Natural Perspectives:

While Vic was off earning a living the other day, I caught an interesting show on the Planet Green channel. I’m pretty sure his vision of me is sitting at home in curlers, eating bonbons and watching daytime TV while he is working. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I don’t curl my hair.

As an environmental writer, watching Planet Green is research. I was working. We’ll just ignore the bonbon aspect of his vision of how I work.

The program, called “Ecopolis,” compared four innovative green technologies that can help cities in the near future. Imagine my surprise when I saw that Huntington Beach was the site of one of the four.

To reduce carbon footprints and keep denizens of cities supplied with food, water and energy in the year 2050, the show’s host compared four different technologies that are in use now as pilot projects.

One was the Orange County Sanitation District’s Groundwater Replenishment System, a process of purifying sewage through a series of treatments that include microfiltration and reverse osmosis. The Orange County Water District is a partner in this project, because this purified water is destined ultimately for our taps. The water is pure enough to drink after it comes out of the reverse osmosis tank, but there is one more step.

Next, the water is pumped 13 miles up the Santa Ana River and allowed to percolate down through the thousands of feet of gravel and sand that underlie Orange County. This sand and gravel, called Pleistocene alluvium, washed down over countless millennia from the Santa Ana Mountains as they were uplifting. This natural filtration process adds back the healthy minerals that give our water its good taste. It takes several years for the water to make it down to the deep water tables from which we pump our drinking water.

This may sound gross, but cities upstream have been dumping their treated sewage into rivers all over America for centuries. The people downstream drink it after the water has gone through appropriate treatment. I’ve heard that water from the Rocky Mountains goes through about 375 people before it finally reaches the ocean. Since we Southern California residents get some of our drinking water from the Rockies, we are end users.

Orange County’s Groundwater Replenishment System nabbed second place on the show’s competition to see which technology would help cities of the future the most.

Two other technologies were acoustic refrigerators and capture of methane from cow manure. Methane is 18 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Although there is far less methane in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, it will be important to reduce methane as well. A good deal of atmospheric methane comes from cows and other ruminants as the bacteria in their rumens digest the cellulose-heavy forage that they eat. Cows emit gas from both ends, but a lot is also present in their manure.

A company in Texas — where there is a lot of cow manure — collects manure, mixes it with grease from restaurant grease traps and warms it up in huge anaerobic fermenters. The methane gas produced is purified and compressed, then sold as natural gas. While this innovative technology produces energy domestically from a waste product, the end result is still carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as the natural gas is burned. This technology, while admirable, didn’t win first place. Neither did the acoustic refrigerators, which eliminated the need for refrigerant chemicals.

The technology that won was growing food aeroponically. This technique is now in use in Singapore and other major cities. It is similar to growing food hydroponically, only the roots simply dangle in a closed chamber and are sprinkled with nutrient-rich water every few minutes. This uses far less water than hydroponic culture and can be accomplished in an urban environment, compared with growing plants in the soil on farms.

The inventor of this technique envisions city rooftops throughout the world outfitted with aeroponic urban farms. Bridges between buildings could house additional farms and provide shade relief to the streets below. Multistory greenhouses could grow even more food.

This technology beat out the other three for maximum reduction of greenhouse gases. Food travels an average of 1,500 miles from farm to table. Things are getting worse as city dwellers demand fresh fruits and vegetables year-round. To supply the demand, food is shipped across the equator so northerners can have spring vegetables in the fall and summer fruits in the winter.

Vic and I make a concerted effort to eat locally grown foods, mainly as a way to combat global warming. That means choosing foods that are in season locally. I’m not saying that we never eat blueberries from Chile in winter, but in general we stick to American-grown produce, and usually California-grown. We also grow as much of our own fruits and vegetables as we can.

Our apricots, lemons, limes and oranges are gone for the season. Right now, our fruit trees are producing plums, nectarines and peaches, so that’s what we’re eating. Our yard is also supplying us with green beans, tomatoes and cucumbers, plus occasional squash and eggplants. Making good environmental food choices, and even growing some of your own food, is one of the best ways you can help our planet in this ever more crowded world.

Unfortunately, the one thing I can’t seem to grow is bonbons. I’m working on it.

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected] .