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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Water and Enlightenment dreaming « Previous | |Next »
February 18, 2003

Can we defend the idea of a water commons in the face of the ongoing privatisation of water by those who think that the free market is the one true path to water reform? Can the idea of a water commons be divorced from the old idea of state ownership of water? Can we connect a water commons to community ownership? Is this a possible way to manage our rivers?

Answering these questions indicates one way that philosophy, which has ruthlessly criticized itself, reinvented itself and returned to the common life, can be critically involved in public life. This opens up a way that philosophy can begin to critically engage with public policy. It shows that the classic Roman idea of philosophy in political life (as advocated by Cicero and Quintallan) is still relevant and worthwhile.

The above questions arise for us in Adelaide because South Australia has recently woken up from its water development dreaming to discover that it is a water-stressed state. It is now released that water is a key to how we live on this land, and all the indications are that we are not doing too well in living sustainably in the river country. All this comes as a bit of shock. But it is shock that other people ---eg., those in southern California----are also experiencing.

This shock gives rise to a premonition all is not well with our current mode of life; that we cannot continue with business-as-usual; and that big changes to our current practices are needed. There symptoms of this shock in South Australia are many and varuous. Here are a few of the common ones.

South Australia has realized that its geographical dependence on River Murray water has meant declining water quality from dryland salinity. Downstream Adelaide faces such a salt load in the Murray River that we won't have safe drinking water two days out of five within 20 years unless something is done.

It is in this state that the new in-situ leaching uranium mines have been approved. These mining operations at Honeymoon and Beverley mines discharge a cocktail of sulphuric acid and radio-active slurry back into the underground water aquifers. Many in South Australia still think of the Murray as a river even though no water has flowed over the Goolwa barrages since November 2001, nor is it likely too for the rest of 2002.

Adelaide is also spending millions to stop its coastline washing away because of rising sea levels and land subsidence. It has been estimated (by Dr Graeme Pearman, the head of CSIRO climate and atmosphere sector) that sea levels around Adelaide have risen twice as fast as in the rest of the country. Because Adelaide has pumped out quite a lot of its ground water, it has subsided by about 15 centimetres whilst sea levels have risen by 15 centimetres over the past 100 years. The result is a 30cm rise in sea levels, leading to severe beach erosion, coastal destabilisation, added infrastructure expenses and a suite of building codes and regulations designed to anticipate the impacts of future global warming and subsidence.

Parts of South Australia, namely the Eyre Peninsula, are facing a water crisis since the health and development of the region is constrained by the lack of water. In other parts of SA streams and creeks run dry because of the mining of aquifers for irrigated development. In other areas, such as the Upper South East, the deeply salinised ground water is drained away to the sea, into wetlands and into the Coorong through an extensive drainage system. The latter is having devastating consequences for the ecology of the Ramsar–listed wetlands.

As the southern part of the Murray-Darling Basin, South Australia is currently involved in political conflict with the other basin states of Victoria, NSW and Queensland. The environmental disaster of dryland salinity, dying wetlands, water scarcity, and declining habitats and biodiversity has given rise to intense interstate conflicts. These are conflicts over how we have historically perceived and experienced water from a shared river system. These conflicts seem to be intractable and beyond our capacity to resolve them.

The diagnosis we get from these symptons of stress is that our current mode of life is a wrong way to live. It is unsustainable. What shocks us is that this unsustainable mode of life is the end point of the liberal, utilitarian Enlightenment. Unreason was built into the very core of the Enlightenment project and many of us did not see it until it was too late. How come we were fooled we ask ourselves. How come we did not listen to those philosophers who talked about the dialectic of enlightenment?

In his Negative Dialectics (p.364) Adorno says that shock is what compels us to philosophize and to throw light on truth. We can begin this process by recovering our history of water development in Australia in order to get a handle on the way that water politics in modernity has impacted on our political life. The key to that history is Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme of the 1940s and the process of self-reflection on that history unlocks a doorway onto another kind of history--an ecological one.

