The El Manzano community hold their finished hand pumps

Over the course of my short visit here the power has gone out, for one reason or another, multiple times, and when it happens the taps totally refuse to surrender their precious charge. I thus find myself almost compulsively filling my stainless steel water bottle at every opportunity.

Our dependency on electricity is great enough without exacerbating the problem manyfold by having that vulnerability daisy-chain on to such a basic human need as water.

As mentioned, the massive earthquake a couple of months back helped villagers to register and acknowledge their vulnerability. The two hand pumps in the village were a critical element in their being able to avoid the chaos found in the towns and cities at the time. Ten days without power would otherwise have meant ten days without water.

A few days ago the El Manzano community rallied to increase their water security.

Jose demonstrates while the village looks on

Jose (below centre), who works for a local NGO that helps train poor farmers how to improve their situation with inexpensive, low tech solutions, came to El Manzano to get the village set up with manual water pumps. Rather than just bringing pre-assembled pumps along and handing them over, Jose brought the components only, and got the village involved, and working together, in their creation. The villagers took ownership of this element of their transition, and in the course of doing so are now intimately familiar with how the pumps work, so are now well prepared to create more if needed and to repair any that may break in the future.

The villagers get busy creating their own from scratch

There’s more to such gatherings than just reducing resiliency for individual families, of course. Such hands-on meetings create opportunity for the community to unite behind a common need and goal. Days like this are active and fun and serve to build relationships and strengthen friendships.

Even the children got involved

The resulting hand pumps are six metres in length – more than enough for the very high water table they have here, yet deep enough to help filter water that’s seeped down from above.

Is your community looking at ways to build resiliency for the energy-challenged times ahead? Why not give it some thought…. Aside from the practicalities, it can be a fun way for families – old and young – to get together to do something practical and rewarding.

Rather than fearing the future, we have opportunity to take it by the horns and steer it in a positive direction – one that gives us a localised interdependence that has a measure of hope of seeing us through difficult times.

Or, the other option is to just sit and trust the government to take care of us….

Continue on to Part VII: The House Building Gets Underway

The ‘Adobe House’, El Manzano’s ecological demonstration house.
All photos © copyright Craig Mackintosh

In the middle of the little El Manzano village, on display to all in the community, is the ‘Adobe House’. This demonstration house is a project by Eco Escuela El Manzano to demonstrate to the community several low-tech but effective techniques for improving quality of life whilst reducing a home’s impact on the environment.

Houses made from adobe bricks are common in Chile, although, increasingly, like many ‘developing’ countries, people are turning towards energy disastrous concrete instead. The Adobe House was not purpose built – rather, it is actually a very old house that was retrofitted in 2008. It is thus a good example of what many villagers could do if they had a mind to.

I’ll share a few of its features.

Against one wall they built a simple conservatory. The earth brick wall absorbs heat during the day, warming the home, and radiates it back out during the night – to ensure an extended frost-free period for vegetables. Well positioned terracotta tiles or other high thermal mass elements can increase this energy buffering as well (even just barrels of water can do the trick). Though not incorporated here, another addition can be to add vents between the conservatory and the home to allow excess heat to pass into the house.

During the hotter parts of the year the ends of the conservatory are easily opened up.

Outside the house and conservatory there’s a trellis hung heavy in grape. It creates an excellent, and edible, shade area under which sits an outdoor table and benches for summer breakfasts and lunches. The foliage dies back during the winter months to let more sunshine through.

Next to this sits a fantastic earth oven. And yes, the bread was as good as it looks:

Other elements include the all-important manual pump for water – without which this community would have suffered dearly during the recent earthquake (see Part I) – and a greywater system for biologically cleaning household waste water, returning it, slowly, to the water table after several stages of natural cleaning.

Potty Training

The ‘centrepiece’ of this demonstration site, however, is this:

A composting toilet (or ‘dry toilet’ as they’re called here)

This elevated, dual-chamber throne room (similar to the one at Zaytuna Farm) serves as the home’s fertiliser collection station. When enconsed therein, or thereon, as the case may be, the room is notable for its lack of odor. Any odor.

Although composting humanure should be regarded as an urgent… um… call of nature everywhere (the world is running out of potable water, and yet we’re crapping in it, and we still haven’t come to terms with the significance of phosphorus recycling yet either), it is arguably even more important here in El Manzano.

I say this for two connected reasons: 1) most of the community here rely on ‘long drop’ toilets (simple holes dug into the ground), and 2) the water table in El Manzano is incredibly close to the surface – in many places barely a metre below ground.

In case the obvious eludes you – this means that these smelly, bacteria-filled repositories will be seeping into the water table…. Yes, this is the same water table they’re pumping water from so as to quench their thirsty lips. If it weren’t for the very low population density here I think we could be looking at some serious health issues.

The Eco Escuela El Manzano team are therefore turning the problem into the solution, by demonstrating how a potentially disastrous waste stream can instead become a resource. The Abobe House has a constant stream of students and interns residing in it – all of whom are building site fertility rather than contributing to water contamination.

Continue on to read Part V: The Design Stage

Please consider contributing to this worthy cause – you can do so via donation links on this page!

Further Reading:

• Compost Toilet – Farallones (237kb PDF)
• Compost Toilet – Minimus (459kb PDF)
• Urine-Diverting Toilet, Vietnam (3.4mb PDF)
• Low-Cost Compost Toilets (3.45mb PDF)
• The Humanure Handbook

Meet Doris. Prior to the quake, before the little El Manzano community decided it was pertinent to seriously consider things they could do to build resiliency into their village, Doris was already paying attention. She took the advice of the Eco Escuela El Manzano team and got herself a hand pump, so if the lights went out, it didn’t have to mean she and her family would be without water as well. Hence her describing the fact that the community had TWO hand pumps to supply water after the quake hit.

Now the whole village wants to get a hand pump. Imagine that.

I’m uploading this after 15 hours without power. Some mischievous people nearby cut cables during the ‘wee hours of the night’ – taking a good length of them so they could sell the copper wire they contain. Quakes, cable theft, energy crisis – whatever. Low tech hand pumps are saviours here where all water must otherwise come via electricity powered pumps.

We chose to gamble. The forecast predicts rain for Kapoho ever day this week, but only a 20% chance. In the meantime, we’ll make sure to keep the containers we generally use only for drinking water filled up to the top with water from the Pahoa water station. If we don’t get significant rain over the next few days, we may have to pay a water truck to come fill our tank. $180. Otherwise, no showers, no toilet flushing, no water for dishes or laundry.

Living off-grid at the mercy of Mother Nature is a continuous learning experience. When you live in the City where all your needs are provided by public utilities, you just don’t understand smart use. Sure, many people tend to become conservation-minded when the bills get too high. But, how many city-dwellers can relate to getting down to that last drop of red water, knowing you will soon need to think about waterless composting toilets and showering at the beach?

The real question I have to ask myself is, “how did we get here when we had so much rain this past fall and a completely full water tank?” The answer, “we took it for granted that the rain would keep coming”. We washed our dishes under running water, we flushed our toilet after single uses, we washed all our laundry here and we took showers that were as long as the solar-heated water would allow. To our credit, we do have eight people living on this system. But, we were wasteful. Now we are paying the price. Yet, we have learned very important lessons about conservation.

