Too much rain? Use less water.
On Chicago rivers, increasing complexity, and the need to ask for complete instructions
Seven times this April, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD) of Greater Chicago has issued an “action alert”, asking residents to curtail their use of water through voluntary conservation practices. These action alerts have not been issued because of a water shortage, but instead because of excessive rainfall.
■ At first, this seems paradoxical: If excessive rain is falling from the sky, why should conservation be on anyone’s mind? Most surpluses don’t result in requests to cut back on consumption.
■ The reason is that the MWRD isn’t charged with managing the supply side of water, but rather the post-consumption disposal of it. And because Chicago got an early start on installing sewers (it was the overflow automatically into the rivers. The less that flows in, the lower the chances of those untreated waste overflows.
■ Thus, what sounds completely backwards at first makes a great deal of sense upon further examination. It’s a lesson well worth learning and keeping close to the heart, especially in modern times. Modernity has begotten increased complexity in nearly every aspect of life.
■ The impulse to seek out quick and simplistic answers may come to us very naturally, but we have to be eternally vigilant not to let that impulse keep us from giving a fair hearing to more complex explanations that might land closer to the truth.
■ It’s a valuable skill to be able to take complex matters and distill them for easier understanding. But it’s a shame to be so stubborn and intellectually lazy as to refuse to consider that sometimes right answers are the exact opposites of what our instincts would tell us.