Engineering the Invisible: What Wastewater Treatment Taught Me About Worldbuilding, Systems Thinking, and Human Futures

The first time I had an inkling that the water-human interface was something special came in 2006. I was taking a shower, because all the best thinking happens on a walk or in the shower. I was exhausted. It was my third year at the United States Military Academy and I had just spent the last 19 hours in various stages of pain, terror, boredom, and despair. As I was standing in the open shower bay (since we weren’t allowed to have doors) next to the other five women also having a ‘day,’ I seemed to see the water cascading over me in a new way. It wasn’t water, exactly, it was almost as if I could see the connection spaces, the bonds between the water molecules sliding over themselves and reshaping themselves atomically. It was the first time that I saw the nature of ‘wavicles’ or the dual nature of energy and mass moving through the polar structure of water. It was not an equation, it was not something that we would talk about in science class. It was understanding. Real understanding, as if I could see the nature of the universe outside of myself for a brief and shining moment of clarity.

Too often, I think there is a ‘dumbing down’ or a mechanical focus on processes that excludes this clarity. Probably because these moments are rare and precious and only a few people ever get to have them. We are forced to rely on our heuristics, on our sizing diagrams, and on our assumptions to try and make the best choices we can with what we have. But those assumptions are based on research that’s almost 100 years old. We do not invest in new understanding for ‘disgusting’ things like municipal wastewater treatment systems at the same rate that we invest in things like marketing algorithms or consumer data machine learning to extract wealth from poor people. This fundamental thing—water—often gets taken for granted as if it will always be self-healing, always be self-cleaning and will always be consistent with our assumptions and heuristics. I propose that this may no longer be true. The days of centralized treatment may be coming to a close. The new dawn of decentralized care and nature-based solutions may be the only way we can afford to help nature clean and recover the water that we have used with callous consumption over the past 100 years. Civilizations have risen and fallen based on how they treat their water. From Mesopotamia to the Aztec Empire, water is the heart of a civilization. Promoting clarity of how precious and necessary it is should be at the forefront of all we do as treatment engineers and scientists since not many people truly understand how delicate the line between thriving and failing is.

The art of making these cultural connections and promoting understanding is not something that scientists do well and it’s not something that engineers do at all. Engineers are very focused on just achieving whatever objective the client has. There is little wisdom, some collaboration, but it is so focused on outcomes that our understanding of implications and cultural shifts is limited to whatever is directly related to that client, that project, that requirement. Scientists can get away with a little more, but as we think about what policy is or what we want from our water over the next 200 years, the ideas get murky and we end up talking more about capitalism and jobs than the true nature of surviving on a planet with no clean water. This kind of mutual understanding and world-building requires art. We can find it in science fiction, like the Water Knife or Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi; the Drowned World by J.G. Ballard; or How Beautiful We were by Imbolo Mbue. This is the only simulation I know of where we can see the nature of water more clearly, ironically through a less rigorous study of it. The place where science fiction and science/engineering meet is not at an equation, it’s through the kind of visceral understanding that only comes from reading the thoughts of those who see it, like the writers listed above. It’s here that we can see the flows, the constraints, the feedback loops, and human behavior at the interface clearly. And it’s why I’m so fascinated by the capability sci-fi provides to balance simulation with understanding, technical accuracy with clarity, knowledge v. wisdom in those that may never see these topics in the minute detail of an engineer but can definitely understand them in the emotions of a character.

This is the real takeaway for us as a civilization. The majority of our technology and entertainment do not make our minds more clear or more wise. We spend our money on poison that both eats away at us from the inside mentally as well as poisons our water and earth to physically help us die moment by moment. If we think of art as a simulated experience, as something to be treasured as it can reveal some hidden truth of the universe instead of as a mindless entitlement to feel distracted and pleasant, could we potentially change the zeitgeist of our time? Create a new world worth surviving in and thriving in?