First, we could use a much larger catchment tank. With the 103 inches of annual rainfall we normally get here in Kapaho, we could easily fill five water tanks. However, I think setting up at least one more might be able to store enough water to get us through occasional droughts like this.

Second, we need to start valuing our water and put conservation practices in place. We have recently resorted to peeing in a bucket. The urine collected not only cuts down on water needed to flush the toilet, but also acts as a valuable nitrogen source when poured over a compost pile or around trees. We will also be setting up a dry-composting toilet, akin to a Humanure model, as an alternate to our traditional loo. This system uses no water. Instead, after use, some type of dry carbon such as sawdust is poured over the deposit to cut down on odor and activate decomposition. Eventually, the contents will completely decompose and can be used as compost around trees. We’re also using Germ-X as an alternative to hand washing.

Third, we will encourage shorter showers. Turn off the water when soaping up. Sounds simple. Same with dishes. Fill up the sink, rather than washing them under running water. Paper plates are handy too.

Finally, laundry. I just spent $20 washing clothes at the laundromat yesterday. While this conserves our catchment water, it’s not only a waste of money, but also of energy. Finding an efficient method that uses renewable energy while at the same time reduces home water use is the goal. Perhaps a bicycle-powered washing machine may be the answer. More to come on that one.

Overall, the lesson learned here is to not take resources for granted just because they seem abundant at the time. It doesn’t matter whether you live off-grid or on city-utilities. What’s here today may be gone tomorrow. Just the very act of thinking about what you use and considering creative ways to reduce that usage now, may prevent a loss of luxury in the near future.

A coconut shell is an excellent, biodegradable planter.
The coir (husk fibre) is extracted and mixed with soil to become a potting mix
with particularly good water retention capacity (the fibre reduces evaporation).

All photographs © Craig Mackintosh

The world’s largest water harvesting earthworks has transformed Sri Lanka, or at least large parts of it, from aridity to lushness. This mainframe design provides biological resources that villagers can use to maximise biodiversity for personal and environmental health. In similar fashion the ‘mainframe design’ of the ‘invisible structures’ of Sarvodaya’s community network provide avenues for the free flow of permaculture information to help achieve this goal. The good news is that many villagers are making use of these resources and this potential, despite constant attempts by Big Agri to lure them, through offers of free product samples and demonstrations, into chemical dependency.

Nandana Jayasinghe (inset), Director of Sarvodaya’s Agriculture Cluster and Development Education Institute in Thanamalwila, southern Sri Lanka, took me to see several sample home and market gardens. Nandana’s work is to help build on village level independence by supplementing, but not supplanting, local knowledge with permaculture techniques suitable for their climate and culture. Over recent years Nandana has been organising annual Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) courses with visiting international trainers, as well as many other workshops.

Nandana tells me that about 80 villages within their network are specifically practicing permaculture, and counting, whilst remaining villages almost universally reject chemical based systems due to their disharmony with Sarvodaya’s agreed principles of prioritising the health of their environment.

After months without rain, mulch dries up and is easily blown away by regular
strong hot winds. Practitioners try to plant wind breaks to help here.

A buried clay pot, once filled and covered with a rag, slowly percolates water to plant roots whilst eliminating loss through evaporation

Gardening brings its own unique challenges for every locale in the world. While many of us are looking for biological solutions to creatures like slugs, aphids and caterpillars, your average permaculturist in Sri Lanka deals with ‘pests‘ of a whole other breed. Imagine walking outside to find dozens of peacocks feasting on your crops, for example. Keeping a determined monkey out of your yard is virtually impossible, and elephants…?

The ethical basis of permaculture intersects very well with the Buddhist majority of Sri Lanka, who have a deep respect for the right to life of all creatures within the biosphere. Where a rifle would quickly become the ’solution’ in other parts of the world – where the goalposts keep getting moved on what are regarded as ‘acceptable remaining population levels’ for various species, as we grow our economies – it is not even considered in most of this country, and would be greeted with scorn from neighbours. Instead, people here experiment with other imaginative alternatives. In regards to elephants, specifically, I had several villagers tell me the only people they’d heard of being killed by elephants were those who had previously resorted to violence against them – the family of a murdered or injured elephant would return to take revenge.

Sarvodaya villagers try to learn how to get along instead.

The Sri Lankan elephant, largest of the Asian elephant species (weighing up to
5400 kg), can wreak havoc in a home garden. Numerous methods are used to
discourage their presence, from hanging glass bottles together in trees
(which spook elephants by their sight and also sound as the wind disturbs
them), along with other reflective items.

A tree house serves as residence for a guard who is tasked with frightening
hungry elephants away at night by means of flashing lights and noise.
I saw trees larger than this that had been pushed over by elephants….

Monkeys are amongst the biggest challenges home gardeners face.
Despite appearances, this monkey is not being aggressive. It is simply yawning.

Much of Sri Lanka tends to be naturally arid. Where gardens are not in close proximity to a reservoir (called ‘tanks‘ in Sri Lanka) or their canals, or even where they are, water harvesting systems become an essential improvement. Many households featured rainwater harvesting tanks, provided by Sarvodaya. On my visit not a few were disconnected, however, simply because there had been no rain for months and unflushed empty pipes attracted lizards, snakes and other critters. When the rains come again, these are reconnected to supply drinking water and irrigation from rooftop rainfall.

A temporarily disconnected rainwater harvesting tank

Everywhere I went I asked the same question – particularly of older people: "Over the course of your life, have you noticed a change in weather patterns? And if so, what exactly?" Without exception, they all respond with "We get less rain." Nandana thus encourages and educates in the use of swales, composting, mulching and other water conservation practices. Permaculture can go a long way towards adapting to the impacts of climate change.

Unfortunately composting toilets are not considered here. The concept is culturally abhorrent to Sri Lankans in general and are thus disregarded outright. I suspect this may change over time as water shortages become more acute….

A palm frond covered trellis over vegetables protects from harsh
mid-summer sunlight and reduces evaporation.

One thing you find if you travel in 2/3rd world countries is that the people there usually look at you as if you’re somehow better off than they. It surprises them to realise you’re actually there to learn – that you’re there because they have something you don’t. In this case it’s a localised interdependence that secures them against the economic and social vulnerabilities we face in a globalised, peak oil world. I have immense respect, even envy, for communities that are able to provide for all or most of their own needs. An on-the-ground realisation of this appreciation often seemed to fill the people with a renewed sense of pride in what they’re able to achieve through their own labours and ingenuity. And so it should.

A biodiverse garden in the higher altitude district of south central Sri Lanka
provides more than 95% of this family’s food needs.

Because of the hoops you have to jump through to get organic certification,
Sarvodaya encourages home and market gardeners to develop Community
Supported Agriculture (CSA) schemes instead.

Biogas

Biodigesters are a permaculture design technique that are especially appreciated – with some home gardeners managing to make a closed loop for their energy requirements in this way. Families that have enough land to keep a few cows, and about US$100 or so for initial installation, can easily supply enough methane gas from a biogas system to fuel all their cooking requirements.

This biogas installation consists of three concrete lined chambers (see pic above). The one on the right is about two feet deep. Cow manure is shoveled into water here. The slurry flows through an underground pipe into the centre chamber, which is about 12 feet deep and three feet wide. Methane gas builds up in this chamber and flows through the small hose you can see running towards the house and into the kitchen (below). Overflow from this central chamber goes into the chamber at left, where it can be shoveled out and mixed into composts.

