Consumers Detest Dogs Shitting on their Front Lawns but Insist on Shitting in their Drinking Water.

A Review of Klaus Lanz's 'The Greenpeace Book of Water' David and Charles, Moffat Scotland 1995. This review was completed in september 1997. It has been slightily rewritten for this publication.

The private water industry has a vested interest in encouraging domestic, industrial and agricultural consumers to pollute the water supply system, "The water industry benefits directly from pollution of water resources: today's poisons are a guarantee of future business." (p.35); "Today there is a huge market for technology designed to process our increasingly poor quality raw water to produce drinking water that still conforms to official standards." (p.35). Pollution triggers off consumer demands for the water industry to provide expensive waste treatment facilities to combat pollution which gives it the opportunity to boost profits. The ideological benefit of installing these facilities is that it establishes the water industry's green credentials. It claims these huge expenditures are "the price it is willing to pay to protect the environment". This is another example of the fact that the current industrial system cannot be reformed, it needs to be abolished.

There are many environmentalists who fail to appreciate that the water industry's expenditures on environmental improvements are a means of generating profits not protecting the environment. Even worse is that when environmentalists raise the alarm about water pollution they almost invariably soften up consumers into accepting higher water prices thereby helping to boost water companies' profits. Far from protecting the environment, environmentalists who insist on technological solutions to water pollution problems end up exacerbating pollution.

Over the last century or so the water industry in many countries around the world has operated on the basis not merely of supplying water but of using water as a means of disposing of waste. It is this dual purpose which enables multi-national water corporations to make profits out of pollution. Multi-nationals are not entirely to blame for this given that in most countries they are merely exploiting opportunities created for them by what were previously municipal, or state owned, organizations.

The water industry encourages domestic consumers to shit into their drinking water - water which has been expensively processed just so that people can mess it up again. It then encourages domestic consumers to cause even more pollution by allowing them to pour huge quantities of poisonous non-biodegradable chemicals into the sewage system. This not only further poisons drinking water it also transforms vast quantities of invaluable nutrients, which could be used to fertilise the land and grow crops, into colossal quantities of poisonous waste which brutland continues to dump in the sea, causing widescale ecological problems or, as is increasingly the case, being burnt in waste incinerators, thereby boosting the greenhouse effect. Klanz argues, "Keeping greywater and excreta separate is crucial to the protection of the natural environment from damage done by problems originating in domestic use." (p.55).

Industry is allowed to consume as much water as it wants (in some countries bulk users get cheaper rates). Very few companies recycle any of the water they use. They then dump their wastes into a single waste treatment plant (or into a local river if they can get away with it) which makes it impossible to recycle these wastes, pollutes even more water, and makes it impossible to clean up the water. The water industry can't even extract household chemicals from water let alone the 70,000 chemicals in production or even the 3-4,000 new chemicals being released into the environment each year, "Most of the washing-up liquids and washing powders, detergents, soaps and shampoos currently in use contain substances that cannot be filtered out of waste water even given the most advanced purification technology." (p.56).

In sum, multi-national water companies want water consumers to:-

* keep using water as profligately as possible;

* use only water which has just gone through the water industry's highly expensive water treatment system; and,

* dump all of their wastes into one water disposal system.

These are the ways by which they use pollution to add value to their product. Pollution doesn't deter economic growth it boosts economic growth. It is not surprising then that the current water system is the most expensive, the most inefficient, most polluting, and the most unhygienic .. "the system of sanitation that is the most expensive, most wasteful of water and most likely to pass on infectious diseases .." (p.49).

Just as the electricity industry sees its role as supplying more and more energy to its consumers, so the water industry sees its role primarily as supplying ever increasing quantities of expensively processed clean water to consumers. The sheer decadence and corruption of brutish capitalism is transparent in that during the eighteen years of tory rule, there have been incessant demands for increasing labour productivity whilst nothing has been done to increase energy, water, or resource, efficiencies. Brutish industrialists would rather spend copious amounts of time and effort engaged in blood sport abuse of its workers than doing anything about boosting profits by increasing water and energy efficiencies.

The major theoretical breakthrough in this work is that klanz gives a higher priority to the regionalization of the water industry rather than reformist nonsense such as increasing water efficiency, water conservation, and water recycling, all of which are important only in a regional structure, "There is no doubt that the establishment of legally enforceable regional water sustainability - obliging each region to cover its demand solely with its own water - would represent a significant and very valuable corrective to current water policy." (p.39). It would be interesting to know whether greenpeace supports this recommendation.

Given the debate about the relative significance of the Earth's Carbon spiral and the water cycle, it is also interesting to discover that lanz doesn't believe it is feasible to use the water cycle as an environmental measuring system, "How do you begin to calculate the amount of water used in making a car? For a middle of the range car made in germany, the production of the steel and aluminium alone takes 78,000 litres of water, without allowing for the extraction of raw materials or other stages in manufacture that are extremely water-intensive but virtually impossible to quantify. It is not even possible to produce reliable figures for the water consumption involved in the production of a frozen Chicken." (p.121).

Greenpeace's view of a green future (although it denies this is its vision of a sustainable society) is fixated on solar power. Klanz also administers some serious criticisms of this geophysiologically destructive form of energy, "Unlimited energy is still the ultimate goal of most development planners. ^[1] One of the possibilities under consideration is the use of vast solar farms to convert sunlight into electricity, in other words, using the sun as a gigantic socket to plug the planet into. Other scientists, however, believe that the discovery of an inexhaustible source of energy, no matter how environmentally sound, would mean that humanity could face problems it has never even imagined. No matter how environmentally friendly the method of production, any increase in the availability of energy to humanity runs the risk of allowing the human population of the planet to achieve such levels of activity and therefore destruction that we could undermine the very structures and processes that allow life to exist on Earth. This may sound like the apocalyptic vision of a mad scientist, but some people believe that there is already evidence of it happening. The greater the amount of energy available in a particular place, the higher the piles of refuse, the larger the number of cars and trains, the more the countryside is under attack or sealed up - in other words, the greater the side effects of civilization." (p.110). It is to be hoped that greenpeace, and the wider green movement, get off their infallible stools and start to debate which form of energy is suitable for a sustainable Planet.

This book is excellent in showing that, in many areas around the world, oomans are breeching water's ecological limitations - extracting too much water from aquifers, cutting down too many Trees and thus reducing rainfall, damming to many rivers, draining too much land, waterlogging soils, polluting too many streams and rivers, creating floods, etc. Global burning may be the big issue which will transform the Earth and imperil ooman survival but for sheer bloody minded, stupid, self destructiveness it is difficult to beat the way the water industry, in the name of environmental protection, makes a huge profit out of poisoning both drinking water and ooman manure. To borrow one of our commonly used phrases, this is stark, staring, raving madness.