Down the Gurgler

Down the Gurgler
(c) Melina Magdalena, 2006

Anyone see Lily Tomlin and Helen Caldicott on Enough Rope last night? I stayed up especially, and am glad I did. Earlier in the day I had a conversation with my sister about the world. As a new mother I know she must be especially sensitive to what’s going on around us.

On Saturday night I had a series of hilarious dreams, one of which is pertinent to this discussion. I dreamed I was watching television. There was a lead-in before the ad break, to the next segment in the program, in which we were going to be introduced to “Australia’s Most Famous S-Bend Family”. In my dream I saw how this family (perhaps something like The Borrowers, by Mary Norton) had set up home in the S-Bend of a toilet!

It seems to me that if we don’t want to end up drinking toilet water via new and improved water filtration technology that no one trusts any more than they trust microwaves, than we really oughtn’t be putting our sewage in the water in the first place.

It seems to me that there is no inevitability about water desalination , nuclear power or recycling sewage into potable water. Besides the fact that recycling water makes perfect sense, as it mirrors the organic water cycle, perhaps people wouldn’t be so up in arms about using filtered grey water from washing dishes and clothes, as they are about using filtered poo and wee water?

If we continue to take no action, we will descend, like Jonah into the whale, and who knows when and in what condition we will eventually emerge into the filthy waters of our own creation? Humans are the dirtiest creatures on this planet.

So here’s an agenda for a political party that wants to win votes and save the world. Please add your ideas to this agenda and present to your likely candidates. (ever the eternal optimist, I presume there are some strong and sensible political candidates somewhere in Australia.)

1) Invest every cent that is needed in building Australia a solar power grid, so that we are completely solar powered and are selling our excess energy overseas by 2015.

2) As a lead in to the above, offer one-off grants to all public housing tenants in Australia to convert their homes to solar power by 2010.

3) Retrain some of the miners at Roxby Downs to manufacture, repair, maintain and install solar panels and the necessary apparatus.

4) Close all uranium mines in Australia.

5) Do not begin to enrich uranium in Australia.

6) Refuse to store nuclear waste anywhere in Australia.

7) Invest every cent that is needed in converting Australia’s sewage system so that toilet waste no longer enters our waters. This means investing in the research that will make it possible even for city-dwellers and office blocks to be able to convert to composting toilets . Every Australian household and office should be converted to using composting toilets by 2020.

8) Retrain miners and other willing workers to be able to manufacture, install, maintain and repair compostable toilets and in the plumbing skills necessary to change our sewage systems so that toilet waste is kept separate from grey water.

9) Make the installation of rainwater harvesting tanks mandatory for every Australian dwelling, and in educating Australians about how to keep this precious resource clean and usable.

Let’s not send ourselves down the proverbial gurgler.