The nice blue flame indicates the clean burn you get from methane. The waste from three cows is more than sufficient to keep this fire burning for this family of eight, all day, every day – cooking grains and other food and boiling drinking water for improved health.

A few metres away, across the kitchen, is what they had to use before the biogas installation. As you can see, the gas cooker saves a lot of work in collecting oft-scarce firewood just to see it choke their lungs and the atmosphere. Dead wood can now be composted or used in construction instead and carbon emissions are reduced. Nandana estimates there are about 60 – 70 such biogas installations working efficiently within the Sarvodaya network to date.

Stay tuned for Part VII….

It’s taken a while to find the time to sit down and report on Part B of our earthworks here at Rosella Waters, near Cairns in far North Queensland. Phase I Part A was documented whilst the process was taking place. This latest update however will rely on memory and hurried notes made during the process, together with numerous photos. Large excavations such as the two large dams we constructed in part A are considerably easier to direct and far less time consuming than the finer detail work using smaller machinery as we experienced in putting in Part B.

Once again we had an excellent earthmover that came on the recommendation of the guys who did the two large dams. Sparky, as he is known, is a very knowledgeable and experienced earthmover, having spent a great deal of the last 40 odd years driving a 46 tonne excavator, building large scale dams, roads and “opening up new country”, as the saying round here goes. Now he runs a private earthmoving business and has at his disposal an 85HP bobcat and a 4 tonne mini excavator with numerous attachments. All of the following work was done with these two small machines.

The first part of the process in Part B was to construct a gabion rock wall at the very top of our system, in the gully that feeds our two dams. Previously, we had done a catchment analysis and based on the 1000mm of rain we receive per year, we arrived at a figure of 5,000,000 liters moving through it. We used this figure to calculate levels and engineer our spillways, level sill heights, the freeboard on the dam walls, trickle pipes, lock pipes, etc. The gully in question begins on our neighbour’s property. It is fed from the hill behind it and also from the diversion drains the road department puts in on the dirt road leading to our front gate. The catchment is predominately regrowth after being cleared 30 years ago with two dozers and a ball and chain. The catchment area is not a well functioning bio-diverse eco system and as such there is little water infiltration and a lot of sheet flow that brings top soil/sediment run off into our system. During the wet season of 2008 we did a small trial by hand building a rock wall just inside our fence line to get an idea of how much material would be trapped and how long it would take to fill up. After only 3 rain events, the small rock wall was fully backed up with silt 1.5 feet deep and the moisture remained just under the surface of that material well into our dry season. With that experience and the slight scar constructed at the back of the Lap Pool dam during its construction, we decided on a larger than first thought gabion, to (a) repair the damage caused by the construction of the Lap Pool dam (b) trap silt/top soil and sediment, preventing it washing through our system and ultimately ending up on the Great Barrier Reef, and (c) provide a small scale example of a solution to dry eroded gullies, that run like rivers in the wet, utilizing a “waste” product of local agriculture.

The “waste” product I speak of are the mountains of volcanic rock that many farms in the area have piled up in massive windrows. Farmers spend up to $4000 an acre to pull them out in preparation for planting avocados, potatoes, mangoes, bananas, sugar cane, etc. Rosella Waters sits right on the edge on an ancient lava flow so the farms that surround us are littered with such rocks, some as large as a car down to rocks as small as a grapefruit. We approached our neighbours up the top of the hill, who grow avocados and mangos, and who had recently put in a mass planting of new trees. Prior to that they had a 20 tonne excavator and dump truck working for a week to pull every rock out. They followed this by traversing over the land with a pickup and five workers pulling the grapefruit sized ones out by hand. Anyway, they were more than happy for us to go onto their property and select as many rocks as we liked from the windrows, which they had conveniently separated into different sizes.

Gabion rock wall trapping silt/sediment & top soil

The cost in building the gabion was therefore the time for Sparky to load up the individually selected rocks into his tip truck and then place them one by one with a claw on the end of his excavator arm. The process took two days in total and we estimate that it cost us close to $1800 to build. As we had large rocks to work with we decided against both “keying in” the base of the gabion wall into the side of the gully and constructing a net meshing to encase them in.

The volume and more importantly the velocity of the water coming down the gully in this case didn’t necessitate us doing either. Choosing the largest rocks first, we placed each one exactly where we wanted to create a firm base on which to construct the wall. It was built much in the same way as a dam wall is built, starting out wide at the base, six meters in this case, and tapering up to two meters wide at the top. The height of the gabion is nearly three meters. After placing each rock, Sparky would firm it down, swivel it around until it was firmly wedged. This in itself is more difficult than it might seem and does take time, but it is VERY important to get right. In all, the wall required 7 full dump truck loads of rock to construct. Once the main frame of the wall was complete we got another two loads of grapefruit sized rock which we have since placed by hand to smooth out the top of the gabion, thus providing a great access path across the gully that we can push a wheel barrow across, drive an ATV over or lead a goat and cart. To repair the scars at the side of the back of the Lap Pool Dam, just in front of the gabion wall, we placed some large rocks on the ledge and back filled behind the rocks with some top soil we had had set aside from the construction of the two dams. This was immediately cover cropped with cowpea and a crotalaria variety called gambia pea. All of the seed we used to cover crop was bought from a local seed merchant as seconds, which means there is a low strike rate (around 40%) but at $1 per kilo and having used the correct inoculant, we gained excellent coverage and stabilized the area. It’s important to remember that seed is the cheapest herbicide!

The next element we tackled was the overflow swale and spillway connected to the larger Mushroom Dam at the bottom of the property. We decided that after completing the gabion it would be best to start at the bottom of the system and then work our way back towards the front gate so that by the time it was all done, Sparky could load up and head off without risk of doing any damage with his machinery.

The first swale was only fifteen odd meters in length and had a level sill spillway half way along it that would spread the overflow of the system over a 3 meter wide area right on a broad ridge point, making it very safe to discharge and presenting no danger of causing an erosion gully. The construction of this small element proved to be a major turning point in our working relationship with Sparky. In the end it took the best part of a day to complete, due to a number of factors including our newfound language barrier. There were some important miscommunicated terms that needed clarification as we went: level sill spillway, back cut, swale, swale mound, swale dish, bottom of the swale dish and most importantly LEVEL. The idea that we wanted to construct something that didn’t run and was in fact perfectly level and on contour was quite a paradigm shift for Sparky, as in his words he had “spent his whole life draining landscapes” and what we wanted to do was quite the opposite.

The swale needed to be constructed on a steepish slope and we decided that we wanted it to hold 300mm of water in the base and have the top of the swale mound 800mm high – thus a substantial 500mm freeboard on the swale mound. The freeboard on the dam wall is one meter, so if ever there was a chance of water spilling over it would go over the swale mound first. It is unlikely to occur as we have “over engineered” things, but if it did the swale mound can be repaired with a shovel unlike the dam wall! What we soon discovered in constructing the swale was that due to the slope of the land we just wouldn’t have enough material to make the swale mound as high as we wished. The answer was to dig further up the hill from the back cut, as gently as possible, in a 1:1 cut. We didn’t want to dig too far up the hill so we adjusted the level of the swale mound back to 700mm high and with a three-meter long level sill spillway, the swale mound still wouldn’t be at risk.

