On a sailboat at a harbor in the Gulf Islands in Canada recently, I looked down to see the ship moored next to us release its holding tank. Clouds of toilet paper and human waste were flushed right into the water where children were netting shrimp and, as the sea water was warmer there than here, people could be swimming. I soon learned this is the common practice, and was told that the city of Victoria and until recently the city of Vancouver pump their wastewater directly into the sea.

To be honest, I am not really that concerned about human waste being released into the ocean. What was surprising was the quantity being released into a small area. At some level, the amount of input into a natural system of even a natural product exceeds the capacity of that system to cycle it. As a natural system gets overloaded, it doesn't provide back the services we count on-- in this case, safe water to bathe in, and healthy fish and other sea life. This led me to an interesting observation about the US and Canada.

In the US, we have found ourselves facing the limits of natural systems for several decades now. We woke the world nearly thirty years ago as we set off on a path to save ourselves from being overwhelmed by our own waste, or otherwise by excesses of our human systems over the natural ones that support us. The Clean Air and Water acts, and the Endangered Species Act were a way to set standards and goals, and to create a means to reach them. I will be quick as anyone to point our the weaknesses and failures of the institutions we've built to carry out these goals. Their side effects are plenty and routine. Some of the goals themselves need to be revisited in light of new information. These laws on the other hand have done a lot to preserve the health of natural systems that in many cases were expected to collapse or were already past collapse. They have brought Lake Erie back to life and created countless other demonstrations that we can be forward thinking in our relationship with nature and succeed. Our lead was picked up by the rest of the developed world. Despite our now somewhat more conservative and begrudging face, we are still leading the world in conservation in a number of ways. The evidence is palpable even as you cross the border to a country everyone assumes is really just the northern US with the metric system and national health insurance.

The Canadian government is a long way from having the laws and standards we take for granted. In the way clean air and water are expected as rights, or citizens are protected when they try to protect their communities, the US is generally a cleaner, more democratic place. To be fair, this is as much a function of demographics as of democracy. Canada is a place with 26 million people, one tenth the US population, in a country the same size as ours. Until recently there was plenty of space in Canada for the environment to absorb the demands placed on it. This is changing, though, as it is the world over.

For all our disgust at the systems of rules and the disjointed overlap of regulating agencies, what we have brought on ourselves is a much better world than we would have had. One need only spend a few days outside of the US to begin to see the benefits of the choices we make here to try to protect our natural systems.

As a nation, and in our valley, despite our mistakes, we need not to be afraid to continue the work we have started to improve our relationship with nature. Things can be drastically improved on, and in fact will need to be. We face limits in our valley that are faced everywhere--our natural systems will not continue to support us well if we do not learn to accept and to create human systems that are much more consistent with natural limits.

This is a very important matter to work on together over the coming years, or we will have severe limits increasingly placed on us by others or by nature. I would suggest as much as possible it is better for us to take on this work. The not so bad news is, we have already begun it.