Photos by Dr. Meriel Brooks

 

Long after you leave Brazil, its waters stay with you. That’s what three Green Mountain
College professors and a group of their students discovered after spending three weeks studying the ethics, politics, and ecology of water on a recent course in southern Brazil. Here is their report.

Pristine waterfalls mixed with orange pollution slicks on subsistence-fisheries rivers punctuated the contrasting and complex issues that still haunt Meriel Brooks, ichthyologist and Green Mountain College professor. “One minute you’d be looking at paradise and the next minute see something out of our own pre-EPA industrial history,” she says.

Students and faculty from Green Mountain College traveled earlier this summer from Poultney to South America to study water and related issues in Brazil. It was not all paradise, however; this photo is from a well-earned final excursion that some of the GMC group took, snorkeling in the Rio Sucuri (Python River) - a stark contrast to the wastewater treatment plants and pollution sites that were earlier on the itinerary.

Brooks, along with Professor Rebecca Purdom and Provost Bill Throop, designed the travel course to Brazil around issues of sustainable water resource use in developing countries. “We got all that in spades,” Brooks notes. The group spent three weeks in May in and around Piracicaba. Located at a major falls on the Piracicaba River, this city has been a focus of the environmental movement in Brazil and boasts some of the leading water experts in the country. Students heard from these experts, explored areas beset with industrial and human waste pollution, and toured newly engineered wastewater treatment plants and other regions near São Paulo and the city of Piracicaba.

While Brazilians, particularly in Piracicaba and the neighboring city of Americanas, have made considerable strides to improve local water quality for human consumption, basic ecological factors for the aquatic communities have yet to be considered.

“What stunned me – and what I keep coming back to when I talk about this trip – is the lack of attention to the health of the aquatic communities,” Brooks says. “While I could find engineers and microbiologists who were very knowledgeable about the public health aspects of wastewater treatment, no one could talk to me about the health of the fisheries,” Brooks says.

Brooks conducts research into larval fish populations in several Vermont rivers. “Aquatic ecology of any sort seemed to take a back seat to basic public health concerns.” While that makes sense to Brooks, she notes public health may be greatly affected in spite of cleaning the human waste from the rivers.

“Many of the impoverished people still depend on fish stocks in these polluted rivers to survive,” she notes. “If that fishery collapses (or the fish are as unhealthy to eat as I expect they are) then the public health problem solved with domestic drinking water will erupt again from the diets of people pulling their protein out of the river.”

“It’s more complex than just removing sewage from the rivers,” Brooks says. “But when children die from water full of bacteria, it seems wrong to focus on much else.”

Rebecca Purdom, the second professor on the Green Mountain College trip, agrees that the focus seems narrow. “Like so many places in the world, the fledgling environmental movement is doing very important things – like cleaning up basic drinking water,” she says. “But the problems are so much larger and more complex.”

Purdom, who teaches environmental law and public policy and specializes in water law, found the Brazilian legal system and its environmental protections an ideal contrast to the American system for her students. And she seems to relish the complexity as a teaching tool.

“My students understand the American legal system, Clean Water Act, but everything in Brazil was foreign and new. My students and I had to start from ground zero, learning a new legal system,” Purdom says. “That’s the kind of thing that stretches students. They have to understand their own background better to grasp the contrasts.”

GMC students, far from home, pause for a group photo.

Student Michelle Smith concurs. “We got to see the true conditions that many Brazilians have to live in, the problems that they are facing trying to get clean water – which they view as a basic human right,” Smith notes. “It was interesting to compare Brazilian water law to our own system. For being a country that has so many problems, their laws are so much more progressive,” Smith says, but notes that enforcement is an issue in Brazilian water law, whereas in the U.S., mechanisms do at least exist for enforcement of environmental law.

Environmental protection and water protection is written into the Brazilian constitution. Brazilian water law requires that every person should have access to a minimum amount of potable drinking water – as a human right. And Brazil’s new water law mandates grass-roots-based basin planning. “It makes Vermont’s [otherwise laudable] basin planning process look like a schoolyard exercise,” Purdom says.