First swale constructed leading off the Mushroom Dam

The data records for the region showed that the largest single 24-hour rain event in the last 30 years had been 284mm. We rounded this out to 300mm and built the spillway to be able to deal with ½ cubic meter of water per second. Together with another spillway on the swale connected to the opposite side of the dam wall, we have more than ensured the dam wall’s safety. Another safety margin we designed into the system was a 110mm lock pipe set at the bottom of the Mushroom Dam wall. The lock pipe is 27 meters long and goes right through the bottom of the wall. On the outlet side there is a butterfly valve, which can be opened wide in the event that the spillways aren’t coping. At the bottom of our system, and being our primary aquaculture dam, it also means we can drain this dam if needed. The dam also faces West, which is likely to be the direction of any fire entering our property, so in the event of a fire we have the added security of being able to drain 2.5 mega liters of water in that direction.

For ease of construction we built this first swale with the 85HP bobcat, equipped with a 1.7 meter wide tilt bucket. Time is money with earthworks, so we decided to make the swales a bucket width wide. Sparky started by running across the slope with his bucket following the back cut line we had marked out, corresponding to the high water mark of the dam. The spill was flicked down slope forming the first part of the swale mound. Once we had the basic shape and marked the position of the level sill spillway, Sparky used his tilt bucket to scrape beyond the back cut line up the slope to get the material we needed to gain the swale mound height we were after. We also took quite a bit of material from the area leading onto the dam wall, progressively cutting back to smooth out the sharpness of the cut. Sparky did a great job and we can easily drive through this area and up and onto the dam wall, giving us access to the other side of the property. The swale runs dead level at 300mm deep all the way through, from the exit point at the dam to the end of the swale itself. On the final scraping run we asked Sparky to tilt the blade slightly down slope in the swale dish, meaning that water will be predominated into the swale mound during rain events. With our first swale complete, fully seeded and earthmover trained we we’re ready to attack the rest of the design. Together with a mix of gambia pea, cow pea and pigeon pea we also planted sweet potato cuttings, aibika, cassava, pumpkin seeds, etc… giving us full cover leading into the wet. In the last few days we have started to receive our first rains in 9 months, so now we have a good base in which to begin our major plantings.

The next swale was a short one connected to the opposite side of the dam wall. It was constructed in the same fashion and care was taken again to ensure a smooth driveway leading off the dam wall for ease of access. With not much room to play with within our boundary line, the swale was extended right up to the fence line with our neighbours and the three-meter level sill spillway will serve as discharge of excess water into the creek below, and also as access to behind the dam wall and our Zone IV area of the property.

Moving further up the slope, we then tackled the 25-meter long swale connected to the Lap Pool dam. With this swale we had a few important decisions to make. Firstly it was going to be the Lap Pool’s only swale and only level sill spillway, the overflow from this leading to the Mushroom dam. The placement of this level sill was therefore vitally important as it would be the major source of water that fills the Mushroom dam and we also have future plans for structures connected to the 6m x 3m jetty we placed on the dam. We saw the opportunity for the level sill to be a feature and a potential wet/dry growing area, in close proximity to the jetty and eventual cabin connected to it. We decided to step the overflow down into a further two level sills before it entered the Mushroom dam.

The step down spillways leading overflow from the Lap Pool Dam swale into the Mushroom Dam. Jetty posts in waiting.

In this way, we slow down the volume of water, create further edge and add an aesthetic feature in the process. The level ditches are slightly wider than the level sill on the swale itself and together with generous amounts of cover crop seed, we planted clumps of vetiver grass to further stabilize the area and slow down water flow. We used the same technique on all the level sill spillways. With such an abundance of rock at hand and a couple of quite steep spillways to stabilize, we saw this as our best option. On two steep spillways, we planted out clumps of vetiver grass across the slope, starting at the top and offset all the way down. Then we placed rocks from the bottom up, starting with larger rocks in an arc, wider than the spillway, followed by smaller rocks all the way up the spillway wall face. We left a 200mm space around each of the vetiver clumps and now 3 months later we have a very stable, rock wall face to our spillways, with large clumps of green vetiver grass breaking up the brown.

Back on the Lap Pool swale we asked Sparky to dig ½ meter deep x 1 meter long x ½ meter wide ditches within the swale dish itself. These ditches will hold water for longer than the rest of the 300mm deep swale and as such become growing zones for some wet crops. We now have these ditches planted out with Taro, with water chestnuts on the edges, all of which is shaded by bananas growing at the inside edge of the swale mound.

Lap Pool swale with newly planted Taro and water chestnuts in the pits and banana on the edges.

Again the whole swale was cover cropped with cowpea, Gambia pea, pigeon pea and dotted with cassava, Aibika, sweet potato and pumpkins. The larger long-term support species and variety of fruit and nut trees are now ready to be planted. We had considered putting all of plantings in at the same time but with no rain at all for close to 9 months we decided to get cover crops and shorter term nitrogen fixers going and wait for the beginning of the first rains before putting them in. The earthworks couldn’t be put back to a more appropriate time due to the availability of machinery.

The rice paddy system was by far the biggest challenge. To look at now, it seems all we have done is push a little dirt up to make a wall and dig a couple of holes for the ducks to live near. In a sense that’s true, but the process of constructing the 1:300 diversion drain from the Lap Pool dam to a duck pond connected to a rice paddy (the overflow of which runs along a diversion drain with a 20mm fall over 20 meters, to another duck pond connected to another rice paddy, the discharge of which drops down into a 25 meter long bio-filter which is itself a level sill spillway), dropping water into the Mushroom dam wasn’t that simple! Plus, the overflow of the second duck pond, leads to a short swale with level spillway that drops down to a 20-meter long swale, the spillway of which also drops into the bio-filter before being discharged into the Mushroom dam. Phew.

The rice paddies with bio-filter below. The beach area is on the edge of the Mushroom Dam with the back side of the Lap Pool Dam wall behind it.

A great deal of gravel road base material was taken out of the rice paddy area and we used this to repair/construct a proper ringed access road, our main access road on the property. The road has now been graded correctly so that water will run into drains leading along side it directed to water storages. On the road we have placed 150mm x 50mm x 4 meter long blue gum planks in sets of two, 4 inches apart, at an angle across the road, every 10-12 meters. We first heard of this idea from Rainbow Valley Farm in New Zealand who has the same system on much steeper roads. As water runs over the road it only has a short distance to run before it drops down into these drains that run across the road at a slight angle. By not allowing the water to build up speed over the road surface the material stays on the road rather than down the bottom of the hill, with obvious benefits.

