Interesting post, especially the bottled water stuff. I'll have to look into that a bit more. I wanted to pick up on this though, "What you are doing is paying an exorbitant amount for a BASIC HUMAN NECESSITY...", and give a slightly different perspective about the cost of water (not bottled).
Here in Australia, where we are in the throes of one of the worst droughts in the country's history, we don't charge enough for water. Nowhere near enough. Water, as it comes out of the tap, is dirt cheap and as a result it has been wasted and wasted; it used to be common to see spinklers on in the middle of the day, people hosing down cars or footpaths, kids playing with hoses or having massive water fights. You don't see it anymore, but the reason people were able to do that kind of thing is because water is cheaper than any other utility (about $0.60/kL (http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/yourhome/technical/fs21.htm)). Why you don't see activity like that now has nothing to do with the price of water increasing and everything to do with water restrictions and major metropolitan water supplies sitting below 34% for Sydney (http://www.sca.nsw.gov.au/), 37% for Melbourne (http://www.melbournewater.com.au/content/water/weekly_water_update/weekly_water_update.asp?bhcp=1), and 25% across three dams for Brisbane (http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/BCC:BASE::pc=PC_2159). And it's much worse in rural areas (see Qld's Water Storage Information (http://www.sunwater.com.au/#), some of regional NSW (http://www.g-mwater.com.au/browse.asp?ContainerID=water_storage_levels) and Goulburn (http://waterrecycling.blogspot.com/2006/06/goulburn-pioneer-inland-city.html), in particular).
The thing is, despite water restrictions, water usage is not declining as much as it needs to in order for any kind of sustainability. We have people installing rainwater tanks, but you need rain for them to be useful, there are discussions of desalination plants and recycled water, but both of these options freak people out; yet we still have people who are more concerned about their lawns being green than the fact that water is now essentially a finite resource (we may be getting rain and floods in the tropics, but I don't think all of us want to move there).
What it comes down to is making people think about their water usage and, from my experience, the only thing that does that is hitting them in the hip pocket. Yes, water is a basic human necessity, but it is also one that gets treated far too casually by those of us who have infrastructure that provides quality water. I agree that a certain level of water should be free, or near to it, and certainly it shouldn't be withheld at all, but in the modernised world we abuse our access. We don't need hundreds of litres (http://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/abs@.nsf/Latestproducts/9B8672490C837E96CA25723400211F60?opendocument) per day per capita to survive and I think that an argument can be made for placing a higher monetary value on water precisely because it is a human necessity.
And in keeping with the saving water theme I'm going to suggest:
- turning off the tap when cleaning your teeth or washing your face, - placing a brick or similar into the toilet cistern so it doesn't fill as much, and - using grey water from the rinse cycle on the washing machine or from the fish tank to water plants.
I also highly recommend reading The Weather Makers (http://www.theweathermakers.com/) by Tim Flannery. He's an incredibly interesting environmentalist; his book on global warming is excellent, accessible and a good companion to An Inconvenient Truth.
Thanks for the thought provoking post and the music. I shall be grabbing some later.
no subject
Here in Australia, where we are in the throes of one of the worst droughts in the country's history, we don't charge enough for water. Nowhere near enough. Water, as it comes out of the tap, is dirt cheap and as a result it has been wasted and wasted; it used to be common to see spinklers on in the middle of the day, people hosing down cars or footpaths, kids playing with hoses or having massive water fights. You don't see it anymore, but the reason people were able to do that kind of thing is because water is cheaper than any other utility (about $0.60/kL (http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/yourhome/technical/fs21.htm)). Why you don't see activity like that now has nothing to do with the price of water increasing and everything to do with water restrictions and major metropolitan water supplies sitting below 34% for Sydney (http://www.sca.nsw.gov.au/), 37% for Melbourne (http://www.melbournewater.com.au/content/water/weekly_water_update/weekly_water_update.asp?bhcp=1), and 25% across three dams for Brisbane (http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/BCC:BASE::pc=PC_2159). And it's much worse in rural areas (see Qld's Water Storage Information (http://www.sunwater.com.au/#), some of regional NSW (http://www.g-mwater.com.au/browse.asp?ContainerID=water_storage_levels) and Goulburn (http://waterrecycling.blogspot.com/2006/06/goulburn-pioneer-inland-city.html), in particular).
The thing is, despite water restrictions, water usage is not declining as much as it needs to in order for any kind of sustainability. We have people installing rainwater tanks, but you need rain for them to be useful, there are discussions of desalination plants and recycled water, but both of these options freak people out; yet we still have people who are more concerned about their lawns being green than the fact that water is now essentially a finite resource (we may be getting rain and floods in the tropics, but I don't think all of us want to move there).
What it comes down to is making people think about their water usage and, from my experience, the only thing that does that is hitting them in the hip pocket. Yes, water is a basic human necessity, but it is also one that gets treated far too casually by those of us who have infrastructure that provides quality water. I agree that a certain level of water should be free, or near to it, and certainly it shouldn't be withheld at all, but in the modernised world we abuse our access. We don't need hundreds of litres (http://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/abs@.nsf/Latestproducts/9B8672490C837E96CA25723400211F60?opendocument) per day per capita to survive and I think that an argument can be made for placing a higher monetary value on water precisely because it is a human necessity.
And in keeping with the saving water theme I'm going to suggest:
- turning off the tap when cleaning your teeth or washing your face,
- placing a brick or similar into the toilet cistern so it doesn't fill as much, and
- using grey water from the rinse cycle on the washing machine or from the fish tank to water plants.
I also highly recommend reading The Weather Makers (http://www.theweathermakers.com/) by Tim Flannery. He's an incredibly interesting environmentalist; his book on global warming is excellent, accessible and a good companion to An Inconvenient Truth.
Thanks for the thought provoking post and the music. I shall be grabbing some later.