As in, they decided that 0 is best for health, but it’s an unreasonable and expensive standard to hold our water systems to. This ideal state is what the EPA calls the MCLG (non-enforceable Maximum Contaminant Level Goals).
Culture layer: Parents: “Water is good for you.” Teachers: “American water is the cleanest in the world, you don’t have to second guess it.” Neighbors: “Our water is amazing! How do you think those NJ bagels taste so damn good?”
Nature layer: “From water does all life begin.”
That Ridgewood Water notice a few paragraphs ago came from the website of the water source I drank for my entire childhood. Now, I am not trying to fear monger or spread conspiracies. I just went down this rabbit hole, like Mark Ruffalo in Dark Waters (which came out the same year Ridgewood’s water report first mentioned PFAS 🤔) and felt like I needed to share this with all you loyal readers. After all, this is a newsletter about what you consume and how to do it.
My hope is that the one takeaway from this piece is that you begin to see the world around us not as how it always was or how it always will be. But instead, see that we are living in a massive health experiment at the top Pace Layer. We live in a time where MDs are the ones trained in prescribing medications, but it’s the MBAs convincing us what we should eat and drink. Calley Means, co-founder of TrueMed recently said: “If a gold fish is sick, do you inject it with drugs or do you clean the tank?” No wonder 2 in 5 American adults are obese, and 6 in 10 Americans live with a chronic health condition. We’ll see how long this experiment lasts before Nature, Culture, Governance, Infrastructure, and Commerce pull us back to reality. Or, maybe, the government will just start putting Ozempic in our water instead of fluoride. START LOBBYIN’ PEOPLE!
Thanks for reading homies, we’re back.
If you want to dig deeper into this rabbit hole, I invite you to join me. Here are some starter links:
Pace Layers essay (link)
Voting with your Fork- Michael Pollan (link)
Coca-Cola sells 1.9 billion servings of its drinks a day
Not Boring by Packy: The Experimentation Layer
Not Boring by Packy: Pace Yourself
Belief and Progress “The New Technologist Manifesto” link
John Lovie: 'Forever chemicals' haven't gone away.
Justin Mares on PFAS
A Financial Argument for Deep Tech (link)
Movie rec: Dark Waters w/ Mark Ruffalo
What’s next? I can dig deeper into private wells (pun), micro/nano plastics, fluoride in our water system, or anything else. Let us know in the poll what you want to learn more about.
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