The soft sell and appropriate tech

Two current campaign controversies and two memories conspire to remind me of something unfortunate about Panama. The campaign features a debate between Ricardo Martinelli's subway proposal and Balbina Herrera's preference for a monorail; and Bosco Vallarino's promise of a trash to energy incinerator. Walking down memory lane, I remember early in Juan Carlos Navarro's first term as mayor, an environmental forum about sewage treatment at which I asked about biological tertiary treatment and got sternly rebuked by a couple of ladies in the audience for suggesting such a system in lieu of something more high tech.

Then there is this horrible memory of the New York sport press corps camped out around Mariano Rivera's house in Puerto Caimito after a boy and his father were electrocuted in a pool crudely wired up to keep a dog from swimming in it.

There is a peculiar disorder in the thinking of someone who would electrify a swimming pool to keep a dog out of it, rather than covering the pool or training the dog to stay out.

It's a way of thinking that favors complicated machines over simple ones, high energy solutions over frugal ones, gizmoes over biological processes. In Panama it's a common and costly malady.

Monorails or subways? What are the routes, the geological conditions along them, the rights of way to be acquired, and the modifications we would need because of our rainy climate? It all gets back to money, but those are some of the questions to ask.

Incinerating the metro area's trash? That's a wonderful idea for the company that builds the incinerator, but a bad one for everybody else. Think of people throwing batteries in the trash, and then breathing in poisonous metals in the incinerator smoke. The toxic ashes are expensive to bury properly, if buried improperly will poison the groundwater, if dumped directly or indirectly into the sea will contaminate our seafood, and if left in a pile to be blown by the wind will add a carcinogenic grit to our urban soot.

Sewage treatment? The first phase is to skim the greasy stuff off the top and the heavy stuff from the bottom. Then bacteria are introduced to eat up the dissolved organic matter, and the resulting froth is skimmed off or filtered out --- this is secondary treatment. After these two processes the water still has impurities and micro-organisms. A modern plant uses a "tertiary" method to get rid of these. This can be done by adding chemicals, filtering through layers of sand and charcoal, electrolysis or exposure to ultraviolet light.

All of these methods require expensive inputs. Or the effluent can be piped into a pond with water lilies or reeds that absorb most of the remaining bad stuff, and the pond's runoff can be released into a mangrove swamp for nature's scrub brush to do the rest of the cleaning. This latter biological process is the modern and economical way to treat sewage, notwithstanding the Panamanian gizmo fetish.

Are people ready to listen to softly spoken explanations of public policy choices that respect their intelligence, rather than shouted hype and vacuous buzz words? Will they penalize politicians who take them for fools?

Maybe this will be the year for some of that.