How does plastic get in the ocean?

You’ve probably heard about all the plastic swirling around in the ocean, especially in the North Pacific. Did you ever wonder how it all gets there?

I did! It’s not like we make trips to the beach just to chuck our plastic in the water, but it ends up there anyway. The Keep Australia Beautiful group know how it happens, and decided to show us in a creative way instead of giving us a lecture.

This 2:30 minute video shows what happened in Sydney and Brisbane when KAB played ocean animal sounds from the places where our litter gets into our waterways.

What do you think? I like that the campaign draws the connection between our drains and the ocean, making the relationship really clear. I’ve seen pictures of fish painted on the footpaths leading to drains before, but apart from a few curious children I’ve never seen anyone pay attention to them.

Science ignored for the sake of the irrigators

I had a post drafted about the latest news about the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, but it turns out that Ben Eltham’s written a better one over at New Matilda. So you should all go over and read that instead

Real Lives, Real Votes – But Not Real Science covers recent events like the decision to only buy back 2,800 gigalitres instead of the minimum 4,000 needed, and the Wentworth Scientists group walking out of the process. Eltham also tells how things got to this stage, so if you haven’t been keeping up with the issue it’s a great summary.

It bugs me that the irrigators are saying that science shouldn’t be the deciding factor in what to do with the Basin. How else can you get a rational decision if you’re not willing to use basic mathematics? X amount of rain minus Y amount of irrigation minus Z amount of other uses equals… not enough for Adelaide to drink. I know there are a lot of regional towns relying on the farming industry, but how can they live with the decision to leave other people without fresh water?

Anyway, Eltham puts it better than I can. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Blog Action Day 2010: Water

Main Creek, near Euston, courtesy of the MDBA website

Every year I join in on Blog Action Day, where bloggers from around the world all focus on one topic for a day. This year the topic is Water. The issues surrounding water use around the globe are very familiar to Go Greener readers – ocean acidification, overfishing, drought and climate change. Today I want to look at just one local aspect of this.

This week the Murray-Darling Basin is in the news. It’s Australia’s largest river system, with an average of 24,000 gigalitres of water travelling through it each year. It’s truly an amazing ecosystem:

• Starting in Queensland and travelling 3,375km to South Australia, the rivers form lakes and wetlands, recharge groundwater supplies, and refresh estuary environments.
• The basin area covers 1,061,469 km² of land, and is home to hundreds of native species of plants and animals. They rely on the river’s seasonal flows to breed and flourish.
• The basin is also Australia’s food bowl – it provides over one-third of Australia’s food supply! The wide range of environments means that it’s used for grazing livestock, wine regions, fruit, vegetables, grain crops, and cotton.
• It’s also home to 2 million Australians – that’s nearly 10% of us. Everyone there relies on the river system: for drinking water, cleaning water, for their jobs and for their future.

We are so dependent on it for every aspect of our lives.

But we don’t show it any respect. Less than half of the waterflow makes it to the end of the river, because we drain it so heavily. We’ve let carp push native species out of their homes. We’ve let the river get salty and filled it with runoff chemicals that cause enormous algal blooms.

If we don’t learn to take care of this precious resource, we’re the ones who will suffer for it. Our farmlands will be ruined and unusable, there won’t be any wildlife to enjoy, and no-one will be able to live there anymore.

The Murray-Darling Basin Plan is a start. It’s based on the science of what can be sustainably taken from the river, and what needs to be done to restore it to it’s former glory. I know there are farmers who are deeply unhappy with it. It’s going to be extremely hard for them to change their methods and in some cases give up their land. But we can’t continue to just take from the land and water the way we have been. We have to give something back to nature, to replenish it and make it last into the future.

It’s about the hard numbers and facts: 24,000 gigalitres can only be made to stretch so far. If we use it all for irrigation, what’s left to drink? Or if we drink it all, how will we water our crops? How will we preserve our wildlife? Water is in limited supply, and we have to be wise about how we use it as our population increases.

I hope that our farmers can consider more than their crucial role in Australia’s food supply, and see their place in the wider eco-system of the Murray-Darling Region. Hopefully they will not only support the plan, but come up with ways to make it better for their children and grandchildren. By sustaining the river system, they sustain us all.

Plantation toxins in Tasmania

A scene from Something In The Water

Did anyone else watch Australian Story on Monday night? It was about an alliance between a GP, a group of oyster farmers and a Sydney scientist, investigating water quality issues in Tasmania’s George River.

The oyster farmers found that their business was suffering because of toxins in the water. A local GP believes there is a cancer cluster in the region her patients are from. And they got together with a scientist from Sydney to try to find out if there was any evidence for what they suspected.

The toxin problem in the water has been traced back to eucalypt plantations along the George River. Now the group of locals want further testing to confirm what’s going on.

You can see the episode online for a while at the Australian Story website: Something in the Water Part 1, and Part 2. I’m sure it will also be shown on ABC’s iView website as well, but the Australian Story site has extra information and interviews that weren’t able to be included in the show.

Because of the tv show, the issue has now been picked up by newspapers like The Mercury and The Australian.

Naturally, the Tasmanian government is denying that there’s any problem. This is the same government that let Gunns rewrite state national parks legislation to allow logging, so I can’t say I’m shocked that they’d instantly move to protect any part of the forestry industry.

As Dr Bleaney says,

Dr Bleaney says she wants further testing of the water supply to be able to make firm conclusions. “We’re not saying we actually have absolute proof of what’s going on,” she said. “We’re actually saying that this needs to be investigated and it needs to be looked at very carefully.”

Toxic drinking water is worth investigating. It remains to be seen if Tasmania’s government is impartial enough to actually conduct a scientific review of the situation, or take any action on it if a problem is found.

I don’t own an umbrella anymore

When I was a kid I used to get rained on all the time. I caught the train home from school, and had a 15 minute walk back from the station to my house. During winter this meant getting rained on at least once a week or sometimes more often.

As an adult I rarely get rained on – I don’t even own an umbrella or raincoat, although I do have a couple of water-resistant jackets that take a long time to soak through if I get caught in a downpour. I still catch the train home, from work instead of school. But I figured it was just a kind of childhood nostalgia that made me think I frequently had so much fun jumping in puddles.

Until I saw this graph. It’s of the average yearly inflow to dams here in Perth, going back to 1911.

Perth yearly dam inflow. Photo credit: Water Corporation, Options for our Water Future report

This is mostly coming from rainfall. My first thought was how much a difference there is between 2007 and the early parts of the 20th century, and how much more variation there used to be between a good year and a bad year for water. Now our bad years are still the same, but our good years don’t compare at all.

My second thought was “Yeah, I did get rained on more when I was a kid”. About 48% more, which is how much (on average, not for a specific year)  rainfall has dropped here since the 80s.

And yet our water restrictions in Perth aren’t anywhere near as severe as they are in the eastern states. It might be time to really think about where our water is coming from, and if we have enough to go around.