The complications of living in shit

You may like to listen to this while you read today's post:

=> Background sounds via BBC Rewind archive

In Robert Fisk's giant tome "The Great War for Civilisation: The conquest of the Middle East", he quotes Margaret Hassan, a CARE worker in Iraq during the sanctions era between the invasions of US Presidents Bush elder and younger.

'If this was a Third-World country, we could bring in some water pumps at a cost of a few hundred pounds and they could save thousands of lives', she said. 'But Iraq was not a Third World country before the [1991] war — and you can't run a developed society on aid. What is wrong with the water system here is a result of a breakdown and damage to complex and very expensive water purification plants.'

=> The Great War for Civilisation

The 'breakdown and damage' of course, was entirely caused by United Nations sanctions that blocked even vaccines for childhood illnesses, as well as water-processing chemicals. The plants were damaged by United States bombing runs. But the point of interest for today's note is the last part of the last sentence: complex and very expensive water purification plants.

Safe, clean water appearing from taps is rightly held up as one of the wonders of modern "civilised" life. But many of the dangers of drinking "untreated" water mostly arose quite recently in human history. We spend a lot of resources making water as clean as a mountain stream is naturally. What's going on here? Ultimately it's pretty simple: humans gather in close proximity in towns and cities, and our outputs get mixed up with our inputs in dangerous ways.

Aaron Vansintjan wrote for Low Tech Magazine recently about the history of large sewage treatment systems combing aquaculture and agriculture into a semi-closed system that turns raw human sewage and stormwater into fresh drinkable water, edible fish, and vegetable and cereal crops. Examples are taken from India and Vietnam, but also from Germany as recently as the 1990s. I'm not necessarily saying that treating sewage with fish ponds would have solved Baghdad's water problems in the decade Germany stopped using theirs, but it's an interesting example of how modern conveniences and urban living can operate in a much more biologically-attuned way. Yet again, the artificial separation between "nature" and "civilisation" leaves us with more brittle systems that require large states and commercial economies to function — someone more cynical than me might suggest that's the point.

=> Urban Fish Ponds: Low-tech Sewage Treatment for Towns and Cities

This story reminded me of the time I went on a tour of Melbourne's CUB brewery, which is just down the road from where I live. On this huge site, a few dozen workers babysit the computers, steel tanks and conveyer belts that produce most "local" brands of beer in Australia. It turns out that given they are basically all lagers, the specific tastes of each "regional" beer are largely down to the local water supply. The CUB factory takes Melbourne mains tap water, and chemically adjusts it to suit the brew they are making. In essence, they have taken samples of "typical" water from the rivers running through Adelaide, Sydney, Launceston, Brisbane and elsewhere, and chemically adjust Melbourne water to mimic the home town of the day's brew. This, I'm told, is "progress".