But, Purdom notes, the devil is in the details. Asked to lecture to a Brazilian graduate level water law class, she was halfway through explaining the U.S. Clean Water Act when one student asked a seemingly simple question: How do you enforce your water law in the United States?

“I was stumped,” Purdom says. “In Brazil, resources for enforcement efforts are rare and people seem to think there is no political will to enforce the laws when resources do exist. A judge might issue an order, but there’s no mechanism to ensure that such an order will actually be carried out.” Students in the graduate seminar wanted hard strategies to enact and enforce their constitutional guarantee to clean water.

“I wasn’t prepared to talk about basic point-source pollution enforcement. In New England the sexy stuff these days is non-point source pollution problems, anti-degradation policy, voluntary basin planning objectives, maybe a little stormwater controversy.” Purdom says she had to think hard – back to her days as a practicing attorney – to remember the basics permit enforcement. “The Brazilian students were hungry for details on how to attach a polluter’s bank account to assess unpaid fines. That’s the exciting stuff down there.”

Purdom points out that the problems with large-scale industrial and municipal waste pollution was an eye-opener for Green Mountain College students as well. “We’d take students up to the headwaters to go rafting and swimming – not so unlike Vermont,” she says. “Then, back down in the valleys near the cities, students talked with engineers and architects who had photos of massive toxic pollution plumes in rivers. It was the stuff of the 1950s. It was frightening.”

“A lot of the things we saw,” confirms Smith, “made me think about a lot of the problems we had in this country around the time of the Love Canal fires and the Hudson PCB scandal.”

Kat Sauter who, like her colleague, recently graduated from GMC, offers this snapshot: “Housing along the Tietê River in São Paulo, for example, isn’t where the wealthy live, as one might assume. Rather, haphazardly-built scrap wood and tin flavellas (ghettos) are crammed on top of each other along the brown, putrid smelling, channelized river.”

Another “frightening” encounter, for Purdom, was with the president of Sabesp, a large water privatization firm working in Brazil. “We’ve all been reading about the privatization of water in the developing world,” she says, “and he is one of the grand dons of that movement.”

“Here’s one of the biggest trends in the world – the privatization of water supplies – in a country that constitutionally guarantees some minimum water allocation as a human right.” Sabesp has been given government contracts to provide all domestic water supplies and waste water treatment services in the region, serving 25.6 million people in the state of São Paulo alone.

“Students got to meet and hear from one of the world trend-setters,” Purdom notes. “Companies like Sabesp may be the future of water resource allocation in the world.”

Smith was left with a more optimistic opinion about Sabesp’s efforts than Purdom. “Despite all of the problems we saw, we did hear some promising news,” Smith notes. “Sabesp is one of the more progressive water treatment companies. They are trying to make sanitation universal in São Paulo (the most populated of Brazil’s states). They are spearheading efforts to educate children about the importance of environmental issues, to improve buffers around water bodies, and to educate about the importance of clean water. They are also trying,” Smith continues, “to get treated water to be used for irrigation, instead of discharging sewage back into rivers. This would prevent farmers from drawing water from rivers that could be used for drinking water.” She recalls a number of presentations from her trip that gave, as she describes it, “hope in the face of disparity.”

Both Brooks and Purdom agree that the students had a rigorous exploration of water issues during the course. “When the best thing that’s happened to the environment in the region is the new waste-water treatment plant, people want to show it off. So our students toured several waste water treatment plants.” Purdom notes.

“That’s not your typical eco-tourism destination,” Brooks says. “Students didn’t spend three weeks at a tropical beach. They got a pretty serious dose of a developing world’s growing pains.”

It’s a lesson she expects they will remember for a long time. “I suspect they’ll remember the waste water treatment plant long after they forget the lovely afternoon by the waterfall,” she says. “We remember what’s shocking, new and challenging.”

Both women also note that Brazil has much to teach the United States about environmental conservation and sustainability. “The City of Piracicaba has committed to becoming sustainable by 2010, which is an enormous commitment for any city in the world today,” Brooks notes.

Green Mountain College plans another trip for students in spring 2008.