Water- A Victorian Vision, Today’s Reality
Review by Rosamund Aubrey, University of Nottingham
We know the Earth as the blue planet, that beautiful image from space, where we see the majority of our world is water; but we forget that water, our staff of life, is a precious resource. Lord Deben, who gave the second Papplewick lecture, is Chair of the Committee on Climate Change and as John Selwyn Gummer, Secretary of State for the Environment 1993-97, has a distinguished environmental record. He gave an interesting, amusing and challenging lecture with the title, ‘Water: A Victorian Vision, Today’s Reality’. The Victorians, he said, got things done and they had imagination, ‘the rarest of all virtues,’ they were able to imagine great things and achieved them. One achievement was bringing safe, clean drinking water to everyone; it was democratisation, making water available to all. But the Victorians also controlled and Papplewick Pumping Station combined imagination and control. They named and tried to make the world comprehensible, but with that came control including control of natural resources.
Lord Deben challenged our current thinking about water. Is it wrong, he asked, to suggest there may be better ways to make water available to all in a way very different to those imaginative Victorians? And would they provide water in the same way now when we know there is a world shortage of water? He thought not. Only 6% of water is used for human consumption, so why do we supply the other 94% to drinking water quality? We think of water as free, but it is a valuable resource, expensive to clean and distribute. Why do we consider different models are unacceptable, surely making clean, safe water available is a priority without necessarily building a developed world distribution network for example.
Businesses are doing the imaginative thinking on water today; for businesses water is not free and he gave Coca Cola as an example. Executives overlaid a map of where Coke is produced with a map of where there is a shortage of water - and they matched. It used to take 12 litres of water to make a litre of Coke, now it takes one and a half litres. Fifteen years ago, a discussion on water was not acceptable because to suggest that Coke is mainly water meant it was not worth very much. Now the value of water is recognised, both to business efficiency and what water conservations mean to communities, water sustainability takes precedence.
Lord Deben emphasised the respect in which Victorian engineers and scientists were held and compared it to today. He was particularly exercised by public acceptance of climate deniers with no scientific background being given the same credence as those with the expertise and knowledge. He mentioned one such denier who ‘may be an expert in the marital affairs of pheasants, and nothing wrong in that, I shoot and eat pheasants and we shouldn’t shoot things we don’t eat,’ but for this person to be seen to be debating climate change on an equal footing with scientists, was Lord Deben seemed to imply, a failure of society to engage with science. A subject close to the Science, Technology and Society Priority Group’s’ raison d’être.
It was easy to see why he was described as the “best Environment Secretary we’ve ever had” by Friends of the Earth, which welcomed his appointment as Chair of the Committee on Climate Change. Lord Deben saw no reason why those who use a lot of water, for swimming pools for example, should not pay a higher rate for their water use. He emphasised again and again the democratic principle of drinking water for all at an affordable price and challenged us to be imaginative. He also urged his audience to shun the hair shirt of environmentalism. We live in exciting times with possibilities limited by our imagination. Climate change is a challenge, but a challenge to do things differently and make a difference to the many millions who live in poverty without access to clean, safe water.