Will the Real Australian Please Stand Up?
Abstract
The average Australian uses around 100,000 tonnes of water in a lifetime – far more than is in keeping with the continent’s natural aridity and episodicity. Creating a society whose water use is attuned to the natural cycles represents a huge challenge to our awareness, ability to share knowledge and our behaviour, akin to any of the great social and attitudinal changes of the past century.
Contemporary science is handicapped by its relative inability to engage the wider society in an effective discourse leading to the uptake of new knowledge. Much of what we discover is not widely shared, and suspicion and mistrust of science are growing.
The paper proposes that dialogue will be a crucial element in Australia’s ultimate success in adopting a new, water-conservative lifestyle, behaviour and technologies. If this can be achieved, it will become our role to help overcome the C21st global water crisis. All the water in the universe, I recently heard a cosmologist proclaim, was actually created in earliest parts of its existence.
The hydrogen, of course, appeared soon after the Big Bang. The oxygen, with the first generation of stars – and from then on it was just a matter of time, temperature and chemistry.
Recent planetological theory holds that all the water on Earth arrived not long after our planet condensed out of a cloud of dust, in an unbelievable hailstorm – only in this case the hailstones were comets the size of countries.
So the constituents of this stuff in the glass are probably around 12,000 million years old – and in its present form, perhaps four billion years old.
Where has it been in the meantime? In and out of the oceans a few thousand times. Building evanescent castles in the sky. Surging across the landscape, delving gorges and valleys, abrading mountain ranges, smearing gold along ancient creek lines, spreading fertility far and wide, sustaining life as only water can.
So why are we so neglectful of this marvelous, crystal-clear substance, that has been going round and round in our universe since ... since eternity?
Drink a glass of water and you’re bound to imbibe a few molecules that have passed through a dinosaur. Maybe several dinosaurs, and any amount of fish, plants and other creatures.
There’s even a possibility you have quaffed a few molecules that once made up Aristotle, Michelangelo, Newton, Mozart, Charles Darwin or Adolf Hitler. They’re all ‘back in circulation’ so to speak, and we’re hydrocannibals, really. I hope you feel better for it.
So, water recycling doesn’t have to be a dry argument. It can be startling, engaging, entertaining.
And second, water recycling has been going on for the lifetime of the universe.
Our problem, as a race, is that because we have finite imaginations we tend to conceive of things as finite. We erect imaginary walls that restrict our vision.
Even though half the world’s people face acute water scarcity by 2025, water itself is still infinite and forever. We just haven’t learned to approach it from that perspective.
Instead we are having bitter social disputes about it. We are even fighting wars over it. We are wasting and taxing it like there’s no tomorrow. We put the most insalubrious substances into it. We treat it with utter contempt in so many ways.
We live in an arid continent – but it isn’t the continent’s fault that it’s short of water. It’s ours.
Put it down to the fact that in a country called Australia there aren’t many genuine Australians.
Twenty million transplants, only a very few of whom have learned real respect for the H2O.
But hardly a single person whose daily water use is tuned to the water cycle of Australia itself.
The challenge of this century is going to be for us to learn to how live like real Australians – creatures attuned to the vast, episodic, erratic cycles and hydrology of our land, like those emblematic Australians, the kangaroo, the gum tree and the murray cod.
That challenge is now upon us because, in our haste for progress and wealth, we have turned an infinite substance into a finite one.
For the kind of uses we put it to, we have just about run out of water – especially in the southern part of the continent – mainly because we just can’t get our heads around the ideas of respect and re-use.
We flirt with the problem with dual-flush toilets and economy shower roses, by not sending our towels to the laundry every day and fitting timers to our garden hoses. But we’re really just pretending to be water conscious.
We come nowhere near the core of the problem, which is that over a lifetime each Australian uses around 100,000 tonnes of water.
That’s slightly more than it takes to float the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise (93kt).
Of course, the economists argue, it’s just a matter of price. If we paid for water what we pay for champagne, there’d be little waste and no shortages. But I think that misses the point.
How we behave towards water is the result of a combination of our social attitudes and values – and these very often tug us in opposing directions.
Sometimes we see water as the great tool of development, unlocking the fertility of our inland soils, creating the wealth of a nation. At others, as the key element in the survival of the native landscape – as well as a domestic, recreational and industrial essential. At others, as a convenient place to dump unwanted waste, or a source of problems like salinity.
