As members of Universities United we have all been given water usage charts to fill in. Unless someone is very dirty, I suspect that I will ‘win’ this one. We built a house for ourselves, which helps. It looks like this on the left. It has a composting toilet, and hence no water for flushing. Fact: over 70% of visitors to our house look down the loo.
At our poo.
Weird...
We do not have a dishwasher.
We save all our rainwater and use it for the office toilets and our washing machine. The rest of it (there are two 3000 litre tanks) we use to water our garden in times of need (a garden that is fertilised by the contents of the composting toilet). Two summers ago we felt oh-so-pleased with ourselves as we freely watered during the hose pipe ban, and some snooper had sent round the water police to chastise us; we ended up chastising them.
So this sounds very self-righteous.
So this sounds very self-righteous.
We are water smugs.
But all this is rather less straightforward than it sounds. As with all matters to do with the environment, values in water become contested. The composting toilet is made in Sweden of naughty plastic and takes up two square metres of floor space (with all the embodied energy that takes), and has a small fan running all the time to extract the smells. So, if this blog was about carbon emissions, the composting toilet would be on the bad list. The pumps for the recycled water are temperamental and need constant adjustment, and sometimes very expensive expert help. So if this blog was about lo-tech, they would be out. And then the water police got their own back later, enforcing us to install another piece of kit that stopped our rainwater potentially backing up into the ‘fresh’ water supply.
It is with this latter that the contradictions about water itself are so apparent. Water from the sky is not allowed to ‘contaminate’ recycled wee which has been pushed around in 150 year old pipes.
But all this is rather less straightforward than it sounds. As with all matters to do with the environment, values in water become contested. The composting toilet is made in Sweden of naughty plastic and takes up two square metres of floor space (with all the embodied energy that takes), and has a small fan running all the time to extract the smells. So, if this blog was about carbon emissions, the composting toilet would be on the bad list. The pumps for the recycled water are temperamental and need constant adjustment, and sometimes very expensive expert help. So if this blog was about lo-tech, they would be out. And then the water police got their own back later, enforcing us to install another piece of kit that stopped our rainwater potentially backing up into the ‘fresh’ water supply.
It is with this latter that the contradictions about water itself are so apparent. Water from the sky is not allowed to ‘contaminate’ recycled wee which has been pushed around in 150 year old pipes.
The way that we highlight the contradiction of water is by bottling the liquid that comes out of the composting toilet and putting a rather classy label on the bottle.
We then hand out these bottles to visiting journalists. The more cultured ones smile at the Manzoni reference (the artist who tinned his shit), but most draw back in disgust. We are giving them a bottle of our urine. We are giving them the best liquid compost I know.
The most profound writer I have found on this contradiction is Ivan Illich. Illich always seems to get there first, whether to the medical profession (Medical Nemesis), education (Deschooling Society), technology (Tools for Conviviality) or water (H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness) - all sharp classics which kick against received wisdom. In the last book he writes about the dual nature of water:
“The water we seek is the fluid that drenches the inner and outer spaces of the imagination. More tangible than space, it is even more elusive for two reasons: first, because this water has nearly unlimited ability to carry metaphors, and second, because water…always possesses two sides. The flood, the blood, the rain, milk, semen, and dew, each of the waters has an identical twin. Water is deep and shallow, life-giving and murderous. Twinned, water arises from chaos, and waters cannot but be dual.”
It is this duality that makes water so ripe for this group; neither fully technical nor fully creative, water is the stuff, in the end, of culture and society (hence a male scientist relating it to feminism in an earlier entry), and whenever one half pulls one way, the other half must pull back to locate it in this contested area, where ideas are always located in a wider political territory and not as autonomous technical or creative fixes.
We then hand out these bottles to visiting journalists. The more cultured ones smile at the Manzoni reference (the artist who tinned his shit), but most draw back in disgust. We are giving them a bottle of our urine. We are giving them the best liquid compost I know.
The most profound writer I have found on this contradiction is Ivan Illich. Illich always seems to get there first, whether to the medical profession (Medical Nemesis), education (Deschooling Society), technology (Tools for Conviviality) or water (H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness) - all sharp classics which kick against received wisdom. In the last book he writes about the dual nature of water:
“The water we seek is the fluid that drenches the inner and outer spaces of the imagination. More tangible than space, it is even more elusive for two reasons: first, because this water has nearly unlimited ability to carry metaphors, and second, because water…always possesses two sides. The flood, the blood, the rain, milk, semen, and dew, each of the waters has an identical twin. Water is deep and shallow, life-giving and murderous. Twinned, water arises from chaos, and waters cannot but be dual.”
It is this duality that makes water so ripe for this group; neither fully technical nor fully creative, water is the stuff, in the end, of culture and society (hence a male scientist relating it to feminism in an earlier entry), and whenever one half pulls one way, the other half must pull back to locate it in this contested area, where ideas are always located in a wider political territory and not as autonomous technical or creative fixes.
Jeremy Till
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