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Re: 'Infrastructure can't cope with latest development,' Letters, Oct. 8

The hidden costs of antiquated infrastructure are many. As we continue to endorse and build sprawl-like over our last remaining greenspaces there will be more casualties - environmental casualties including habitat, biodiversity and most importantly healthy watersheds.

I read the above letter with much interest and sadness. I have lived through and watched the slow death of the Highland Creek watershed over the past 30 years.

As a child I lived near a tributary of this watershed that still runs, albeit dirty, littered and largely devoid of aquatic life. As a child I waded in the creek, caught and chased plentiful frogs and tadpoles that lived in what was a healthy river.

I remember when the river was dug up and channeled. Our parents told us not to go near the 'dirty water' after that but we did, despite the smell. We searched in earnest for our creature friends and found none.

I still walk this tributary and have not seen a frog there since 1985. They are extirpated from this river. With the level of pollution entering it constantly from the overflowing sewer pipes even if we introduced amphibians or other species that were native to this ecosystem they would soon become contaminated and die a slow death.

I tell my son about how beautiful the river was. He always asks me to tell 'the mayor' to do something about it. I do.

The experience of watching a watershed die led me to study the environment. To work and volunteer in the field of environmental science with a focus on watershed and aquatic health. I have spent well over a decade lobbying government and the public about the impending destruction of one of the last healthy watersheds left on the entire north shore of Lake Ontario - Duffins Creek.

If current development plans, such as for Seaton just east of here, follow a similar path based on the same old big pipe infrastructure Duffins Creek will too die in the same manner that Highland Creek has.

There are real alternatives for future developments that could really save our aquatic environments. Grey water treatment plants built into individual suburbs are the best and most feasible route. Some developers and planners laugh at the thought but some of the best work being done in this field is coming from professors at Sir Sanford Fleming College in Peterborough.

The community of Omemee has been fighting the building of a large big pipe sewage system that would send its' waste all the way to Lindsay and are asking for grey water and biological treatment for their waste and water at the local level.

Real research is being done as are real cost comparisons. It can be realistically done for a fraction of the cost of a big pipe system. The environment can be saved too as well as money.

The problem is that in the development process, often development companies are linked with companies that sell and construct big infrastructure projects such as giant sewer systems. It's a win-win situation for them.

Hopefully sooner than later development companies might consider and incorporate grey water systems and then it will be a win-win situation for all - humans, watersheds and the species that call these environments home.

If we don't act now, it will be too late. We are destroying biodiversity and habitat just as fast as in places we think of as being endangered like the tropical rainforests.

Bernadette Zubrisky