The Big Thirst, page 26
Although it sits incongruously on a resort-worthy slice of coast, facing a vista of turquoise Indian Ocean, the desal plant is a massive industrial operation, wedged next to a power plant. One of the striking things about it is that it is immaculately clean. There is not a weed or a scrap of litter visible on the sixteen-acre site. Even the gravel is well groomed. Just outside the main reverse-osmosis building is a small blue-gray box that looks like it might hold electronic controls. In fact, chief engineer Steve Christie pops open the hatch, and there’s a spigot inside: This is freshly desalinated ocean water, the water made by the water factory. Ninety minutes from Cockburn Sound to your palate. It tastes wonderful.
And Christie says the cleanliness of the facility—which is not open to the public—is no accident. “The whole system is sealed,” says Christie. “Our aim is that not even an ant could get in. We want to be able to take the water and send it, clean and fresh, straight into the piping system to people’s homes.”
The Perth desalination plant has operated smoothly since opening— it consistently supplies 17 percent of Perth’s annual 300-gigaliter water thirst. And it was a reasonable choice that solved the immediate problem, although whether it was the best choice is a different, perhaps unanswerable question.
“There’s no solution to the water problem without the people being involved,” says Gallop, of choosing the plant over the aquifer. “When the politics of water get hot, you need public support. I really did want the people on side with this.”
And there’s no question that Jim Gill, with his bar graph, rescued Perth—perhaps from the very crisis that the Australian scientist Tim Flannery had predicted in that famous newspaper headline “Perth Will Die, Says Top Scientist.”
But there is a much larger question about Jim Gill’s handling of Perth’s nerve-rattling plunge into water scarcity: Did Jim Gill waste a good crisis?
Gill doesn’t shrink from the question. He thinks, in fact, that it is the most important question.
“In some ways, we defined the problem and the solution within the existing framework of abundant water,” says Gill. “And we’ve still got abundant water here.
“What I really believe is, we just use too much water. It’s an amazing leap of arrogance that to get rid of five hundred milliliters of urine we use six liters of drinking water—twelve times the amount of the urine. That’s crazy. It’s just an example of how we are not serious in our life about how we manage resources.18
“Perth people use a lot less water than they used to”—20 percent less, per person. “And you could argue that if we hadn’t pushed back the problem so effectively, if the water hadn’t continued to flow from the taps, we’d be further along on the long-term goals.
“You could argue that. But we had to stave off the crisis.
“I do think we’re living an unsustainable lifestyle. We need to wean ourselves from abundant water.”
IN AUSTRALIA, IN UNDER TEN YEARS, one vitally important point has been made bluntly clear: Despite their utter reliability, our water systems are anything but robust. They are durable. But they are rigid, locked into their own assumptions of where the water will come from and where it will be needed. They have no flexibility, no adaptability. When the rain they rely on falls somewhere else, when the river stops flowing, when the underground aquifer we’ve been tapping starts to fall, we look around in astonishment and betrayal. What just happened?
Our water habits rely on those same assumptions of water availability. Abundant, flowing water is its own invitation to indulgence. That’s true in nature—who can resist putting a hand in the flowing current of a creek? And it’s especially true in a world where literally no signals tweak us about our water use, either as we’re using it or even in our monthly or quarterly water bills. The astonishing monthly electric bill is a sharp reminder of why we use the air conditioning carefully in summer; the price of a gallon of gas encourages us to consider cars with good mileage when it comes time to buy a new one.
But we’ve set up a system that treats water differently. A short shower is virtuous, but hardly rewarding, whereas a long, steaming bath—using in twenty minutes the water many Australian cities hope is a full day’s supply—is alluring, easy, and relaxing. Why not? You could take a bath four days a week without actually knowing how much water you were consuming; you could take a bath four days a week without noticing a change in your water bill. Indeed, despite water scarcity from one end of Australia to the other, even in cities like Perth and Toowoomba confronting crisis conditions, the typical home water bill remains less each month than the cell phone bill. Imagine how water habits would change if our bathroom and kitchen faucets simply displayed a small, digital readout showing how many gallons we were using, and had used from that faucet that day? It would be fascinating, it would be fun, it would save a lot of water.
