dry, the beloved country
April 20, 2018 10:18 AM Subscribe
I wrote to my friend Paul, who lives in an apartment in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, to see if I could stay with him in Cape Town. He agreed—but only if I understood what was going on. What was going on, he suggested, was not just a drought, but a kind of vast, unplanned, crazy—and fabulous—social experiment. “I hope you’ll be game to test your water-saving limits!” he wrote me. “Nothing leaves the flat except via the toilet these days. The sink and bath are plugged ... I can manage the washing machine on the lowest setting, and its output goes into a 25-liter container for additional flushing. It’s all a bit extreme perhaps,” he conceded.Surprising, even beautiful things can happen when it feels as if the world is about to end.
What Cape Town learned from its drought
We're worse off than Cape Town‚ say drought-hit Eastern Cape residents
Ten good things about Cape Town’s drought
Letter From A Bed In Cape Town
A month ago my doctor told me to get into bed and stay there. My sudden, eye-popping back pain was a herniated spinal disc, he said, brought on by months of my artlessly lugging 25-liter plastic containers full of graywater weighing 55 pounds apiece around the house to flush toilets. If I wanted to walk normally again without surgery, I should lie flat for—well, he couldn’t really say how long—until it got better.Awaiting Day Zero: Cape Town Faces an Uncertain Water Future
My spine is another casualty of Cape Town’s now-famous drought. After three years of unusually low rainfall, life in many households now revolves around collecting and reusing water, because this city of some four-plus million people is on the verge of running out. If current projections hold, we’ll hit the melodramatically named Day Zero—when the taps will be dry across most of the metro—sometime in early May.
Now, largely thanks to radical conservation efforts — in January, the average Cape Town resident’s daily water quota was just one-third the amount used by the typical Californian at the height of that state’s 2016 drought — the city has reduced water consumption by 57 percent. Day Zero has been pushed back to July 9. And if the citizens of Cape Town (myself among them) continue to save as we have been, we should make it to the winter rainy season without having to line up for water.South Africa's capital is the first modern city to face a critical drinking water shortage – thanks to climate change, it won't be the last
So, disaster averted? Nothing to see here anymore? Far from it. The city’s efforts on the supply side of the water equation have been far less successful than its work on consumption. Even if the drought comes to an end in 2018 — and few experts are willing to predict that — the effects of this water crisis will be felt for years, possibly decades.
Los Angeles flooded to surface of a reservoir with plastic balls to reduce water loss from evaporation, seems like a good idea; in the picture, the reservoirs are not covered.
It's a very good article, personal and detailed. I'm in Maine where water is not presently scarce, not really likely to become scarce anytime soon, at least not a this level. But there will be other crises.
posted by theora55 at 11:49 AM on April 20, 2018 [1 favorite]
It's a very good article, personal and detailed. I'm in Maine where water is not presently scarce, not really likely to become scarce anytime soon, at least not a this level. But there will be other crises.
posted by theora55 at 11:49 AM on April 20, 2018 [1 favorite]
Compost toilets, compost toilets, compost toilets. There's internationally-accepted code for what's basically the infamous, easy-to-use humanure system (pdf). Compost toilets.
See also: Sewer Catastrophe Companion
posted by aniola at 12:23 PM on April 20, 2018 [7 favorites]
See also: Sewer Catastrophe Companion
posted by aniola at 12:23 PM on April 20, 2018 [7 favorites]
This was a great article.
