clean up crew

Today’s young folk are faced with the unresolved, unprocessed shit of past generations, literally and figuratively. Let’s help ‘em out a bit by at least acknowledging what’s what.

This week I went to a STEM Women’s job thingie feeling a little like an imposter. Many companies wanted engineers more than yogini/artists who have turned their attention to environmental science. Undeterred by my own imposter syndrome, I scanned the tables, banners, and goodies the folks were offering. Mostly I chatted up the 4 water companies - one for regional storage (dams) and distribution to farms, mines and folks out of the cities, one for cities, another the middle folks who get the water into homes, and the last the takeaway service of the ‘wastewater’.

The marketing was all human-centric, everyone wearing hi-vis yellow and orange safety gear, as well as lab coats, which I found highly indicative of how we relate to water - as something that requires chemicals and construction hazards. I learned just how many people are involved in the distribution of water from where it falls out of the skies to where we use it to flush our poo away.

And having just come from volunteering at Wild Mountains, where all the toilets are zero-water-usage composting toilets, I felt compelled to bring that up in the conversations.

“Is it true that the water in our toilets is the same as the water we drink?” I asked.

Yes, they all said.

In all this infrastructure for water, wouldn’t it make more financial and ecological sense to use recycled water for everything but drinking? Treating water so we can drink it is an intensive and costly process. Still today, in the 21st century, many people (usually women and girls), in many countries, walk miles every single day for a bucket-full of polluted water to use for everything. Yet here we are in the so-called “first world” washing our clothes, watering our lawns, and flushing our shit out of sight with perfectly drinkable water.

Seems criminal to me that we don’t at least re-cognize our privilege of flushing our waste with drinking water, and many times a day at that. Less than 3% of all the water on our entire Earth is fresh water, with even less than that as drinkable water, along with the enormous costs to make it drinkable. So how can we conscience flushing such precious drinking water down the toilet 10 times a day? And, depending on your toilet tech, each flush ranges between 1 and 7 gallons of water!

Do you even drink the amount of water in a day that you use to move your poo out of sight?

Tell me that’s not criminal!?!

As you can imagine, I wasn’t the easiest candidate at this trade show, since I was questioning the very systems they’re simply looking to fill with fresh blood. Because I’m far more keen to meet the folks who are looking to revamp the infrastructure so it’ll work better and make more ecological sense.

At the door, just before leaving the trade show, I scanned over the blurbs of each company to be sure I hadn’t missed anything. I had initially bypassed one company because its name, LMS, didn’t indicate anything to me at a glance. But when I read their blurb, I dashed back in to chat with a person passionate about methane abatement while they dismantled their station.

I know, exciting stuff right?! ;)

“Transforming waste into opportunity: LMS Energy pioneers methane abatement technologies, turning environmental challenges into sustainable solutions. When it comes to renewable energy, not even waste is being wasted.” (from the page on their website highlighting Circular Economy)

Reminds me of undergrad way back in the last millenium ;) when I was looking for work-study jobs. I was super excited about a project in the Textiles Tech department that planned to investigate innovation options for carpets that would otherwise go to landfills to both smother the decomposition process underneath them, as well as fail to biodegrade readily themselves. My artist boyfriend at the time made such fun of me that I didn’t take it further (sorry to report I was influenced in that way - forgive me for being young).

But here I am now, still interested in how we deal effectively with our shit.

You may have heard me rabbit on before about how queasy I get around stuff and the human dis-ease of creating and consuming more of it, and then storing it or dumping it. Our levels of waste would be absurd if they weren’t so dangerous.

Just like some of our so-called leaders.

In the Applied Research Methods class project last year, our team focused on food waste. Each year, in Australia alone, a mountain of food waste is created that is double the size of the Sydney Opera House. The visual above really helps to conceptualize the enormity of the issue. And a hefty portion of the so-called waste is still edible when it’s dumped! How do we reconcile folks going hungry when, on average, we are sending 1 out of every 5 bags of, often, still-edible food to the landfill per household?!? That’s an estimated $20 billion sent to the dump each year!

What’s the solution to all this mess? Awareness. As I’ve said zillions of times in teaching yoga, “You can’t let go of what you don’t realize you’re holding onto in the first place.” We can’t change what we don’t even re-cognize we’re doing/being, so starting here with the awareness of what we’re wasting, and how, is the key to better ways of living-with instead of using-up what is essential to all life.

WATER.

We live on the only planet that has it and in just the right proportions and ways in which we can even exist at all. Grok that in and let it lead you to better ways of relating to what every single being and process on Earth needs to exist at all…

WATER.