The philosophy underpinning the euphoric dam building of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme was one of nation building through the domination of nature. Governments in the 1940s viewed nature in general, and our rivers in particular, as in need of taming and regulation. Rivers flowing to the sea were viewed as a waste of resources by instrumental reason. The technology existed to tame nature and make the deserts bloom through water development. This justified the construction of massive dams whilst the weirs that were originally built in the 1920s and 1930s for river navigation were refunctioned to operate as irrigation pools. Dams became the temples of Australia that signified a modern Australia and irrigation became a key chapter in the pioneering Australian Legend. With water on tap and irrigation unlimited paradise beckoned. The utiliarian enlighteners said that nation-building through big water development was going to be all benefit with little or no cost. Everyboy bought the dream. It was part of the identity of being modern in Australia.

In looking back on this history we see that the control over water did not turn out to be all benefit and no cost. The large dam partnership between the Commonwealth and corporations historically excluded local government and communities. It gave rise to the displacement of the local community of Adaminaby as people were forced out of their homes and lost their livelihood. The large-scale water diversion also took water from the communities on the eastern seaboard and gave it to those on the western plains; and it took water from the Snowy River ecosystem and introduced it into the ecosystem of the River Murray. The expansion of irrigated agriculture in the arid west was at the expense of farming in the east. Regulation of the flow of the River Murray reduced the natural winter-spring flow peak, decreased the variability of mid range flows and reduced the flow through the (now closed) Murray Mouth to around 21-25% of pre-regulated average.

And now? This is where the horrors of premonition surface and we begin to feel the historical shudders coming on. We have to now think against our own categories, our taken-for-granted ways of seeing nature, and the values embodied in our current way of life. We have to learn think dialectically within our liberal enlightenment tradition and to understand that parts of it are posionous.
parts of it

Today, irrigated water development is now seen as buying national prosperity and security at the cost of ruinous ecological damage. One effect of the modern river regulation has been the isolation of the floodplain wetlands (such as Chowilla) from the river for long period, the reduced flooding of the ecology of the wetlands, and less opportunity for the floodplain to replenish. We are learning to see that we have created a nature–eating monster that has cleared the land, reduced biodiversity and left us with rivers stressed from pollution from nutrients, inadequate environmental flows and huge loads of salt.

The technological euphoria of dam building financed by public money has evaporated to the point where many consider that it would be a good thing to decommission some of the locks, weirs and barrages to help a dying River Murray river flow freely again. We have slowly come to accept that excessive regulation of the river for human use is the fundamental cause of the ecological damage we see all around us.

The stark conflict between the widely different views of water and nature informs the public debate over the water politics we are currently living. Some say that we are battling the geographical fundamentals of an arid landscape, low rainfall, accumulated salt in the soil and a large drainage basin with a small plug. The fundamentals of the landscape are against us and it doesn’t really matter what we do to tame and shape nature since we are all doomed in the long-term. The more hopeful ones in the marketplace would say that the irrigators have successfully fashioned a profitable industry out of an arid landscape, and that with the new improved technology irrigated agriculture can be made a sustainable industry that will have little impact on the hydrology of our semi-arid landscape. New capital investment by irrigators, for instance, will see them introduce efficient practices (eg., converting from spray to drippers to dispense water to plants), and this will reduce further damage to the ecology of the landscape. So it is all too simplistic to identify the irrigators as the evil ones bringing down civilization, as we know it. All that is needed is a little tidying up of irrigation practices and politicians introducing market instruments to enable irrigators achieve greater levels of efficiency in their use of water diversions.

The Australian Government reinfoirces this position when it says that one of its success stories is the Council of Australian Governments’ National Agenda for Water Reform. It says that this reform process institutionalised a whole of government and inter-governmental co-operation to promote sustainable development objectives in land and water management. This reform process addressed the way that, prior to the 1980s, much water infrastructure and use was heavily subsidised as it was publicly funded with no charge to the ultimate users. Hence there was overuse and inefficient allocation led to significant problems. The market can be used to solve these problems.