The Rolling Stone article, however, refers to Cape Town as South Africa's capital...this is not exactly correct. The Parliament is in Cape Town, the President is in Pretoria, the Supreme Court is in Bloemfontein and the Constitutional Court is in Johannesburg. I guess it sort of depends on your perspective. Most people I know call Pretoria the capital.
posted by huslage at 6:35 PM on April 20, 2018 [1 favorite]
The Rolling Stone article, however, refers to Cape Town as South Africa's capital...this is not exactly correct. The Parliament is in Cape Town, the President is in Pretoria, the Supreme Court is in Bloemfontein and the Constitutional Court is in Johannesburg. I guess it sort of depends on your perspective. Most people I know call Pretoria the capital.
posted by huslage at 6:35 PM on April 20, 2018 [1 favorite]
From one of the articles: People’s ability to halve their water consumption in a year and then do more shows what is possible.
posted by aniola at 9:47 PM on April 20, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by aniola at 9:47 PM on April 20, 2018 [1 favorite]
Shout out here for LOW-TECH MAGAZINE and NO TECH MAGAZINE, which do (and link) deep, nerdy dives on low-tech, electricity-free, and historical technologies and tools, mostly without green/prepper/apololypse-washing.
In the US we hear about how we'll have to make sacrifices to get off carbon, and I certainly grant that's true, but people in the past mostly did get by, as do people in the third world, and they did so in (to us) surprisingly ingenious ways, and they continue to do so outside many mainstream spaces.
If We Insulate Our Houses, Why Not Our Cooking Pots?
Aerial ropeways: automatic cargo transport for a bargain
Non-Electric Hearing Aids Outperform Modern Devices
No-Tech repost of Popular Mechanics: The Amish Horse-Drawn Buggy Is More Tech-Forward Than You Think
Cape Town is actually kind of exciting for this. In particular for the water crisis, I can imagine a new trolley network and gravity plumbing home refit becoming big things in Cape Town if it persists. Compost toilets were already mentioned.
It's the 21st century, we have all the benefits of modern historical research, telecommunications, materials, fabrication techniques, and widespread literacy. Going off carbon and cutting resource consumption will take some readjustment but it doesn't have to be a regression to the Dark Ages.
Except...all signs point to Day Zero being a manmade disaster, caused by government mismanagement & infighting, specifically delaying construction of an extra reservoir. If the community can come together to solve basic infrastructure problems, I hope it inspires better administration.
The lesson here, and in Puerto Rico, I think, is that community involvement is critical to surviving climate change, and you will be involved eventually, so best start now. Solar panels on your roof are fine, but turning your house into a solar-powered community center, sustainable farm, and school might just be what saves your town.
posted by saysthis at 7:09 AM on April 21, 2018 [5 favorites]
In the US we hear about how we'll have to make sacrifices to get off carbon, and I certainly grant that's true, but people in the past mostly did get by, as do people in the third world, and they did so in (to us) surprisingly ingenious ways, and they continue to do so outside many mainstream spaces.
If We Insulate Our Houses, Why Not Our Cooking Pots?
Aerial ropeways: automatic cargo transport for a bargain
Non-Electric Hearing Aids Outperform Modern Devices
No-Tech repost of Popular Mechanics: The Amish Horse-Drawn Buggy Is More Tech-Forward Than You Think
Cape Town is actually kind of exciting for this. In particular for the water crisis, I can imagine a new trolley network and gravity plumbing home refit becoming big things in Cape Town if it persists. Compost toilets were already mentioned.
It's the 21st century, we have all the benefits of modern historical research, telecommunications, materials, fabrication techniques, and widespread literacy. Going off carbon and cutting resource consumption will take some readjustment but it doesn't have to be a regression to the Dark Ages.
Except...all signs point to Day Zero being a manmade disaster, caused by government mismanagement & infighting, specifically delaying construction of an extra reservoir. If the community can come together to solve basic infrastructure problems, I hope it inspires better administration.
The lesson here, and in Puerto Rico, I think, is that community involvement is critical to surviving climate change, and you will be involved eventually, so best start now. Solar panels on your roof are fine, but turning your house into a solar-powered community center, sustainable farm, and school might just be what saves your town.
posted by saysthis at 7:09 AM on April 21, 2018 [5 favorites]
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posted by tobascodagama at 11:30 AM on April 20, 2018 [6 favorites]