To the thirsty of the world - I apologise

I have a sneaking suspicion that I may have just done something rather abhorrent. Not only that, but I have been doing it for some time without a second thought, up to four and five times a day. It’s not that it is the first time it made me feel a bit naughty or guilty even, but I made the mistake of looking into the issue a bit deeper, although not literally (that denial will make sense in a bit) and it really does seem to be a first world practice that isn’t really garnering the attention it deserves.

First a bit of background.

Last summer in Australia, the summer of 2012/2013, it was the hottest year on record. The Bureau of Meteorology had to add two extra colours to its heat maps to deal with the extreme temperatures, and nearly the whole country was experiencing severe temperatures at the same time. It was pretty hot! We had terrible bush fires (wild fires as they are called in other countries), nasty cyclones and then we had floods just to rub it in.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, it was a similar story. Droughts, floods, cyclones, storms, cold snaps, you name it, they were on the go somewhere.

But it is the severe drought bit that really strikes a chord, especially in countries that have been ravaged by drought for so long, and are in the midst of serious death tolls as a result of failed crops, dying cattle, and the general horror that such a situation brings with it. Australians are generally pretty sympathetic to drought. It is ingrained in our psyche. Images of dead and mummified sheep and kangaroos dotted about a dried up waterhole are pretty common during summer, and we all know how it feels to be outside on a stinking hot summers day, and the relief a bit of shade and a cold drink can bring!

Which brings me to my actions which are causing my unease. That is, I just flushed about four litres of perfectly good drinking water down the toilet! In Australia! The land that brags about being ‘the sunburnt country”.

In fact, to add insult to injury, I casually pissed in it first, then without a second thought, flushed it away. What a terrible thing to do. It was, prior to my actions at least, clean, clear, presumably treated to the same standard as the water that comes out of the tap in the kitchen that I drink from, from the same pipe redirected under my house to my toilet. Potable in other words, meaning safe for human consumption.

How ridiculous that in a country that is one of the driest on earth, we are so arrogant as to behave in such a disrespectful way. In the United Kingdom, it is estimated that about two billion (yes, billion!) litres of fresh water is flushed down the toilets of the nation every single day. In Australia, if you take a look at one city, the nations Capital, Canberra, you can get an idea of the situation. Estimates have put the wastage there at an average of just under 280,000 litres per year, per household.

So, I feel like a should apologise to the masses dying of thirst in sub-Saharan Africa, or dying of disease for want of clean drinking water anywhere in the developing world. Or to farmers watching there livestock suffer, their crops wilt, their livelihoods dry up. I know that my not crapping in perfectly good drinking water and flushing it away won’t make any difference to your plight, but I just hope that as the aspirational masses of the world continue to rise up and meet the middle class ‘values’ of the West, some new thinking entrepreneur can get it right and teach us all a lesson!

Now, I have to go and stop my kids throwing their uneaten school lunch in the bin, and put it in the compost instead. What a ‘first world’ thing to have to do…

Farmers, Food Halls and Phobias

Food halls, food courts, whatever you call them where you come from, scare the shit out of me! Not because of any type of claustrophobia, or agoraphobia, or even that rather rare condition cibophobia (who knew?!?), but more to do with the whole business of what goes into filling them with, well, food.

We’ve all heard the term ‘from the paddock to the plate’ and kind of like the idea that there is a farmer out there, somewhere, producing this thing called food, that magically ends up diced and sliced and ready to go in a never ending variety of ways, for the consumptive pleasure of the sheeple (love that term) during the hour or so of freedom from serfdom that we call a lunch break these days.