In Perth, Jim Gill retired as CEO of Water Corporation in December 2008, and was succeeded by Sue Murphy.19 “You cannot overstate how hard it is to follow Jim Gill,” she says. “He is the water god in this state, and in some ways in Australia.”
Murphy shares with Gill a career steeped in engineering and construction. She spent twenty-five years at one of Australia’s leading engineering firms before Gill hired her to manage construction of that first desal plant. And she, too, knew nothing about water when she joined Water Corporation. “For me,” says Murphy with a smile, “water was just a source of large construction projects—dams, reservoirs, pipelines.”
But as CEO, Murphy’s mission is completely different from Jim Gill’s, although she feels it with at least as much urgency. She wants to confront the problem Gill didn’t have time to confront: Perth’s water culture. Water Corporation is using a new slogan, “Water forever,” that in just two words captures the challenge. Murphy wants to reset the assumptions about water, to dig into the sociology and the psychology of water use and permanently alter how people think about it.
“The drivers of water have been supply and demand,” she says. “Our job as the Water Corporation has been to simply increase the supply. But now our job is not simply to accept the demand and meet it with supply, but to take demand and manage it down.” She likes the phrase “nega-liters”— the liters of water she doesn’t have to deliver because people find more efficient ways to use water. “We treat nega-liters as the cheapest water we supply.” It is cheaper and easier to teach people to use the water they already have more carefully and productively than to build more dams, desal plants, and pipes.
“From my point of view, the mantra of the whole twentieth century has been ‘cheap,’” Murphy says. “The mantra of the twenty-first century is going to be ‘value’—what’s the best value?”
It’s an idea that, in fact, is almost never applied to water, at least explicitly. What’s the best use of a gallon of drinking water? Flushing away some pee? Watering a backyard? Growing rice? Making a microchip?
Murphy agrees with Gill that Water Corporation didn’t use the crisis either to scare or to force people into living differently with their water. “Fundamentally,” she says, “we haven’t changed anything.” That’s why she wants to ask harder, more complicated questions.
“If you look at how we set out our society here in Perth, we have quarter-acre blocks, with a nice lawn, so we can play football in the yard. In the last twenty-five to thirty years, things have changed. Mom and Dad aren’t home in the afternoon that much. The kids are in [day care]. Dad doesn’t really want to spend the weekend doing the yard. The backyard has become a place for entertaining, but not really a place for the kids to play football.
“That’s why we need good shared spaces—that can be watered with recycled water.”
This isn’t water as an infrastructure problem, it’s water as a sociology problem.
Because of the dramatic water scarcity, and the relentless public focus on how to find new water sources, says Murphy, “We’ve got some public acceptance of the idea that using less is good. But we haven’t locked in new behavior. We’ve locked in gains like dual-flush toilets. Behavior is less tangible, and I don’t think it’s changed.
“It’s like the difference between a crash diet and changing your eating habits forever.
“If we are going to change the way we construct society, we have to distill what we love and what makes it great,” says Murphy. “That’s not the mandate of the water utility. But someone’s got to start that conversation.”
And, of course, water has always shaped society—economically, sociologically, geographically. So the modern water supplier is not a bad place to start the conversation about “water forever.” But it’s also true that, crisis or no, it is in fact a lot easier to build a desal plant than to get 2 million people to build new habits.
Australia is taking its water scarcity seriously, but Australia is unusual in that, with 85 percent of its people within a thirty-one-mile strip along its coastline, almost all of its urban water problems can be solved with desalination. And desalination has what Australians have come to see as a standout advantage: It’s climate independent. The oceans aren’t going anywhere. If you’re willing to pump in the energy, the water factories will pump out clean water. But “climate resilient water” isn’t cheap.