It’s often said that solving the water problem is a matter of striking a balance between these contrasting, and often competing, values. While that is true, I know of no reliable formula for so doing. At the end we will have to engage people at the level of their profoundly-held values and beliefs, and that can be a divisive and even a violent thing.
The task ahead for Australia is to reshape our societal and personal attitudes to water. To begin to treat it with respect and care. To learn to use it wisely and to re-use it many times.
I do not conceive this to be impossible, or even very difficult. After all, in the past 100 years we have completely re-framed our attitudes to female enfranchisement, the white Australia policy, Aboriginal land rights, sexual harassment, Keeping Australia Beautiful and Landcare. Water care ought not to be beyond us.
But, different to the above, it demands co-operation from every individual. So we need to find ways to reach every person and engage them in the idea of becoming a true, water-caring Australian.
One challenge is to bring the debate to a level where everyone can understand it and take part. Where it becomes personally relevant.
Water talk today is about gigalitres and catchments, storages and modeling, guidelines and standards, reticulation and irrigation … and countless things beyond the power of the average individual to comprehend or do much about.
So first we must recalibrate the vocabulary. Chuck away the jargon and start talking about water in a way connected to the daily life and experience of the average Australian.
Here’s a comedic suggestion for a new set of water-metrics:
10 long shaves = 1 teenage shower
10 teenage showers = one lazy gardener
100 lazy gardeners = one Olympic pool
100 Olympic pools = 1 dead wetland
100 dead wetlands = one Sydharb, and so on …
Turning to the issue of waste and re-use, the economists say that change can be brought about by pricing water at its market rate.
Trouble is, in the average family, mum or dad gets the water bill once a quarter, shouts at the kids a bit about how huge it was, then everyone reverts to their old bad habits. There’s nothing before their eyes to remind them how much they’re using every time they turn a tap.
So let’s give them something. You wouldn’t buy a car without a petrol gauge. Why buy a tap that doesn’t tell you how much water you’re using?
I believe a little digital litre-counter on every Australian tap would send a message about being sparing with water to every person in society several times a day.
I certainly don’t rule out using the dismal science to curb water use, but let’s combine it with a bit of social science and psychology too.
Then there’s the fact that most of the water you use in your life is actually employed to grow food, timber, make steel or other consumables. As a consumer you haven’t the faintest idea of the embodied water content of your car, your chair, your beef, your house, your T-shirt, your soap, your newspaper or your cricket bat.
We can rate manufactured products for energy content – why not for water content too?
We need a ‘water friendly’ droplet rating systems for all consumables, to help consumers in supermarkets and clothing stores, hardware marts or garden centres make waterwise decisions.
I don’t just mean objects that use water directly, like pumps and washing machines, but all objects which have used water at any stage of their life cycle.
Also, if we can rate everything society uses or enjoys in water drops (embodied water) instead of dollars, it will create a common ‘green’ currency – and address one of the problems of environmental accounting.
Now I’m well aware that many people may be thinking that ideas like water metrics, tap gauges and droplet ratings are pretty simplistic stuff, and that we’re dealing with a more complex issue.
But in my field – communication – the name of the game is shared meaning.
Unless everyone in the conversation understands what we’re talking about, and can contribute to the discourse, then you’ll never get public buy-in. You can be as erudite as you like, and society will mostly ignore you or worse, be stubbornly unco-operative.
If we go back to those sensitive debates over suffragism, white Australia, land rights and land care, often the great change of mindset came when most people finally saw the issue from a new perspective, recognised its relevance to themselves and their society – and then they supported it.
It was the children of Australia who stopped us chucking our empty tinnies out of the ute window. They understood the meaning of Clean Up Australia, and they helped teach it to the rest of us.
There’s an important message there. I think a waterwise Australia will start in the school classroom as well as the home, so we need to look very closely at what we teach young Australians about the role of water in this continent, and how to look after it wisely.
Knowledge sharing
This brings me to an issue more serious yet. It is in some ways the giant scientific paradox of the C21st.
Today, the quantum of human knowledge is said to double every seven years.
Astonishing technological advances are reshaping our lives and our society.
Yet we also live in a world in which 3,000 million humans cannot make a phone call.
Where 2,000 million cannot safely drink a glass of water.
Where 400 children die every 15 minutes from preventable disease.
Where 97 percent of the human race is not on the internet, and most cannot even get a basic education.
Where a third of our farmland, forests and grasslands are degraded and most of the world’s big fisheries are collapsing.
