Water

'EACH PIECE OF LAND TO EACH PIECE OF SKY'

Opportunist despots and capitalists are both creating and exploiting our precarious water situation. They intervene as custodians of the rain that falls out of the skies, attempting to 'supply' a resource which until their appearance was a natural dependence as free as the air.

The rain falls on every part of the Earth (well almost) (1). Where, then, lies the logic in collecting rainfall in huge reservoirs and then returning it to its various points of origin? Evaporation losses are less in a small bore well or storage tank than in a large and relatively shallow reservoir, particularly if the well or tank can be partly sealed to retain a volume of semi-saturated. cold air on the watersurface.

Although the supply system of our munificent Authorities is undoubtedly big, it is unlikely that it is yet sufficiently vast to have any real effect in balancing out local differences between rainfall and demand (2). Which leads us to the crucial question: at what scale does demand become 'unreasonable' in exceeding the natural supply of an area? Megatechnology knows no limits, and seeks out only the maxima in both supply and demand.

Rainfall farming, roof collection of water for home and industry, and all supplies of water from springs, lakes and similar sources as found, all represent a state of abundance and an enviably unhampered hydro-dependency akin to that of the primitive hunter-gatherer, to the small farmer of the humid regions, and now to the builders of `autonomous' houses. Peoples of the tropical rainy and temperate rainy regions are in a mare fortunate position to find or gather water and thus to subvert the hydrocrats. But in arid and semi-arid regions, water-supply is a factor in farming, living, and manufacture which has to be handled in league with many other people, because of scarcity of supply and bulkiness of need.

Local tasks of digging, damming, water-distribution, irrigation, and canal building can be undertaken by a family or group of neighbours `each piece of land to each piece of sky' (3), or (more frequently) they can be undertaken with the superfluous guidance of a hydrobureaucracy. Kropotkin mentions the `syndicate agricoles' or peasants' and farmers' associations of southern France, which were not until 1884 `permitted', as a'dangerous experiment', to combine for the purposes of pumping water, inundating vineyards, and maintaining canals.

Integration of local water into an organic living system-with, for example, a greenhouse-cum-solar still; wind-powered water pumping; fans, or pumps driven by the power of falling water wherever available (from the roof?)-such a system forms a kind of benevolent water-works, and is a key part of the discorporate vision of AT, with which we hope to tempt you from the false convenience of buying municipal water 'on tap' and flushing it down the WC. See Fig 1 for ideas.

A divining rod, when used by a gifted operator, will locate underground sources of water for almost no cost. However the water is obtained it will most likely need some kind of purification if it is to be drunk or used infood preparation. A favourite solution is the solar still, Fig 2. This will distill even brackish water, seawater, or polluted rainfall to produce small quantities of pure water.

Colin Moorcraft suggests that as plants are known to carry out their own water surveys, drill down to water, pump it up and purify it; it might be as well to ally ourselves with them. The solar still was developed from a cloche-like arrangement, , and the use of the right plants as a kind of evapotranspirating wick may be the best solution.

Lifting and moving of water from source to point of use may be most easily carried out if you have a source with head above the pump location and/or flow. A hydraulic ram or a noria wheel, Figs, will raise water with its own power. Wind-powered pumps can be left permanently 'on' to raise water into a tank when the wind is sufficient. Selfregulating water-sprinklers or simple drip-feeds can also be let roll, supplying the greenhouse and garden.

Lest such a direct state of dependence upon nature be alarming, let us consider for a moment the ability of the big Water Authorities to provide an adequate supply of untainted water for developing . industrialism. After the current wave of continental water engineering ends (4), the transition to a gradually globally engineered climate will seem inevitable (5). A possibly precarious water situation for some will have been turned into a perilous subordination to the artificial for all.

Poison rain, putrefying rivers and lakes, and dying seas are inescapable effects and not 'by-products' of the systematic transformation of the material conditions of life. But they are at least temporary setbacks on the road to artificiality-which afford opportunities to big and small alike. In all States industrialists have the ambition (and in Communist countries even the ideological compulsion) to take over everything and invade every phase of life. The prerogative of the State's water authorities is everywhere guarded.

There are secrecy provisions in British law which make disclosure of details of water-polluting manufacturing processes unnecessary. People are prosecuted for non-payment of fishing licences, but toxic effluent from factories accumulates and combines in unknown ways to kill the fish.

The majority of the world's hunters, gatherers, small fishermen, and rainfall farmers have found their proud self-sufficiency gradually eaten away. Pessimists will see no obvious reason why the Alternative Technologist's vision of 'autonomy' (not that 'autonomy' in its extreme forms is a particularly worthwhile ideal) should survive the onslaught of totalitarian technocracy, merely by boldly asserting its own separationism. But this site has not been produced in the belief that Nothing Can Be Done.

REFERENCES

(1) A certain area of the Chilean desert has not received rain for over 400 years. The other global extreme in watery precipitation is over 23 metres annually. Evaporation exceeds rainfall only in midsummer in Britain, whereas in Algeria the evaporation:rainfall ratio is 59:1.

(2) With minor exceptions such as the towing of icebergs from Greenland into the Caribbean, the scale of Big supply systems for cities and -industries is insignificant compared to climatic regions. 150 kilometres is a maximum distance for water supply of capital cities. The supply-demand argument doesn't hold water.

(3) This phrase is credited to the revisionist line of anarchist renegade Liu Shao-chi.

(4) There are Russian proposals for damming and reversing the flow of some of their largest rivers, with consequent alteration in the Siberian climate. By comparison the British Water Resources Board's projects for barrages across the Wash and the Solway and the oblitreation of the Lake District look quite mild.

(5) Borisov'Can We Control the Arctic Climate', Science and Public Affairs, March 1969.