The diversion drain leading to the 1st duck pond needed to fall at 1:300 and be set low enough in the Lap Pool dam so that it was the first water to leave the dam as it filled. We can regulate this fact by capping the end of the 150mm pipe. The level at which we set the150mm diversion pipe was 450mm below the high water mark of the dam which also corresponds to the level of the level sill spillway. That is 150mm lower than the depth of the swale and the level at which water exits the dam into the swale. As I said, setting the pipe at that level ensures we can control when the water heads to the duck ponds. We have a 30,000 L concrete water tank connected to our shed with approximately 100,000 L of potential roof catchment. We needed to decide what to do with the extra 70,000L. In a minor brain wave, we came up with the idea to pipe the overflow through a 90mm pipe down the side of the tank, under the road and into the 150mm diversion pipe with a t-piece. At the entry point into to first duck pond, we have rocked the spill and next to the 150mm diversion drain pipe we have another 150mm pipe under the road that collects all the water in the drain running alongside the road. At the end of the drain along the side of the road we have dug a meter deep silt trap, concreted the base and placed a grill over the top. This will keep silt out of the duck ponds and provide another source of potting mix from the material that does ultimately come from the road.

The main issue we faced with the levels we were dealing with was to get the duck ponds as high up the slope as we could, leaving us room to put in the proposed rice paddies. The duck ponds would end up being quite small as a result and have a 800mm slope at the back of them from the ridge road. We saw this back slope as another opportunity to be creative and decided to step this down in 300mm wide ledges to the high water level of the ponds. The end result is a duck pond amphitheatre on both ponds! This stepped area will be fully planted out with duck habitat and forage, shading the ponds in the process.

Duck ponds at the back of the paddies, connected by a diversion drain. The amphitheatres at the back of the ponds are well cover cropped and stable.

The two ponds are connected by a diversion drain that runs from 1st pond to 2nd pond, with a 20mm fall over its 20-meter length. This isn’t a great deal of fall, but it’s enough. It has meant we have been able to keep the 2nd pond up as high a possible to give us room for the paddy below. The water from the duck ponds are released into the paddies by way of gates we picked up from an old rice farmer up here. They used to grow two crops a season using the channel that leads from Tinaroo Dam as a source of their water. One of the reasons they gave it up was when the cost of water went from $8 p/ML to $18 p/ML. Now they flood irrigate sugar cane instead. We swapped the four gates for a case of beer and made metal plates that slide into the 3mm gap in the concrete gates, to control the flow of water. The same gates are used at the exit end of the paddies, to discharge the nutrient rich water into the bio-filter below before it heads to the Mushroom dam.

The bio-filter that acts a level sill, taking nutrient rich water from the paddies as well as the swale in the background at the base of the chicken tractor system, overflows into the Mushroom Dam.

The two paddies are separated by a meter wide bund and surrounded by a meter wide, meter high bund with a slight grade. All of this will become a growing zone for duck forage, mulch and some soft fruits such as pawpaw and banana. The meter high bunds, once planted out, will become a living fence keeping the ducks in the paddies during the rice-growing season. We plan to grow rice using the integrated rice and duck growing system I had learnt whilst living with Takao Furuno and his family in Japan. Takao is a social entrepreneur with the world economic forum with his rice duck growing system and has an excellent book out through Tagari publications titled “The Power of Duck”.

The short swale connected to the second duck pond drops down into a longer swale, which will form part of our chicken tractor system. This 20 meter long swale lies at the bottom of the contour chicken runs and borders the Mushroom dam. It’ll take excess nutrients from the chicken system and grow some large trees on the north side of the dam, providing shade. Due to this swale being constructed on less of a slope than the first, it was built with the four tonne excavator. Working from the downward side of the swale, the bucket cut on the back cut line and the spill was dropped to create the swale mound. Following Sparky along with the laser we ensured that the swale dish was 200mm level all along. It doesn’t need to be within a mm but it does help to make the dish as level as possible so as to get an even distribution of water along the swale in lesser rain fall events. Obviously the best way to check that level is to fill the completed swale with water and adjust accordingly with a shovel. It is cheaper to do this in your own time than to pay $100 an hour for a 4 tonne excavator to do it.

“Hairy Harry” stands tall on the island at the back of the Keyhole Dam.

The final element to put in was the Keyhole dam at the entrance to our property. We named this pond the Keyhole, as it is the key to the system that connects water on both sides of the property. The Keyhole sits on a central ridge that dissects the property and the idea was to create a small water storage in our Zone 2 area that can move water through either the system described above or to future water storages on the river side of the property, or both. We decided how large a storage of water we wanted and marked out the approximate position of the dam wall for Sparky to follow. We set a target level for our high water and corresponded this to the position of the two swales that were to direct water to the Keyhole via 150mm pipes placed under the access road. The wall was built using the bobcat, layering wetted clay followed by numerous track rolls with the same machine. Using the excavator to dig the hole of the dam, material was mixed using the tilt bucket with me standing close by, hose in hand, making sure there was the right amount of moisture to make the clay bond. Dam and pond walls are all about compaction and with enough of the right clay, a little mixing if the material is good and bad, and the correct amount of moisture, things should seal. We decided to create a small island at the back of the Keyhole as an aesthetic feature, duck habitat and for the fact that the palm we’ve named “Hairy Harry” was too good looking to lose.

Once the Keyhole was built with a 400mm freeboard on it, we set about marking the back cuts of the two swales that were to connect to it. The Mediterranean swale (so named due to quite granite soils in that part of the property) leads out towards the header tank and drops its spill down into the Lap Pool dam. It is connected to the Keyhole via a 150mm pipe, under the road with a slight 20mm drop towards the pond so as to not get stagnant water sitting in the pipe.

The Mediterranean swale connects to the Keyhole Dam via a 150mm pipe under the main access road. The level sill spills water into the Lap Pool Dam below.

The end of the pipe can be capped, if we wish to keep water in the Keyhole dam and direct any overflow via the 150mm pipe under the road on the other side that connects the Council swale to the same dam. We called that one the Council swale because its main catchment comes from a slight improvement to the dirt road the council recently graded. It was graded sloping towards our fence with no drain so in large rain events we would get large sheet flows of water moving through the landscape causing unnecessary erosion. We asked Sparky if he wouldn’t mind creating a little spoon drain 100 meters up to the neighbours gate entrance and directing that water through the culvert under our road entrance. The five meters beyond the culvert to our fence line continued as a drain before entering our property where it then becomes a level swale directing a substantial volume of water through the 150mm pipe, under the road, into the Keyhole dam and ultimately through our entire system.

Considering the volume of material we are likely to receive from the dirt road, we placed a 200mm deep x three-meter wide silt trap just inside the fence line. This can be dug out by hand when necessary. The level sill spillway of this Council swale directs overflow to a gully, which in future may become a dam or a large gabion, subject to future test holes to check for clay content.
Either pipe in either swale can be capped to control the direction of water movement through our system. This small dam feature is something we are really happy with for its aesthetic beauty and complex simplicity in functionality.

This spoon drain runs 100 meters long and will direct a large amount of water through our system via the Council swale that connects the Keyhole Dam.

For our first major earthworks the complexity involved in the design was substantial. It was quite a big undertaking, made even more so by the birth of our second son Dylan smack bang in the middle of it all. At this point I must give special recognition to my darling wife Georgie who at 41 weeks pregnant, kept us fed and watered, took all the photos and spent considerable time standing there with FRED ( Forever Ridiculous Electronic Device) i.e. the lazer level staff and receiver, in 33′C tropical heat. We took close to a year observing the site, designing, listening and talking to others, re-designing and planning the earthworks and the immediate repair work after they’re done. Once the earthworks began, concept became reality and the two can be quite different no matter how good the planning. Each evening after Sparky had left we spent time talking things over and making decisions for the next day’s work. We gave our laser level a really good working over, it has been a great investment; I don’t imagine we could have done all that we did without it.

