Everything’s a Resource, Stupid!
We’re all so powered up by the hundred varieties of baked beans on the supermarket shelf that we’re missing a vital component of our lifestyle. Business people and economists don’t factor it in either. Its the truth that’s as plain as the nose on our collective faces. Water.
Watching the address to the National Press Club on the ABC this week some startling figures were revealed by Dr Megan Clark, head of Australia’s CSIRO. Among them, she said that between the 1960′s and the 1990′s we doubled food production on this planet, mainly through fertilisers and improvements through agricultural science. In the next 50 years we have to double food production again – with the added carbon costs and depleting water supplies. Now that’s a challenge. As Megan pointed out, that’s double the number of cows, double the fields of rice, double the number of chooks producing eggs… and with a lot less water.
Because everything takes a lot of water. A litre of milk takes a lot more water – cows don’t give it up for free. A cotton shirt, from memory it’s about 1600 litres of water. Every lump of coal needs to be washed clean. Every piece of steel. Every item of food we swallow or throw away. A friend purchased a sub-$100 hot house from K&D Warehouse a few weeks ago. It lasted a night because of the bad weather. A night. That makes short term economic sense (for a quick dollar) to produce that product but absolutely no real sense to have it produced. It should never have been made – water was used to produce and sell that useless product.
Pretty much everything has the cost of water consumption but we’re currently ignoring it. Now hear this – as you’re getting ready to whine about the impact of carbon taxes on your lifestyle its going to get worse. First, water is going to have an explicit cost. Second, it will be factored into the way we start to think and behave. We all need to become more aware of how much water supports our lifestyle.
Because without water we don’t have life. Pond scum. That’s us… and if we’re not careful with water then we’re a brief fizzing match in a lonely corner of the universe that never mattered. Ask this question of your government – where will we be in 200 years time? What’s the model?