Where 500 wealthy individuals earn more than the poorest three billion human beings together
A world in which more and more knowledge is passing into the hands of a ever-tinier proportion of the people.
Francis Bacon observed more than 350 years ago, that knowledge is power.
In the C20th this became literally true. The driving engine of innovation was war: the desire of nations to predominate, to conquer and destroy. To do this they had to keep their knowledge close and secret, in order to exploit it. This has patterned the innovation process we have today.
By a terrible irony science, which for so long served the interests of humanity, is now widening the gap between those with access to knowledge and those without.
It is giving power to the few, and subtracting it from the many.
This knowledge divide is the gravest issue confronting humanity today.
It is the source of inequity, exploitation, division, anger and conflict.
It is the driver of unsustainable use of the earth’s resources, of inadequate food and water supplies, of disease and suffering, of lack of social progress, inequality and nation failure.
It is breeding mistrust among people in both the developed and developing worlds in science and technology – because they no longer see them as serving the public good, but rather the wealthy few.
And when people mistrust the motives of science, they cease to heed the science itself.
This is leading to the growing phenomenon of technology rejection.
In Australia, we spend about $11 billion a year on science, technology and innovation. Yet we’d spend less that $100m – under one percent – in sharing that knowledge with the wider community. Much of it never leaves the library shelf.
The majority of Australians who are not in school or college have no means to access this vast repository of knowledge because – and I will be criticised for saying this – the people who create the knowledge, or who fund its creation, do not make sufficient effort to see it is transferred to others.
Consequently we are wasting a significant part of our investment in science and technology.
We are not even sharing it effectively with Australians, let alone the billions of our neighbours who so desperately need it to improve their lives, to build their economies and stabilise their societies.
In the case of water, if we are to change the behaviour of a nation to water, there are two imperatives:
- first, the people need to know the necessity, the facts and the issues surrounding it; and
- second, they must have an equal part in the dialogue over what is to be done.
Dialogue is an obscure word in the contemporary scientific lexicon. Because there was no dialogue, the community has imposed moratoria on genetically modified food.
We take pride in belonging to one of the world’s great democracies. So why do we force change on people without consulting them?
Around the world, the presumption that science knows what is best for society is under challenge. In Europe, in New Zealand and Australia pressure is rising for what is known as the democratisation of science.
Dialogue between science and society needs to begin at the conception of the research. It is too late when the new technology is developed, and society is facing a fait accompli.
This does not mean that the people vote on every scientific project. It means the people are consulted, able to express their views and values and contribute their thoughts and skills during the research.
Dialogue is a process of equality, in which participants speak a common language, share meaning and have equal power.
It accepts that views and values held by society are the result of millennia of human social evolution. They are there for a purpose – to ensure the survival of the society. They embody an essential balance between risk acceptance and risk aversion, and science must encompass this if it is to deliver benefits.
Dialogue is not merely a benefit to society. It also holds large benefits for science.
The community can bring to science many ideas and skills which will result in research outcomes being more widely accepted, adopted or commercialised, and so, of greater value to more people.
The community can be a partner in the process of advancement and innovation, instead of an uninformed recipient – or an opponent.
That is the true meaning of the term ‘knowledge society’.
Democratising science will ease fear of change, allay concerns about loss of control or failure of ethical standards. It will limit exclusion. It will curb the growing perceptions of risk and exploitation.
This is so with water. In the Murray-Darling Basin it is well recognised there will be no change without dialogue, without wide engagement by the different parts of the community.
We need to have the same discourse across Australia, and especially in our cities where people are not even remotely conscious of their ‘water footprint’ on the wider landscape.
The people have often shown they are willing to learn, and take part in change. But they need better access to the information on how and why. They need to be engaged far more fully in the debate and to have their values linked with the findings of research.
If Australia can achieve a true dialogue on water, it will make swifter progress towards sustainability than any country on Earth.
If we can learn, then we will be able to teach, to lead and to share our knowledge.
Whatever else may happen, the C21st will be the century of the global water crisis, afflicting billions of humans in frightful ways.
It is Australia’s destiny, I believe, to help resolve that crisis. To share with the world not only our technical knowledge of how to care for, manage and re-use water, but also our understanding of how to engage society in this task.
To do that we first have to create true Australians, people who think and behave like the landscape itself.
When we have achieved this, it will become our destiny to share this understanding with the world, and so make a contribution to humanity beyond all the empires and beliefs of the past.
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