When Joan Ames of West Tisbury realized the workmen who had been fixing her house had been relieving themselves on her lawn, she was delighted.

She thinks the emerald green circles in the grass are beautiful, and the workmen’s al fresco un-drinking affirmed her in her creed of urinary utopianism. She wishes everyone else on Martha’s Vineyard did likewise.

You may laugh, and indeed some in the audience did when Ms. Ames was introduced as “the urine queen of Martha’s Vineyard” at the beginning of a session she addressed at last weekend’s Wampanoag Environmental Health Consumer Expo at the regional high school.

But she is serious about her mission to make people understand the root cause of one of this Island’s most pressing environmental problems: the excessive nitrogen that is killing our ponds.

“Most people really don’t understand that when talking about nitrogen pollution in the ponds, what they are really talking about is urine,” she said.

“If people knew that, they might be able be some change in behavior with this very valuable substance.”

And it’s true, in most Island ponds, the largest contributor to that nitrogen overload comes from seepage from septic systems. Nitrogen is a fertilizer, and the ponds need some. But high levels promote the excessive growth of algae, which then choke out other life forms.

The septic systems on which most Islanders rely remove little nitrogen. Instead, they simply release it deep in the ground, too deep for most of it to be taken up by the roots of plants. Thus it enters the groundwater and ultimately flows to the ponds.

There are more sophisticated septic units one can get, which remove more nitrogen, but they are very expensive and maintenance intensive. You can also get toilets which separate urine out, but they also cost a lot. Ms. Ames brought with her a cheaper alternative.

With a flourish, she produced her low-cost alternative — a large plastic yogurt tub.

If everyone would just pee in a yogurt tub or some similar receptacle, that urine — with its high nitrogen content, and also valuable nutrients potassium and phosphorous — could be used to fertilize lawns and gardens applied to lawns and gardens, instead of algal blooms.

There were, she said “three ways to grow away urine.”

You could apply it neat to established lawns, or diluted for more new grass or more sensitive plants, mix it with other gray water and irrigate with it, or mix it with carbon-based products like wood chips or cardboard to make excellent compost.

But what chance is there that Ms. Ames’s proposal will catch on in a country so puritanical it can’t even discuss such issues without recourse to euphemism, much less act on them? Where even environmentally-concerned members of Ms. Ames’s audience tittered in a slightly embarrassed way at various points in her presentation?

Ms. Ames herself conceded the difficulty.

“Americans are not very good at dealing with bodily functions,” she said.

The other two speakers on the panel offered more orthodox solutions, although they conceded those too would be unpopular with some people.

Bruce Rosinoff, of the Water Alliance, and the point man on the Island for the Massachusetts Estuaries Project study of the health of the ponds, and Joe Alosso, the wastewater manager for Edgartown and Oak Bluffs, were talking sewers.

Back in the 1970s, 80s and early 90s, Mr. Rosinoff said, the idea of putting in sewers had been widely viewed as “not politically correct” among environmentally-concerned residents of the Cape and Islands.

It was not just that they were expensive and required the digging up of roads, but that they would allow for greater population densities, which did not sit well with those who were opposed to major development. Septic systems were seen as the answer.

“Well,” said Mr. Rosinoff, “we came to find out in the early 1990s that septic systems do absolutely nothing for nitrogen.”

It became clear that wastewater treatment plants and sewering were the answer.

“We are not going to be able to solve our problems on Martha’s Vineyard particularly in the down-Island towns without an awful lot of sewering,” Mr. Rosinoff said.

In fact, said Mr. Alosso, quite a lot of wastewater and sewer capacity had already been built on the Island, beginning with Edgartown in 1972.

Now the various treatment plants are capable of handling a total of 1.2 million gallons per day.

In response to the need to protect its waterways, Edgartown had recently installed sewer service to more than 300 homes in the Great Pond watershed, and the town board of health now is working on regulations to compel those homes to tie into it.

Oak Bluffs is looking at something similar.

There are other measures being taken too. Increasing the number of times each year that ponds were opened to the sea, so they might be better flushed. And aquaculture, too, for oysters remove a great deal of nitrogen.

But sewering was the main thing.

Mr. Alosso noted the geographic boundaries of the Island do not correspond to the town boundaries, a fact which complicated the process. Sengekontacket Pond is split between Edgartown and Oak Bluffs, for example. Lagoon Pond is split between Tisbury and Oak Bluffs. It requires a shift in thinking and planning; towns are going to have to start thinking watersheds, not towns.

Furthermore, the watersheds for those ponds extend even more widely across town boundaries than the ponds themselves. A map of the catchments for the various ponds shows all the down-Island catchments begin in West Tisbury.

(As Ms. Ames put it, her neighbors in West Tisbury had “the dubious distinction of peeing in more ponds than any other Island residents.”)

There are several big, obvious targets for sewering: the hospital, high school, community services and YMCA are in. Island Elderly Housing will be next.

Mr. Alosso also pointed to the Arbutus Park/Ocean Heights areas in the Sengekontacket watershed, and also homes along County Road between the hospital and Oak Bluffs fire station as two prospective areas.

Then there was the question of what to do with this wastewater. The towns are studying whether it would be necessary to pump it to a major treatment station or to set up smaller satellite stations.

But more important than where it is treated is where it is sent afterwards. It should be returned to the watershed whence it came, Mr. Alosso said.

And while the problem is most acute in the more populated parts of the Island, up-Island towns also need to take steps to cut nitrogen pollution in their ponds.

Mr. Rosinoff said the most nitrogen-overloaded body of water pond on the Island is Chilmark Pond.

The solution to that one might include sewering around Beetlebung Corner, but the low population densities up-Island generally make sewering less practical.

And the problem there is less to do with septic seepage than with atmospheric deposition of nitrogen blowing across from the mainland, coupled with poor flushing. More frequent openings and maybe aquaculture would help.

Even Squibnocket Pond is impaired, largely because it is so poorly flushed that it took a whole year for the nitrogen to circulate out of it. There, 16 times more nitrogen entered the pond from atmospheric deposition than from wastewater.

Of all the Island ponds, only Menemsha is considered so clean as to require no limiting of its nitrogen load.

Solving the nitrogen — particularly the urine problem — in Island ponds is clearly not going to be easy, or cheap. Mr. Alosso later said the costs of sewering would likely be in the vicinity of $10 to $15 million.