Now that the mainframe infrastructure is in place, a little water is in the dams and the site is green with cover crops, the system has literally come alive. From seemingly nowhere frogs have descended upon the water storages attracting ever-increasing numbers of birds. The place must look like a red-light sale at a discount store – a hydrated green oasis in an otherwise dry landscape.

Overlooking the system from the header tank. A transformed landscape.

A natural spring we knew existed has started to recharge with the water in the swales from irrigating the cover crops. It moves through the sub-soil leaking out into the side of the dam. Our hope is that this recharged system will help to keep the water level more constant in the Mushroom dam by offsetting any evaporation.

In all, the earthworks took close to two months to complete from start to finish with a total of 16 days of actual earthworks involved. With the start of our seasonal wet season rains upon us, the next three months or more will be spent busily planting, planting and more planting. We know Sparky is coming back when the wet really hits – we made a pact to sit down with a beer together in the pouring rain and watch the system operate in full flight. Through a local NRM group we are also planning an open day, for local farmers to come and see the system. These major earthworks are just the start of a great adventure in the development of our Permaculture demonstration site for the wet/dry tropics of Northern Australia, Rosella Waters.

India is a country where water shortages have become so acute that the failed monsoon rains in 2009 had people literally killing each other over buckets of water, and tensions are still rising. (See this video also.) In many places cities are receiving less than half the water their populations need to meet basic requirements, and the constant bickering between individual states often breaks down into violent clashes.

Glaciers that provide melt water in the north are disappearing. and fast. Indians are simultaneously switching to a more westernised diet, which has enormous impacts on water usage, and large scale monocrops for biofuels add to the disaster. Presently 90% of India’s water usage is for agriculture. This percentage is rising, whilst competition is increasing with the growing industrial sector. India’s population is expected to surge to 1.5 billion people by 2050, and the country is still rapidly urbanising – with city dwellers using a lot more water than their rural counterparts. It is predicted that by 2020 most major Indian cities will run dry.

And India is not alone with these problems.

Businesses, of course, are making the most of the situation to cash in on the intense demand. I think it’s time to pay attention to water harvesting words of wisdom, and solve these problems at source – and in doing so also heal the land:

With wisdom and wit, Anupam Mishra talks about the amazing feats of engineering built centuries ago by the people of India’s Golden Desert to harvest water. These structures are still used today — and are often superior to modern water megaprojects. – YouTube

Hat Tip: Robert Windt

And, for good measure:

Further Reading:

• Letters from Sri Lanka – The World’s Largest Water Harvesting Earthworks Project
• The Muffin Tin and the Sponge
• Harvesting Urban Drool
• Water Harvesting DVD
• Water Worries

With chapters like ‘Crap Happens’, ‘Deep Shit’ and ‘A Day in the Life of a Turd’, this is sure to be an interesting book, albeit possibly not one to read over lunch?

With this wonderful substance piling up in all the wrong places (after all, we’re running out of clean water, and yet we’re crapping in it…), this taboo topic deserves a lot more attention than it gets. Enjoy the book – and special thanks to the author Joseph Jenkins for making this freely available (warning: 22mb PDF – if you want to download chapter by chapter, scroll down on this page, or just read online here).

Oh, want a hard copy of this book? Here you go.

Written by a humanure composting practitioner and organic gardener with over 30 years experience, this third edition provides detailed scientific information on how humanure can be hygienically recycled, without fancy technological do-dads, a large bank account, toxic chemicals, or environmental pollution.

This unique handbook provides information on composting, soil fertility and microorganisms, alternative graywater systems and much more. It also gives detailed instructions on how you can build or buy your own sawdust toilet and compost bins for only a few dollars.

Defecating in our drinking water is perhaps one of our culture’s most curious, but least talked about, habits. This book gives compelling and detailed testimony as to why humanure should be constructively recycled:

* to prevent water pollution: (almost 4 trillion gallons of sewage effluent are dumped into our coastal waterways each year);
* to fertilize the soil: (rich in soil nutrients, humanure can be safely recycled by thermophilic composting);
* to protect our dwindling drinking water supplies: (nearly 1/3 of all household drinking water is used to flush toilets); and
* to enhance our health: Fertile soil not only grows great veggies, but nourishes our health and community’s well-being. – josephjenkins.com

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink. – Samuel Coleridge (1772-1834). The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, II

If you look down on our earth from space, the predominant colour is blue. The surface of our earth is approximately 70% water. In that respect, perhaps our planet would have been better called the Ocean, than the Earth. Yet, excepting expensive, energy intensive and environmentally problematic desalinisation techniques (PDF), we cannot use it for our daily personal water intake requirements.

• 97.5% of all water on Earth is salt water, leaving only 2.5% as fresh water
• Nearly 70% of that fresh water is frozen in the icecaps of Antarctica and Greenland; most of the remainder is present as soil moisture, or lies in deep underground aquifers as groundwater not accessible to human use
• Less than 1% of the world’s fresh water (~0.007% of all water on earth) is accessible for direct human use. This is the water found in lakes, rivers, reservoirs and those underground sources that are shallow enough to be tapped at an affordable cost. – globalchange

We’ve talked about Peak Oil and Peak Soil. Today we need to broach the topic of Peak Water. Despite our inherent natural tendency to think otherwise, fresh water is not an exhaustless commodity, and we are fast running out.

If per capita consumption of water resources continues to rise at its current rate, humankind could be using over 90 per cent of all available freshwater within 25 years, leaving just 10 per cent for the rest of the world’s species. – UNESCO (emphasis added)

More than 2.7 billion people will face severe water shortages by the year 2025 if the world continues consuming water at the same rate, the United Nations has warned. – BBC

Every day, it seems, we read about lakes disappearing, wells going dry, or rivers failing to reach the sea. But these stories typically describe local situations. It is not until we begin to compile the numerous national studies—such as an 824-page analysis of the water situation in China, a World Bank study of the water situation in Yemen, or a detailed U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) assessment of the irrigation prospect in the western United States—that the extent of emerging water shortages worldwide can be grasped. Only then can we see the extent of water overuse and the decline it can bring.

The world is incurring a vast water deficit—one that is largely invisible, historically recent, and growing fast. Because much of the deficit comes from aquifer overpumping, it is often not apparent. Unlike burning forests or invading sand dunes, falling water tables are often discovered only when wells go dry. – Lester R. Brown, Plan B 2.0 Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble (PDF)

The following passages outline the almost gold-rush type explosion of water extraction that occurred since the birth of the fossil-fuel based agricultural ‘Green Revolution’ days of post-World War II, and well demonstrates our natural tendency to assume natural resources are limitless:

There was a rush to exploit the limited groundwater resources. The groundwater was freely available at the cost of a bore and a pump. There was competition to use more and more groundwater. Water tables dropped, and farmers drilled deeper bores, and installed more powerful pumps. Almost simultaneously, all around the world, the wells began to run dry, and governments were quite unable to control the extraction of groundwater, or protect the resources.

Most governments did not know where the wells were, or the depth of the wells. Governments did not record water levels, but were certainly informed when farmers complained when their wells ran dry. Farmers, governments, and their professional advisors, had all believed that the wells would flow forever.

