Protect San José’s creeks and rivers

Water that enters our City storm drain system flows untreated into the nearest creek or river and ultimately to the San Francisco Bay. Stormwater runoff, in the form of rain or irrigation water, collects pollutants by flowing over sidewalks, driveways, curbs, and landscaping.

Common pollutants - such as trash, oil, soap, paint, copper, nickel, mercury, and pesticides - can degrade, or impair, water quality in our local creeks and rivers. Less commonly recognized pollutants, such as leaves or landscape clippings, can reduce the amount of oxygen available in the creeks for fish which makes it difficult for fish to live. Even soil and sediment can impair water quality, both by degrading spawning habitat in the creeks and by carrying pollutants such as copper, nickel and other heavy metals that readily bind to sediment. Rivers carrying excessive sediment and other pollutants can significantly reduce spawning habitat for fish, which in turn impacts other wildlife. These pollutants, individually and cumulatively, adversely affect fish, plants and wildlife that live in and depend on the City’s rivers and creeks.

Also, it’s the law. Water quality in creeks, rivers, storm drains and the Bay is protected and regulated by State laws like the California Porter-Cologne Water Quality Control Act, Federal laws, such as the Clean Water Act, as well as local ordinances.

Ontology

On an individual being level, these questions are studied by the separate fields above, but are also more integrated into cognitive ontology of various kinds. This challenges the older linguistically dependent views of ontology, wherein one could debate being, perceiving, and doing, with no cognizance of innate human limits, varying human lifeways, and loyalties that may let a being "know" something (see qualia) that for others remains very much in doubt.

On the level of an individual mind, an emergent behavior might be the formation of a new concept, 'bubbling up' from below the conscious level of the mind. A simple way of stating this is that beings preserve their own attention and are at every level concerned with avoiding interruption and distraction. Such cognitive specialization can be observed in particular in language, with adults markedly less able to hear or say distinctions made in languages to which they were not exposed in youth.

Structure

Structure is a fundamental and sometimes intangible notion covering the recognition, observation, nature, and stability of patterns and relationships of entities. From a child's verbal description of a snowflake, to the detailed scientific analysis of the properties of magnetic fields, the concept of structure is an essential foundation of nearly every mode of inquiry and discovery in science, philosophy, and art.

A structure defines what a system is made of. It is a configuration of items. It is a collection of inter-related components or services. The structure may be a hierarchy (a cascade of one-to-many relationships) or a network featuring many-to-many relationships.