There is a scene in one of Wendell Berry’s Port William novels where the characters of the town barber, Jayber Crow, and the elder of the town, Old Jack, are compared. Rain drips from the roof of the barber shop to the ground to the disapproval of Old Jack who believes that a man with a roof ought to have gutters, and that a man with gutters ought to have a cistern to store the water in.
This article is written in the spirit of Old Jack.
*****
Water administration might seem a prosaic, if not a downright boring, subject to some. Yet in a landscape as hot and dry as my home state of Western Australia, water (and even its administration by government bodies) has always had a touch of romance associated with it.
Few Western Australians do not know the story of C. Y. O’Connor who in 1895 conceived a pipeline over 500 kilometres in length to deliver fresh water deep into the state’s interior. The scheme was completed in 1903 and is justly recognised as an engineering marvel though it was tragically too late for O’Connor who took his own life before the completion of the pipeline in the face of intense public pressure.
Less celebrated, but perhaps no less visionary, has been the transformation of the water system away from dams to desalinisation and groundwater sources in recent years. Western Australia was the first state in Australia to utilise desalinisation on a large scale and the aquafers beneath the state’s capital, Perth, are increasingly being recharged with recycled water.
Put together this careful management of water resources have alleviated the twin pressures of a growing population and a drying climate. When the 2017-18 water crisis in South Africa saw Cape Town facing ‘Day Zero’ as its dams ran dry, it was rightly observed that Western Australia had no similar crisis though it faced similar population and climate pressures.
All this is to say that from my birth until quite recently, I have benefited most of my life from a public administration that has reliably delivered potable, fresh water to my house and garden at very little cost. This is a fact that I do not wish to take for granted.
Yet amidst all these achievements, and all the benefits of a reliable water supply, there is one failure that I think is notable.
Where government bodies have been successful in delivering novel and effective means of new water supply, there has been a persistent failure to convince the population to reduce its consumption. For over twenty years water restrictions, education in schools, advertisement campaigns, and smaller block sizes and gardens have singularly failed to change watering habits.
Indeed, Western Australians use more water than almost any society on earth with an average use of 327 000 litres passing through each household in 2017.
To encourage a reduction in water usage, the water utility has recourse to two pressures: price and restrictions. Both, as they have been applied to date, suffer from significant inefficiencies.
Water restrictions suffer firstly from targeting only specific water usages. Watering your lawn on the wrong day of the week might net you a $100 fine but showering for the better part of an hour is perfectly fine. Policing breaches in restrictions is also notoriously difficult and relies on neighbours policing neighbours or (as must be more often the case) turning a blind eye in the interests of a more harmonious street.
To increase prices meanwhile, a tiered price system has been implemented to penalize heavier users with higher prices. This system is implemented at a household level meaning that no allowance is made for the size of the family utilizing the water. A household occupied by a single person might pay less than half the price for a litre of water than a household supporting a large family, even though the large family’s per capita usage of water might be far more sustainable.
More significantly, both water restrictions and pricing allow no discrimination for the use to which the water is being put. For the water authority a leaking tap and a flourishing vegetable garden are uses that must equally be reduced. An irrigated lawn that is daily the play site of young children is charged the same as the verge that is irrigated solely for appearance’s sake.
Moreover, this system, that has been designed with tremendous technical skill and visionary foresight to deliver water to hundreds of thousands of customers, harbours further inefficiencies inherent to its size. I have little doubt that the first European settlers in Western Australia would marvel at the ingenuity that supplies thousands of litres of water through internal plumbing for a pittance. Yet those same settlers might raise their eyebrows to learn that in this same system water is desalinated (or pumped from deep within the earth), purified, made potable with chemicals shipped from half a world away, and transported hundreds of kilometres to fill a cistern above a toilet bowl.
*****
In 2019 I moved from the suburbs of Perth to the outskirts of a rural town. In doing so, I left the coverage of the local water utility and assumed responsibility for my own water supply. The house my family had purchased came with a small functioning tank supplying some stock troughs and a larger tank plumbed into the household with a substantial leak in its bottom.
In the year that followed, we rectified the water capture and storage systems adding around 180 000 litres of storage largely supplied from rainwater captured from the roofs of the house and shed. We also benefit from a bore (or well for American readers) that supplies around a thousand litres of water each day. A grey water system recycles water from the sinks and showers and waters a small orchard of fruit trees.
Since the installation of the main water tank, I have only purchased water once. Following a dry year in 2020, I paid for around 20 000 litres of water to be trucked to the property. Two weeks after this delivery, a rainstorm dropped almost half as much water in three days than I had received in the entirety of the preceding year. The 20 000 litres I had paid for overflowed from the tank later that year after a wet winter.