But when you stand back in a food court, in a capital city or a country town, and watch the amount of protein and carbohydrate that is being consumed, animals and plants in other words, and then you extrapolate that out in a global sense, and then you think that cities are getting bigger and bigger and more and more people are eating and eating and more and more stuff is being produced and killed and cut up and, and…….well, that is why they scare the shit out of me! It just can’t be sustainable. And I’m not just thinking about the food, here either. All those plastic forks and containers that are destined for landfill the moment they are produced on an assembly line ‘somewhere else’, and all the electricity being used to cook and light and clean and heat and cool and it is all so bloody terrifying when you really stop and think about it that it is enough to make one go and live in a cave for a little while just to regroup…

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no luddite (well, maybe a little bit) and it’s not that I don’t like people generally (well, I don’t really, especially when they are in a state of mass consumption without even the slightest thought as to how lunch appeared in front of them), it is just that all this stuff is basically the fertility from a paddock on a plate, and perhaps that’s not such a good thing when we are talking about high intensity production like this, that shows no signs of slowing down at all. 

You might not know this, but a food crisis was averted mid-last century by what was called the Green Revolution. Not the kind of Green Revolution some folks want to see these days (that is, environment and sustainability), but a revolution in agriculture that saw a radical increase in production globally. It was hinged on the use of new and improved fertilizers and has been both a blessing and a curse. Synthetic and mined fertilizers are not really doing that much good to the land they get into, and while synthetics are a product of fossil fuels, the mined ones have problems all of their own, land degradation springs to mind. The thwarted Malthusians must be waiting with baited breath to see what happens next as the global population, fuelled literally by the fruits (and grains, and meats) of our own ingenuity, clamber up the aspirational ladder to an evermore crowded middle class mezzanine, start banging their plastic forks on the food court tables and start chanting “we want more, we want more….”.

So, without wanting to even try and offer any solutions to this ever increasing drain on our poor old planet, let me just say again, without the slightest twinge of embarrassment, that food halls, food courts, or whatever you call them where you come from, really do scare the shit out of me!

And, in an attempt to sum up my fear in a nice little package, I have come up with a new phobia that I hope doesn’t get in under your skin like a bot fly larvae (I’ll spare you a link to that particular horror but feel free to investigate it):

Claciboagophobia – the fear of being stuck in an enclosed food hall with a bunch of people who haven’t a clue.

Apparently there is no cure.

Want to be a billionaire?

It seems that finally the seriousness of anthropogenic global warming is gaining traction on the oil soaked slippery slope of the mainstream media – albeit buried between the latest political hijinks and some actor or other that is wearing a new dress – with the Australian Climate Commission’s latest media foray suggesting that to avoid a pretty different planet to the one we have come to know and love we need to leave the majority of fossil fuels in the ground instead of burning them as fast as we can.

Anyone with an entrepreneurial bone in their body would be looking at this issue with an open mind and firing up their creative juices to do a bit of future gazing to figure out where-oh-where the opportunities are really going to lie in the next decade or so. Now would be the time to try and, in the lexicon of the football field, be where the ball is going and not where the ball is right now because the swell of popular support for the notion of moving toward a genuinely sustainable future is growing quite quickly, and where the swell of support heads, so too does political will and the eventual policies to facilitate a change, and that, my entrepreneurial friends is where goes the money (the popularity of the likes of Bill McKibben with his recently sold out tour of Australia where he was spruiking the ‘terrifying new math’ of climate change shows just how far we have come, despite the usual naysayers).

Unfortunately, the political will on this one will lag for as long as there are budget deficits, an addiction to growth and a populace too self-obsessed and distracted by whatever latest gadget they are being told to buy by corporations whose sole raison d’être is to make money and to hell with how it is done (this in spite of all sorts of major otherwise conservative organisations clearly articulating their concern on this issue). It seems it is easy to preach to the converted or to mouth off some platitudes, but the powerful interests with very long investment pipelines in fossil fuels are digging in, puns intended, for a long and expensive fight. Long enough, perhaps, to get all the black gold in all its forms out of the ground, muddying the waters of the by now pretty clear science, funding ‘think tanks’ to obfuscate for as long as possible, and basically playing the role of a fiddling Nero while the Earth fills the backdrop of a burning Rome.

Nice work, guys.