Perth has a second desal plant under way, Brisbane and Sydney have plants built and operating, and Melbourne and Adelaide each have plants under construction. Overall, just the desalination plants that Australia’s state governments have built, or committed to building, will cost A$13 billion—A$600 for every resident of Australia, just for construction.20
It is quite possible, in other words, to spend enough money so we don’t have to do what Jim Gill insists we must: wean ourselves from abundant water. At least some of us can.
IF YOU STEP ONTO THE PORCH of Laurie and Deborah Arthur’s farmhouse at five-thirty in the morning, it’s easy to be surprised by the perfectly camouflaged, and momentarily motionless, visitors.
The Australian bush spreads out before you, dawn is just spilling over the flat land. There are tall trees near the house, giving way to wide vistas of scrub, crossed by a dirt road. If you step down off the porch, the ground itself suddenly seems to ripple, whirl, and race away from you, as if a wave were bunching under the brown dirt and rolling out.
It takes a minute to get your bearings, to figure it out.
It’s the ’roos.
The kangaroos have quietly congregated in the Arthurs’ yard overnight—perhaps fifty of them—and to the unpracticed eye, a kangaroo in the bush is invisible, even fifteen yards away, until it starts to fly.
The kangaroos have the coloration of deer—brown except for white bellies—but what is so striking is how they move. It’s like no other creature—the kangaroos seem to hover, defying gravity, their legs pumping an unseen blur, their bodies angled forward like in a Road Runner cartoon, moving at an arresting speed across ground they do not seem to touch. It’s hard to get your eyes to keep up with them—they are moving so fast, so silently, so effortlessly that you can lose them against the brown scrub while you are looking right at them. Their movement is unearthly— their speed, their ability to change direction without a flicker of exertion, their ability to be one place, disappear, and reappear someplace else in an eyeblink. Close to the Arthurs’ farmhouse, the kangaroos are stubbornly territorial. They are reluctant to give way, they go off a bit and turn back and gaze at the house, then instantly they’re racing for the horizon.
The ’roo posse is part of Laurie Arthur’s unspoken covenant with his land. Lots of farmers consider the kangaroos a damaging nuisance. But as with the eagles, Arthur thinks the kangaroos are as entitled to roam the Murray Valley as a guy in a John Deere combine.
“We certainly have 250 kangaroos on the farm now,” he says. “We’ve had four or five as pets for a while. A joey will get separated from its mum, and Deb will take it inside, make a little pouch for it, which she hangs from a doorknob, so they can climb in when they’re feeling nervous.”
Arthur does a similar thing when he gets cranky. He fires up his tiny red helicopter, with the cockpit that is nothing but an acrylic bubble, and he floats up to a thousand feet.
“When I get in a nasty mood, I get up here, and I just feel relaxed and happy,” says Arthur. “When I’m up here, I just can’t sweat it, you know?”
The chopper’s engine is so loud, two passengers in the cockpit need headsets to talk, even sitting with their legs practically touching. The view is majestic—a thousand feet of altitude over the flat Murray Valley takes the horizon out a dozen miles or more in every direction.
It is late fall in Australia—May—and spread out below Arthur are thousands of acres of his land, all chocolate brown, like pans of brownies. The ground should be gleaming green with crop.
“This is my forest”—Arthur traces his finger along a wide band of dense trees, not green but khaki—“that’s red gum forest. This is my forest, crying out for water.”
Suddenly he smiles. “As you can see, except for the drought, we’ve got the world by the throat.”
It may be Arthur’s thirty years working the land that has given him a sense of calm in the face of a crisis no less urgent, no less potentially devastating than that Jim Gill faced. It isn’t fatalism—Arthur is working as hard as the lack of rain will let him—but he knows he can’t make it rain, and he knows that there is no one to rescue him.