The groundwater rush was like a gold rush; it was a great uncontrolled bonanza. The International Water Management Institute has estimated that the total global withdrawal of groundwater is now about 1,000 cubic kilometers each year, but it is quite unsustainable. This great global rush to exploit available groundwater resources in our time is a one-off extraction of a limited natural resource. – Executive Intelligence Review

Over the last century, worldwide, demands on water have increased six-fold – twice the rate of population growth. Some of the main reasons are:

1. Population growth: the world’s population has doubled in the last forty-five years, and if present birth/death rates continue it is expected to double again in the next fifty. Whilst much of this growth is in developing nations, even the U.S. population (currently 300 million) has doubled in the last sixty years, and is expected to double again to 600 million in the next sixty-five. “The issue today, put simply, is that while the only renewable source of freshwater is continental rainfall (which generates a more or less constant global supply of 40,000 to 50,000 cubic km per year), the world population keeps increasing by roughly 85 million per year. Therefore the availability of freshwater per head is decreasing rapidly.” (Blue Gold) Water experts estimate that there is no more fresh water on earth than there was 2,000 years ago – when the population was three percent of its current size. (Imasar).
2. Agriculture: Approximately 70% of all fresh water is used for agricultural purposes worldwide. And, just as some nations have great oil resources, and others don’t, so it is with water. Dry Pakistan uses 97% of its freshwater for agriculture, and China (with 20% of the world’s population but only 7% of its water) uses 87%. For a quick comparison overview of water consumption for different dietary options, see tables on this page.
3. Industry: Worldwide, approximately 20% of freshwater is used for industry, and, increasingly, industry is battling agriculture for a greater share. Our consumer society promotes an escalation of excess, and everything produced consumes water. As our water tables shrink, we’re told to go shopping.
4. Home use: Around 10% of the world’s fresh water is used for private use. “The average American individual uses over 150 gallons of water each day. The average African family uses about five gallons of water each day.” (Water.org)

As water tables drop, disease increases in humans, flora and fauna. Additionally, diminishing water stores necessarily concentrate chemical run-offs from agriculture and industry, making remaining supplies increasingly dangerous – sometimes even resulting in toxic algae blooms that can convert dwindling freshwater reserves into poisonous sludge.

The miller sees not all the water that goes by his mill. – Robert Burton

We can be a very single-minded race. It is darkly fascinating to watch governments make profit-motivated policy decisions that not only ignore our diminishing water supplies, but that incentivise (subsidise) the systematic and inefficient escalation of their use. Somehow, our policymakers and industry heads manage to draw up economic strategies wholly independent of natural systems. Our most basic human needs take a back seat in the drive to “grow the economy”.

But, hard cold facts don’t defer to optimism or wishful thinking. Looking at economic and energy ’solutions’ in isolation from finite resource limitations is a dangerous, but contemporary, tendency. A recent news release indicates that the people of China are learning these lessons the hard way:

Apartment residents collecting rainwater in China

China Slows Coal-Liquids, Ethanol Push on Water Fear

Beijing is trying to slow the push on water-intensive alternative energy on mounting signs that China might face a serious water shortage in the future.

This may stymie the second-largest energy consumer’s plans to turn its huge coal reserves and agricultural land into transport fuel, and lead it to continue relying on greater imports to fuel its booming economy, a bullish factor for global oil markets.

An official… recently said China might halt coal-to-liquids (CTL) projects and stop ethanol production from corn.

… analysts said the NDRC comment reflected a shift in Beijing’s policy as droughts and pollution have led to hundreds of millions of people going without regular drinking water.

“If there’s any issue that can destroy China’s march forward, it’s water,”

… “Water levels in the upper reaches of the Yellow River have hit a historic low and officials have warned that China may run out of water by 2030.”

The Yellow River, China’s second longest, supplies water to over 150 million people and irrigates 15 percent of the country’s farmland. But in recent years, it has occasionally run dry before reaching the sea. – Reuters

Demand for water is outstripping replenishment rates in many parts of the world, and in some places many times over.

Scores of countries are running up regional water deficits, including nearly all of those in Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, plus India, Pakistan, and the US.

… In 2015 nearly 3 billion out of the estimated global population of 7.5 billion people will find it difficult or impossible to find water for food, industry and personal needs. … According to John Gannon, a former assistant director of the CIA and former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, water scarcity now constitutes “a significant issue in security” as water shortages “encourage refugee movements which, if they spill over into other countries, can engage us.” “If people don’t have water, they can’t live. They are going to move or they are going to die.” According to the CIA report “Global Trends 2015” none of the proposed solutions – importing water, water conservation, expanded use of desalinization of seawater, or developing genetically modified crops that use less water or more saline water – will be sufficient to substantially change the outlook for water shortages in 2015…. – Earth’s Carrying Capacity (emphasis added)

Rapidly escalating glacier and snow melt trends brought about by climate change come as a volatile addition to the above. Sea water intrusion on coastal freshwater aquifers is another dilemma. Although a natural occurrence, rising sea levels as a result of global warming, combined with shrinking aquifers, can significantly magnify this problem.

Saltwater intrusion is a natural process, but it becomes an environmental problem when excessive pumping of fresh water from an aquifer reduces the water pressure and intensifies the effect, drawing salt water into new areas. – Wikipedia

Just to give an idea of the scale of our water problems, I’ve compiled just a few media reports from around the world:

All of which may translate to increased international tensions.

For example, Malaysia, which supplies about half of Singapore’s water, threatened to cut off that supply in 1997 after Singapore criticized its government policies. In Africa, relations between Botswana and Namibia have been severely strained by Namibian plans to construct a pipeline to divert water from the shared Okavango River to eastern Namibia.

The former mayor of Mexico City has predicted a war in the Mexican Valley in the foreseeable future if a solution to the city’s water crisis is not found soon. Much has been written about the potential for water wars in the Middle East, where water resources are severely limited. The late King Hussein of Jordan once said the only thing he would go to war with Israel over was water, because Israel controls Jordan’s water supply. – Blue Gold

No-one should feel safe and detached from these issues. Global Warming’s huddled masses will go wherever they have to, to survive.

So, is it all doom, gloom, death and despair? It would be a major understatement to say that it probably will be, so long as we cling to our present lifestyles and a ‘business as usual’ mindset. As we’ve already discovered, freshwater resources are not increasing, indeed, they cannot – yet our populations, and our population’s demands for more (of everything) are all rising just as our aquifers are failing. People worldwide are already feeling the pinch, if not enduring direct suffering. Even putting shortages aside, some believe water pollution is already a leading cause of death in the world – and it’s all happening just as those of us in The North have managed to convince everyone in The South that our water-intensive western lifestyle and diet is a ‘must-have’.

Our ability to overcome this end-of-the-line scenario may well depend on our ability to re-evaluate the priorities of our lives – to learn to find satisfaction in a simpler existence, and to create a society that places far more value on access to clean water, healthy food and healthy local communities than it does on artificialities. I think we need to transform our current deformed understanding of ’success’, diffusing it with visions and aspirations of sustainability.