In 1994-95, the Council of Australian Governments (CoAG) adopted the National Agenda for Water Reform, whereby all states in the federation committed themselves to a range of market based measures as part of a general policy framework. Pricing practices were reformed to reflect the full economic cost of resources; cross-subsidies were removed; other subsidies made transparent; transferability of water rights to address inefficient allocation was introduced; and a water market for the trading of water entitlements was created. Under these reforms water service providers were required to operate on a commercial basis, whilst the new investment in rural water supplies is limited to ecologically sustainable and economically viable projects. Specific provision was made to ensure adequate water for the environment.

As a result of this reform process most States are reforming their water legislation to ensure that the environment has enough water to protect bio-diversity and river ecosystems before any other allocations are made. The National Competition Council was made responsible for assessing water reform progress in the various States and this regulatory body has exercised its power to recommend suspension of competition payments by the Federal Government if commitments are not met.

This use of market instruments to drive water reform has been judged a success in policy-making circles. They see themselves as beginning to address the key problem of a culture in an arid landscape that wastes water in a prodigious fashion rather than conserves it. The policy makers deem that it is only a question of time before the pricing reform for rural water will achieve full cost recovery and water conservation is achieved. It is then acknowledged that, in the short-term, care must be taken in removing the system of subsidies, given the major structural and social change that is currently occurring in rural Australia.

Is this argument reasonable? Is this the right pathway for water reform? What do we see if we think dialectically?

What we discern is a philosophical conflict that is buried in this market mode of governing the conduct of a population. South Australians see the Murray-Darling River as a commons with the river’s waters being a common good that requires some form of community ownership in the basin. This position conflicts with the market economy’s view of water, which holds that water is a private good that can be extracted and traded freely. So the Queensland cowboys call for the removal of all limits on the use of water, the establishment of water markets, and full property rights. The market economists deem private property rights to water to be a rational alternative to state ownership, and they hold that the free market is the only substitute to the bureaucratic regulation of the Basin’s water resources.

One problem with market view is that since those downstream (often graziers) are denied access to water so we have regimes of unequal and non-sustainable water use and water-wasteful agriculture (rice and cotton) established in the Basin. More importantly, since the market view is founded on private ownership, it disregards the ecological function of water for a floodplain river. Because the private property rights of the self-regulating market denies the common good of ecological functioning, rivers can be drained and polluted by cotton farmers for their wealth creation. Their appeal to private rights means they can remain indifferent to the ecological hazards of intensive irrigation, and can see no reason to pay the hidden costs of their intensive projects

Now this representation of the conflict over water between private and public good is too black and white. South Australians, for instance, have adopted water trading and they have fostered it because it works in their interest. Their high value-adding viti-culture industry buys water from the low value adding upstream dairy farmers. Hence they support the privatisation of water fostered by the reforms of National Competition Policy because it provides a way to continue irrigated development.

However, there is also an important principle here that South Australians are tacitly defending against the advocates of the free market. We are saying that it is important to defend water as a commons, or as a shared public good, since water is the ecological basis of all life in the Murray Darling Basin. It is only by viewing water as a commons, ie., from the ecological perspective of water, that we are able to identify the hidden costs of irrigated agriculture. When the free market irrigators say they can improve their current practices to reduce further damage, they tacitly overlook the ecological perspective that exposes the past damage. What is hidden by the market’s private property perspective is that so much of the damage to the landscape has already been done, that this damage will continue to develop for the next 50 years and that it will cost the public billions to restore the landscape and reverse the damage.