Supplying my own water has not been without its own stresses or expenses. The capital outlay of installing and plumbing the water tanks will take approximately 20 years to pay off. There are still expenses and maintenance. The writing of this article was itself interrupted when the pump supplying the water from the tank broke and needed to be replaced.
Yet overall, I would suggest that capturing and using my own rainwater is far more efficient than being supplied with water from a public utility. There are no leaking pipes on my property and no thirty-minute showers. My vegetable garden is heavily mulched and irrigated with dripline to minimise evaporation. Our decorative gardens are planted with drought tolerant natives. Every morning in the summer I manually turn on and off the irrigation system, adjusting the water used to the weather and the needs of the plants.
I am in the process of controlling run-off from the property so that, as far as is possible, every raindrop is absorbed and stored in the soil. In addition to this, I am very aware of the rain that falls on my property and consequently the water I have at my disposal. In a dry year I will plant less and in a wet, more.
In other words, my household does exactly what the water authority has spent at least the last twenty years encouraging households to do. Ironically, we only began doing so when we removed ourselves from the system that supplied such cheap, available water to begin with.
*****
All this begs the question then, could other households introduce some efficiency into the system by assuming control of at least part of their water needs? Is this possible in the space constraints of the city? And in a hot and drying climate like Western Australia, why is there not more of an incentive to capture and use rainwater?
The last question has an answer that is at least partially geographical and peculiar to Western Australia’s capital city, Perth. The city sits on sand dunes that absorb rainwater and recharge an aquafer basin beneath the city. From the perspective of the water authority therefore, run-off that passes into underground soaks (as is the case for most gutters in the city) ultimately recharges the aquifer basin and will eventually be pumped from the ground and used for the city’s drinking water.
Yet this geographic consideration does not itself explain the reluctance to encourage widespread adoption of water tanks. While a water tank in Perth might not prevent run-off into the ocean, it might still be used to by-pass the process of pumping, purifying, and transporting water by simply trapping and using rainwater directly at the source.
It is my suspicion that there are two more significant obstacles that prevent government policy from incentivising water tanks. The first is that water tanks are not without some risk and need of maintenance. Water bourn illnesses and contamination are both possibilities and need to be mitigated against when using the rainwater as drinking water. Likewise, there is a possibility that badly installed or maintained tanks become a liability to those around them. For the bureaucrat a centralised system comes with the attendant virtue of control (or at least the illusion of control), while a system that diffuses responsibility among the masses is also a system that relies on the competence and goodwill of the average person.
Yet it is exactly this reliance on the competence of the average person that I believe makes the diffusion of responsibility so important. I hold as an article of faith that when people are relied upon to act as good and competent citizens, they will (mostly) rise to the challenge. Conversely you cannot remove responsibility from a person and expect them to act as a citizen ought.
The principle of subsidiarity is of relevance here. It holds that central authorities should only assume those responsibilities that are beyond the capacity of a more local level. The consequence of ignoring the local in favour of a centralised system is, I would argue, exactly the mixture of efficiency and inefficiency that the current system embodies. Huge efficiencies in generating large quantities of water, but persistent inefficiencies in the water’s use precisely because the users bear little responsibility for and have limited input into the system.
There remains the question of whether the household is capable of administering its own water needs. In terms of technical understanding and even (for the most part) cost, rainwater harvesting is something that is capable of being organised at a household level.
There is however the consideration of space. The footprint of my water tanks is beyond the capacity of a typical suburban lot and thus beyond the capacity of most households to implement. Yet there are, I believe possibilities at a street level for neighbours to share in the placing and use of rainwater tanks. And while it might be impossible for older suburbs to retrofit enough space to completely offset their water use, new suburbs could benefit if space were allocated from the start of their design.
At the very least I think it would be a worthy experiment for a new development to try. Give responsibility of the water supply back to a local or household level (with appropriate safeguards and safety nets) and measure the outcome. I suspect that the household that bears more responsibility for its own water will also be the household that uses water in a more sustainable and conscientious manner.
*****
Intuitively most people have a sense of the efficiencies brought by large systems. We understand concepts like economies of scale and specialisation. Indeed, one of the characteristics of a modern, developed, economy is its embrace of these very concepts in the name of efficiency. And while efficiency is never an absolute good and it doubtless overemphasised in contemporary society, it is nevertheless an appropriate measure to be discussed and (as part of a basket of other important goods) strived for.
Yet the presumption that every large system must be more efficient due to its size and scope is erroneous. Often the supposed efficiency of a system is arrived at through determining ahead of time what will be the measure of success and ignoring any other considerations that may be equally relevant.
The system that kept water flowing though my taps for most of my life certainly had benefits that I do not wish to undersell, but ultimately, I have no regrets for exchanging its security for ownership of my water supply.
And I ask you to join me in praying for rain this year.
