Intractable Problems

Why Educational Communications is Essential to Your Community Relations Strategy

In mathematics, a problem is called intractable if there is no efficient algorithm that solves it. It’s the same in communications. The intractable problem is one that can’t be tackled head on, one that won’t go away with a simple solution. 

We create an intractable problem every day, sometimes several times a day. We use the bathroom, the toilet. To put it delicately, we produce “bio-solids.”

The average person produces about 0.4 kilograms (kgs.) of human waste a day, or 2.8 kgs a week. That is a total of 145 kgs of human waste per year. Provincially, Ontarians produce over 2.1 billion kgs of human waste per year. That’s 57,000 tractor trailer loads, with trucks sitting on the 401 highway back to back all the way from Toronto to Montreal. 

What do we do with it? We may press “flush”, but it hasn’t gone away.

If you want to safely spread treated bio-solids on farmers’ fields near suburbs, you still have to go deep, to communicate more than what the neighbours are smelling. You need to go global to get local. 

Nature’s Way, sponsored by the Water Environment Association of Ontario, poses the ultimate challenge to youth. There are over 7 billion people on our planet. By 2050, there will be 2 billion more people to feed. How can we sustain that population without overwhelming this planet? 

Using every resource we have is part of the solution. Our waste is a nutrient rich resource. It should be put back into the soil to replenish it, to build up its organic matter and to help capture carbon to fight climate change. 

We live in a geological age that is now being called the Anthropocene, the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment. Humans are fundamentally changing this planet, so our choice is to either learn from nature and imitate its processes or continue to override nature and ignore the signs that our natural ecosystem is being negatively impacted. 

Helping youth learn what makes soil healthy, how they are part of the food cycle and how to plan for the safe spreading of their own bio-solids, gives them the hands-on experience to embrace their daily routine and the results of it. They want to reuse their own resources to create a sustainable environment. The intractable problem seems more digestible.

Youth education is one of the most successful ways to approach intractable communications challenges. Business needs and community wants often collide in myriad ways. It might not be spreading bio-solids next door to a suburb; it can simply be a need to connect, to understand, to know the neighbourhood. But if you are spreading bio-solids, the community needs to know why. And you had better reach out to them with answers.

Now, when the “spreading” season comes along in spring and fall, youth can look through their kitchen windows over the farmer’s fields and say to their families, “That’s the Earth being fed. We’re part of a cycle.” That’s nature’s way.