LET’S TALK WATER #4

Doing more with less.

 

My wife and I lived on an acreage for a time. It was a wonderful place, except that it had no potable water so I had to drive into town and fill a tank at the public hydrant, drive it home and transfer it to a storage tank from which a pressure pump would send it to the house. Necessity made of us great conservers of water; we generally got by on 250 litres per day, so 125 litres each.

                Household water use has begun to decline slightly, but in 2009 in Canada, per person use was around 275 litres per day. We were using less than half the Canadian average.

                Household use can be shrunk without real hardship. Innovations like a sink that drains grey water into a toilet tank, taps that release water in bursts of a few seconds when handwashing, low-flow shower heads, in-line water heaters, turning lawns into xeriscape gardens, drip watering of gardens and orchards, etc., are not hard to come by, not expensive relative to the approaching alternatives.  

Although the abundance of fresh water in Canada provides little incentive to conserve, the supply is not endless: glaciers that feed our rivers are melting and will disappear, lakes and rivers are being contaminated through waste-water disposal, chemicals and organic material; ground water is compromised by agricultural chemicals and animal feces, diversion projects for hydro energy, etc. In effect, we’re in the business of turning fresh water into unpotable “sewage;” draining inevitably into the sea, which we’re also well on the way to destroying.

Before we can expect fresh water conservation and protection to become a serious issue, education will be increasingly important. But unless necessity energizes people, it’s doubtful that Western culture will do any better at this than we are currently doing at climate change, or adapting to the digital universe gracefully, or curbing the widening spread between the wealthy and the poor. Unless habits shift, the only alternative left will be water sales or water taxes, moves that hardly seem necessary in a progressive, well-educated society.

Plants and animals (including homo sapiens) have adapted to change and survived, but usually with massive attrition. The principle of natural selection—survival of the fittest, if you like—is the primary means by which species are able over time to adjust to changes in food and habitat conditions, but this is generally only possible when many generations are available for the adjustment. Human generations average out to 25 years or so, so 100 years gives us only 4 generations to adapt; fruit flies, on the other hand, would go through a minimum of 1,300 generations in that time. So in 100 years, fruit flies may well look different but they’ll be getting on just nicely while humans are still at early stages of adjusting to changes in their environment.

Humans, though, adapt through political means, not so much through the pure “survival of the fittest” paradigm, and so are reliant on thought and planning, social consensus and cooperation to make the adaptive changes that keep them fit to live in a changed environment. What this implies is the absolute need for a precise science: analysis, innovation, prediction, and the consensus to live by objectively-derived-at precepts.

But back to water. The right time for enacting strenuous fresh water conservation measures is long past. For Canadians to say there’s no need to conserve is to intone a survival of the fittest mode; a “let the poor freeze in the dark” attitude. “What’s it to me?” 

One reason it matters that we begin strategies of conservation of fresh water is that those in areas without water will pack up and move to wherever water is available. After climate change does its worst, every thirsty eye will focus on Canada and Russia particularly.  

Recommended reading: Postindustrial society | Britannica