Water and Apple Trees

If you had an apple tree in your backyard, would you eat those apples?

Or would you instead mulch those apples, give them to an apple farmer who would use the mulch to grow his/her trees, and then sell the apples back to you?

Personally, I find the former option much more appealing. The current water plan that we have been fed is the same as buying your own apples back from the fruit grower. This occurred to me as I was walking to the bakery and the butcher the other day. It had been raining most of the morning, not particularly heavily but steadily, and water was flowing through the gutters at pace. As I watched the water flowing into the stormwater drains, I couldn't help but wonder where that water was going. Then I realised that most of it would flow into the Yarra and then into Port Phillip Bay and the Bass Strait, where it will become seawater. Funnily enough, it is from the Bass Strait that the proposed Victorian desalination plant will be drawing the seawater to be desalinised in order to solve our water crisis.

This strikes me as somewhat ironic. There are two other related issues that add to my overall confusion. First, the government refused to include water collection tanks in the plans for the redevelopment of Spencer St. Station, yet is more than happy to shell out for the more environmentally suspect desalination plant. Not only does the desalination plant increase the salinty of the surrounding ocean, produce salty sludge, and kill microscopic marine life, but it also requires a great deal of electricty to run. I am unaware if a water tank does any of these things. Furthermore, the construction of a desalination plant is more expensive than the retrofitting of domestic dwellings with water tanks.

Second, the government refuses to upgrade water treatment plants to enable the treated sewage to be used in agriculture. This is a failing both of the government and the citizenry. We, as a people, fail to realise that world leading metropoli of the world are drinking recycled water (e.g. Singapore). Moreover, I wash my vegetables before I cook or eat them to remove small bugs, dirt, or manure that is used as fertiliser from the vegetables I buy (not to mention any chemically produced fertiliser). How would washing vegetables to remove any treated human waste be any different?

Those of you aware of our state's water crisis will have noted that I have not addressed the construction of the north-south pipeline. To use a rather hackeyed, but readily understandable, cliche- this is robbing Peter to pay Paul. Not only do Victoria's regional areas already struggle under the weigh of stricter water restrictions than Melbourne, but the environments that require this water to survive are actually outside the metropolitan boundary. Who would have thought?

The time has come for us to re-evaluate our water crisis. Are we as a state going to tackle this problem in a progressive and dynamic manner that allows for continued sustainable water management, or are we going to allow a self-interested government to peacock projects that may prove to be white elephants? We need to ensure that the resources given to us freely are not squandered in the pursuit of questionable politics.