If you’ve ever taken a psychology class, or perhaps if you’ve done a lot of gambling, you may be familiar with the puzzle called "Wolf’s dilemma." In its simplest form, it goes something like this: Suppose you and nine other randomly selected people are isolated in separate rooms, unable to communicate with each other. Each of you has a button in front of you, and each is free to push the button or not. All who do are guaranteed to receive $200 apiece, regardless of what the others do. If no one pushes the button, each person gets $2,000. If even one person in 10 pushes it, the ones who didn’t will get nothing at all - also known as the "sucker’s payoff."
      How trusting are you of your fellow man? Do you go with a sure thing and push the button? Or hope for the best and refrain, figuring you have little to lose and potentially a great deal to gain? Do you imagine the other nine walking away with their windfall and you, foolish and trusting, standing alone empty-handed?
     Wolf’s dilemma, or some variation of it, has been used to debate egoism, reciprocal altruism, the social contract, and a handful of other concepts, and in many ways it also resembles the decisions people who are concerned with water quality make every day. Each time you act in the interest of your own program, you may be winning a small, short-term payoff at the expense of something much bigger and much less certain.
      The 10 people might represent 10 separate regulated dischargers to a 303(d)-listed lake, in which case each small victory - less restriction for one, more for someone else - offers someone temporary reprieve but doesn’t contribute greatly to the big payoff: solving the long-term beneficial-use problem.
      Or the commodity at stake might be money. Let’s say that instead of 10 people chosen at random, the 10 rooms contain you - the stormwater manager - and nine other city employees: the chief of police, fire marshal, zoning administrator, director of parks and recreation, head of the planning commission, head librarian, and so on. The sums in question aren’t $200 and $2,000 but, rather, program funding or shares of the general tax fund. Paying for improvements one at a time is like each of you separately pushing the button. Merging some of your needs into more cost-effective bundles - say, by considering possible multiple uses whenever something has to be fixed or replaced, such as resurfacing a ragged city parking lot with pervious material - is like holding back in the hope that others will cooperate.
      Or, instead of funding, you might be competing for a share of the public’s (limited, overtaxed) attention. Each of you, pushing the button, gets a few minutes’ regard, but you can do that only so many times before the supply runs out. A concerted, coherent program - hands off the buttons, please, until we can craft a statement about what the city (or county or state) is doing with everyone’s money - might have greater influence long after individual messages have faded. Marketers would call it a form of branding, and it helps make intangibles - which, for so much of the public, stormwater is - stick in the mind.
      Although some stormwater programs have been around for decades, in many places "stormwater" is still a relatively new piece of the pie, or at least a piece in a new shape. A few programs have educated the public - and the decision-makers - so well that they now have enviable support, and NPDES Phase II will push more programs to do the same, but stormwater management as something other than simply flood control is still a difficult concept for many people. What could be more natural than rain, after all, and why do we need to manage it? Cooperation in reaching the public will be especially lucrative for the stormwater community. Some of what we hope to offer, in this and future issues of Stormwater, are alternatives to isolated button-pushing.

Send Janice an Email