The State Government has started running adverts saying “Look, we know the desalination plant is kinda touchy on an environmental level, but we need the water because of population growth and drought and stuff, so if you could stop complaining about it, that’d be great, thanks”. Not in those words, of course.
Victoria (my state) has just had the driest 10 years on record, and it honestly doesn’t look as though we’re going to ever return to the old days when rain happened a lot and we were able to sit under a sprinkler on a hot day without worry or care. We are now mostly all in the habit of saving, reusing and catching water however we can, from a bucket in the shower to a sink liner to rain tanks to even bucketing out the bathwater for reuse on the garden. A friend of mine catches the water from the hot tap before it’s hot enough to use and adds it to her drinking water filter (a nifty idea I intend to steal).
It’s turning into a no win situation. Too many tanks equals less vital run off that feeds the creeks and streams, leading to those already suffering eco systems to die out. There’s a required balance which is being lost, but that’s a blog post for another time.
There’s two things to address here with our lack of water. The first is the mindset which was aired on the radio this morning – “I pay for my water, I’ll use it however I want to”. People still consider a nice green lawn to be a thing of beauty and desire, regardless of how much water it takes to maintain. People still, staggeringly, would prefer to hose their paths than use a broom. All that needs to change. Water needs to be treated as the vital and finate resource it is, with as much resuse as possible. My ideal set up would use shower water to wash clothes, clothes water to flush the toilet and kitchen water for the garden. Not to much hassle really, quite a bit of plumbing though.
The other is population. While the government wants more people, lots of breeding please, the country just cannot keep sustaining a growing population. I’m not saying we should institute a One child policy or anything like that, but people should be encouraged to keep families small. We probably have a while to go yet before Australia simply breaks down, but in the meantime a shift in attitude to smaller families and better use of resources will save us a lot of heartbreak in the future. A level population, or a slow growth, will give us a much better chance of making it into a long future.
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