Environmental Engineering Reference
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in cities located along the Mississippi River. These cities draw raw water into drink-
ing water treatment facilities downstream of the previous cities' sewage discharges.
Sewage discharging into the Mississippi River from those cities comes nowhere near
to meeting the treatment standards of the California reuse project that so alarmed
Mayor Hahn.
In comparison to California, New Mexico is a poor, sparsely populated, desert
state where water scarcity is ingrained into the public psyche. Drought often pre-
vents irrigation of cherished urban amenities, such as sports fields and city parks.
New Mexico society does not appear to be intrinsically less litigious than that of
California. A crucial difference is that water scarcity is obvious to all, and its effects
are widely perceived as both economic and cultural losses.
A key mandate for the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) Reuse
Workgroup (of which the author was a member) was to create wastewater reuse
guidelines that would both protect public health and provide economically viable
means of irrigating urban amenities. Municipalities across New Mexico had already
rejected the California-Florida model in a previously proposed reuse rule. Public
parks and ball fields were turning to sun-baked dust for want of irrigation water,
and few municipalities could afford to build or operate reuse facilities treating to the
proposed rule.
The NMED chose members of the Reuse Workgroup to represent a cross-section
of state government, industry, municipal, and public stakeholders. Although discus-
sions were mostly technical, the cultural realities and needs of the state were never
off the table. The Reuse Work Group was able to craft a middle ground between
the California-Florida model and WHO standards that allowed affordable irrigation
of public urban amenities and protected public health to rigorous scientific stan-
dards. Given the absence of agricultural demand for reuse, the guidelines prohibited
spray irrigation of food crops to avoid unnecessary cultural and technical contention
(NMED 2003). Even though WHO standards were probably sufficient to protect
public health from incidental contact with reused wastewater in parks and sports
facilities, they were not considered to be viable policy because of likely resistance
from technical professionals. The reuse guidelines have been met with widespread
acceptance in New Mexico.
As in the United States, there is every reason to believe that wastewater reuse
across predominantly Muslim societies will also be culturally nuanced. How can
it be any other way given the sectarian, geographic, ethnic, economic, and cultural
diversity of Muslim countries? Moreover, the authority of clerics over civil society
varies between these countries (cf. Iran vs. Turkey), and rulings on religious law from
ranking clerics in one sect of Islam are not binding upon Muslims of another sect.
Despite these differences, the unifying power of scripture in Islam is great. The
Qu'ran and Hadith have a great deal to say about water, cleanliness, and the envi-
ronment that informs both cultural attitudes and Islamic law regarding water man-
agement and wastewater reuse (Al-Jayyousi 2001; Amery 2001; Faruqi 2001). The
Qu'ran is abounding in imagery of water and its sacred nature. Indeed, paradise is
described as “Gardens beneath which running waters flow” (47:12). Culturally and
legally, therefore, it is meaningful and important to consider wastewater reuse from
the perspective of Islam.
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