Of concern is seeing the same mindset applied to this problem as is proffered in response to our other environmental issues – a patch and continue ’strategy’: anything but adjust our economies, our industries and our lifestyles:

Antarctic ice offers a remedy. … Tugs with icebergs in tow would be welcome not only to arid areas. Industry disastrously pollutes rivers and lakes in every part of the world. Current consumption makes use of only 0.01% of available fresh water. Over 70% of this valuable store is to be found in Antarctic glaciers, which consist of the world’s cleanest water. An average 2,500 cu km of ice is added to them every year, while just over 2,000 cu km drifts off as icebergs – a steadily renewed source of perfect drinking water. – TerraDaily

“Industry disastrously pollutes rivers and lakes in every part of the world”, and we use water in highly inefficient ways – yet the solution is not to change industry or industrial methods, but to use more energy to retrieve water from Antarctic icebergs. Patch, and continue.

Worse, the industry solution to diminishing water supplies, is to profit from it:

As the water crisis intensifies, governments around the world – under pressure from transnational corporations – are advocating a radical solution: the privatization, commodification and mass diversion of water. Proponents say that such a system is the only way to distribute water to the world’s thirsty. However, experience shows that selling water on the open market does not address the needs of poor, thirsty people. On the contrary, privatized water is delivered to those who can pay for it, such as wealthy cities and individuals and water-intensive industries, such as agriculture and high-tech. As one resident of the high desert in New Mexico observed after his community’s water had been diverted for use by the high-tech industry “Water flows uphill to money.” – Blue Gold

I would like to proffer a solution that involves change, and substantial change at that. I’m not afraid to dare to be different here, however, as social change is afoot, whether we like it or not. In the words of Simon and Garfunkel – I’d rather be a hammer than a nail. We either act, or react.

Peak Oil, Peak Soil, and Peak Water – they all share one central common denominator as we look at solutions: soil building. Please bear with me for a moment. With a little attention, you’ll come out the other end of the next two paragraphs unharmed, but hopefully inspired:

At left, a soil with high humus content – making it rich in carbon (indicated by the darker colour), nutrients and water retention capacity. The crumbly texture of this soil can be compared somewhat to a sponge. A humus-rich soil can hold up to 90% of its weight in water (remember – 70-80% of the water we use today is for agriculture, mostly irrigation). This soil also facilitates the ability of plants to draw water from beneath – through a process called capillary action (similar to what happens when you put a sponge onto a wet benchtop). Such soils have an increased cation exhange capacity – which translates to the ability of soil molecules to bind and hold nutrients to themselves. This soil is full of microorganisms and other soil life – the organic matter, air and moisture content makes it a miniature universe of activity. These micro-organisms take nutrients in the soil and feed them in balanced quantities to plant roots (supplying trace minerals and elements not provided in the NPK concoction ‘intraveneously injected’ via the soluble applications of agribusiness), fostering their own natural defense mechanisms against insects and temperature and weather extremes. The whole ‘package’ provides stability and protection against floods, droughts, disease and insect susceptibility – all of which are increasing as our world’s climate continues in its present state of flux. And, it’s all free.

Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium on the Menu Credit: throbgoblins

Conversely, in the lighter coloured soil profile (above, at right), we see the typical result of our chemical-intensive, heavily mechanised monocrop farming system. This soil invites hardy strong-rooted ‘weeds’ to take up residence (these very plants are working as the first stage of a natural process that seeks to restore the soil to the condition seen at left – by trying to break through the hard packed soil to create channels for air to flow, so microorganisms may return and take up residence, etc.). This soil is unhealthy, and not ‘crop ready’. It requires violent physical interventions, and a barrage of artificial stimulation and inputs – i.e. mechanical aeration, and chemical fertilisers – and its CO2 content is being systematically lost to the atmosphere through the application of both. Much of the chemicals applied are leached into the shrinking water table below. For ‘light’ (i.e. sandy) soils, the application of water and nutrients are regularly required since the lack of organic matter causes rapid leaching. For ‘heavy’ soils (high in clay content), water will often pool on the surface, creating anaerobic conditions that further destroy soil life, and promote disease. The compacted nature of these soils makes flooding a serious issue (water sits on top, instead of percolating down – or worse, moves rapidly sideways, destroying land and property). The heavier the farm equipment used, the more the compaction – the more the compaction, the heavier and stronger the equipment must be to break it up in preparation for planting. This soil is virtually devoid of life and organic matter, so the plant’s natural immunity is lost, necessitating drenching with energy-intensive fossil-fuel based poisons. This soil is the ‘prize’ of corporate agribusiness. The farmer in possession of such a soil is the captive customer of an unhealthy profit-making machine – the drivers of which being the only ‘winners’ in this picture.

If you multiply the above implications for water and energy use across the vast area of land we currently use for cultivation, and add to this the enormous potential of soil for CO2 mitigation, you may then begin to see that a shift in soil management techniques to those that work in harmony with nature, as opposed to battling with it to the bitter end, adds up to planet-saving quantities of resource conservation.

Some say we only have a few years before Peak Oil issues will become significantly more pronounced. Some say we only have the next few years to reshape our society and to head into a low-carbon economy, lest we push our climate into dangerous and irreversible feedback loops. And, don’t forget in all this, that as water becomes increasingly scarce, food production will drop. If we ignore these warnings, and these predictions come to pass, our societies will likely violently break apart in a dog eat dog fight for the remnants of current civilisation. It’s not a pretty picture. But, working away from the large-scale monocrop agribusiness model, and transitioning to a more diverse, small-scaled sustainable farming system, could allow, in addition to the benefits described above, the much-needed reduction in focus on global trade and the obscene product and food swaps that come with it – exchanging this, instead, for an active re-building of sustainable localised systems that value and incentivise health, over inequitable wealth. That health being all-encompassing – for individuals, communities, societies, and for the environment they all depend on.

Yes, save water in the shower, don’t let it run when you’re cleaning your teeth, put a brick in your loo’s cistern, harvest water from your guttering, and follow all the other water-saving tips you’ll find on this and other green sites, but let’s not ignore the largest and most glaring aspect of our water, fossil-fuel and CO2 wastage: our entire societal and economic structure, and the malformed agricultural system that makes it all possible.

Watching social, industrial, and political movements at the moment, there is a clear tendency to simplistically grapple with the individual fibres of an unravelling world, rather than examine the entire cloth. Amongst other things, there is the subsidising of even greater strain on our soil and water reserves, and the naive belief we can actually replace the vast amounts of energy we have come to rely on from fossil fuels with a few wind and wave farms – whilst continuing to shop, consume, fly, drive, and promote the very industries that have driven us into this corner.

I would invite you to step back and look at the bigger picture. We are the first entire civilisation to convince ourselves we can live in the world, while not actually being part of it; that we can control nature, whilst ignoring its unchangeable processes. We have thus marginalised the value of the most vital aspects of our existence – healthy food, clean water and fresh air – and, by doing so, we have corrupted them all.

In closing, if you haven’t already – please take some time to get familiar with some of the issues that are shaping our future. Seek out and support farmers that understand the need for diversity, and that focus on the soil rather than the plant. Indeed, consider becoming one yourself! Start small – discover the satisfaction, savings and increased nutrition of having your own garden, and from knowing that what you’re eating is fresh, and free – and carcinogen free!

There’s a world of change that needs to be made, but, change it we must.

Till taught by pain, Men really know not what good water’s worth…. – Lord Byron