The ecological perspective also proposes an alternative principle for resource allocation to the market’s efficiency principle. This alternative is sustainability and equitable allocation, and its application depends on the federal cooperation among the members of the Basin community. Hence South Australians have been willing to engage in conflicts within a political framework of a cooperative federalism of the Murray-Darling Commission to protect the water as a commons. They have done so in the name of equitable distribution of water, in which the states are entitled to a reasonable and equitable share in the beneficial use of water in the Murray-Darling Basin drainage system. We realise that equitable use is a compromise between conflicting political forces. We accept that those in the Basin community will continue to argue over what reasonable and equitable mean, and that this will give rise to intense interstate conflict about combining ecology with equity and economics, and sustainability with justice. So we endeavour to craft rules, guidelines and operational principles for how we divide the Basin’s rivers to ensure the equitable sharing of water in the Murray-Darling Basin. We then find ourselves arguing about the science behind the rules at a time of ecological constraint only to discover that the scientific knowledge of the Basins’ ecological processes is provisional and fragmentary.

As things currently stand the sustainable use of natural resources works within the framework of the assured continuation of existing use: ie. an extensive network of dams, locks and weirs; the view that water is being wasted if it is not dammed; water viewed as a natural resource to be used for human benefit; and ongoing development for the sake of wealth creation. What existing use means is that the role of irrigated agriculture in the Murray-Darling Basin is going to increase and the area under cultivation is going to increase rather than decrease. Existing use means that the public is left with trying to fix up the massive negative effects caused by irrigated agriculture and that no government is going to put up $60 billion over a decade to repair the damage to the landscape that has already been done. Existing use means that increased efficiency in the use of regulated water by irrigators will not return water to the environment. Existing use means government policy is decided in terms of cost benefit analysis and so some areas of the Basin where the salinised water table is a metre or so below the surface (eg., Kerang in northern Victoria) will be left as being beyond repair. So might large tracts of the South Australian region of the Basin.

Now South Australia’s future depends on the cooperation of the basin states and the commonwealth to work towards the common good. This means an entitlement flow for the river: ie. the allocation of water to the environment is given priority over water allocated to irrigation. Yet this historical reversal will be difficult to achieve, since community control over water has all but disappeared. The policies of water privatisation are shifting control of water from governments to water corporations. In arid Adelaide the politicians have acted to ensure that the supply of water is in the hands of foreign-owned corporations in the name of public–private partnerships. This amounts to public assets and goods being privatised.

Water scarcity has become a market opportunity for water corporations to make money by selling more water, and these corporations see water to be a lucrative market. A possible future scenario is that the price of water will go up; the water corporations will insist on a level of profit; water quality will go down; employment in water services will go down; those who cannot pay their water bills will be disconnected; and water-borne diseases will impact on public health. This is a scenario where citizens march against water corporations and governments to repeal water privatisation legislation.

We should not dismiss this version of the water wars as a fanciful scenario constructed by philosophers, or as one that could only take place in Bolivia. We should remember that the current water scarcity in the Murray-Darling Basin is the result of human action. What the scenario does highlight is that control over water implies control over people, and that water privatisation is the preferred instrument of control by governments. If bringing the River Murray back to life means creating equitable and ecologically sustainable water systems, then this may very well require community control over their water resources and democratic collective decision–making. Such a fight for democratic community control over water is currently taking place on Eyre Peninsula in opposition to water authorities that are secretive, closed and elitist.

So when we read about the conflicts and wars that divide states and communities, which range from the Condamine–Balonne in Queensland and the Namoi Valley in New South Wales to the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia, we need to think about who controls the water and how to connect democracy to water. These water conflicts are intensifying, and the destruction of our water resources, forest catchments and aquifers pose intense political challenges for democracy.

We have entered the new world of water politics. Welcome to the 21st century.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:10 AM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)
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» Water politics: ongoing debate from Public Opinion
Despite the recent rains the Murray's mouth remains closed. The river is not a river. It is a series [Read More]

 
Comments

Comments

Gary,
You're doing a kick ass job with this philosophy blog -- really thought provoking writing and nice lay out. Keep up the good work...I'm a reader.

Re: water & philosophy
two interesting books to browse over --
1) The Water issue of Terra Nova (MIT Press)
2) H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness by Ivan Illich

RK

may I direct your attention to an article I authored in "Infinite Energy" magazine on the subject matter of earth-generated water.
I would suggest that this paradigm finds application in what you write here.
would welcome your thoughts. kind regards.