Arthur is an unusual farmer in many ways, not least because over the last decade he has also slowly migrated into the top ranks of water policy and water politics in the Murray basin, and in Australia. He sits on the seven-member National Water Commission. He chairs the water task force for Australia’s National Farmers Federation. And he sits on the board of directors of Sun Rice, Australia’s nearly A$1 billion rice growers cooperative—“although I’m not sure how long they’ll let me stay, since I’m not growing any rice.”
In all, Arthur’s off-farm work consumes a couple days a week, and often finds him in Australia’s capital, Canberra, or in Melbourne or Adelaide for meetings. Although those roles are both demanding and important, the ten thousand acres in Moulamein anchor Arthur’s attention. “I’m a farmer,” he says. “Full stop.”
But the work in conference rooms and offices gives Arthur a helicopter perspective on water policy, to go with the everyday, dirty-boot-level perspective.
As in Perth, there are really two layers to the frustration of the irrigators. The first is, simply, no rain. There’s not much to be done about that. Farming with no water is like trying to farm with no seed or no dirt.
The larger issue is how the Murray River itself is managed. “In Australia,” says Arthur, “everybody wants river health, as long as the other guy does the health part.”
Mike Young, one of the country’s most prominent and well-regarded water economists, suggested that every Murray River irrigator give up 1 percent of his water rights a year, until farming’s water stake is down to a more sustainable level. Of course, the water entitlements are property, like land or buildings. And giving up 1 percent is like giving up the right to farm 1 percent of your land each year.
“Why us?” asks Arthur. “There is a parochialism, a defensiveness, when it comes to water, no question. I can feel it slinking out of my spine sometimes.” He winks. “I have to restrain myself.
“But the failures of the past are being brought to account on one group of people. Our position is, if you want our bloody water, come and buy it. If the very basis of your business is water, how can they take that away without compensating you?”
Arthur’s defensiveness isn’t paranoid. Wayne Meyer is a professor at the University of Adelaide, who has spent much of his professional life studying farming, irrigation, and the most effective use of water—living for years among Australia’s irrigation farmers.
“The irrigators have been living in a dream world,” says Meyer, “just like the cities of Perth and Adelaide. The irrigators have developed an entitlement sensibility.
“The big problem for irrigation is, it never generates enough money out of the irrigated production”—the food—“to be competitive with the productivity of water used in an urban or industrial setting.
“Irrigation,” Meyer says, “has to be a societal decision. Because it doesn’t win in a bid system. The Hyatt Hotel in Adelaide will always outbid the orange grove.”
Arthur knows that too. He doesn’t think he’s entitled to a fair shake from the sky, just from his fellow Australians. “The irrigation systems were set up without an understanding of the soils or the groundwater,” he says. “It’s been a miserable way to manage the Murray basin. And an event like this has caught everybody short. It has brought everything to a head.
“Is there an argument that this isn’t the place for flood irrigation farming? If someone wants to say this isn’t the place for an irrigation scheme, an argument that the whole thing should never have built, I could listen to that.” Just don’t decide that without acknowledging that it’s society pulling the ground out from under a whole way of life that society had previously promoted.
Meanwhile, Arthur works as hard as a fifty-six-year-old man can. In 2008, he took his combine and a crew north for seven weeks to do contract harvesting for Australia’s largest wheat grower—just to make money.
The new woolshed got finished, with help from many neighbors, just ten hours before the sheep shearing started. Although the newly revived sheep flock yielded good wool, the price was low, and the total sale didn’t cover the cost of the new shed, not to mention the cost of taking care of the sheep themselves.
Arthur pushed forward with his new water pipeline, to improve the efficiency of his irrigation, but just to the end of the first stage—running to one of four fields he hopes it will supply. “I’m out of money. The pipe is going to cost $450,000, and I’ve spent $195,000 so far.”
In a twist on the classic O. Henry story, the first stage of the pipeline to improve Arthur’s use of water was paid for by selling water. Arthur sold a tiny slice of his entitlement to the government—3 percent of his total water, for which he received A$195,000. The Murray River gets to keep that water. But that water is gone forever—it’s the first time Arthur has ever sold water—so the new pipeline had better pay off.
