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I stumbled across this car parking stand-off in Calton. The cars are parked behind an apartment block. The laminated note attached to the toy car reads:

"DO NOT REMOVE. This is the property of unit one. We pay rent for this carpark and thus shall utilize it for whatever vehicle we see fit".
Classic.

Mind you, when it comes to sustainability I guess the space occupied by car parking is often hotly contested. The battle lines are drawn a little like this:

Trees + bikes + pedestrian friendliness & walkability + safety
vs
car parking spaces

Sometimes we have to choose between a street tree or a car parking space. Of course trees provide obvious environmental benefits; they reduce green house gases, filter pollution in the air, and reduce the amount of heating in summer. A car parking space on the other hand is probably never going to contribute much to sustainable suburbs - although whether providing a car park is actively 'bad' depends on how many of them are available. If you provide 'enough' car parking spaces, then by definition you're facilitating the use of the private cars; the easier it is to get a park, the more likely you are to drive and the less likely you are to use public transport. But by strictly limiting the amount of parking available then you can begin to tip the balance the other way.

At other times we have to choose between having a row of parking or a dedicated bike lane. You can guess which one of those two options wins out in the green stakes.

Christopher Alexander suggests that no more than 9% of any neighbourhood or development should be given over to parking. He recommends this partly to reduce the amount of traffic (and encourage pedestrian life and public transport use), but also because higher concentrations of parking (on ground level) tend to have a negative affect on the urban fabric. Walking through big expanses of parking is nowhere near as pleasant an urban experience as walking past a row of shops, or along a leafy footpath. And it's no coincidence that on TV the bad guy is always shown kidnapping innocents in the car park as they're walking to their car...big car parks feel exposed, dangerous,
and alienating.

At the moment all the fresh drinking water we use to shower in and to do our laundry is going straight down the drain after a single use. On top of that, most of us are using more fresh drinking water to water our gardens.

This is a shame - because treating greywater on a neighbourhood scale is pretty straightforward - in principle at least.

Possible 'footprint' of an integrated water treatment system. The vertical green line is a stormwater treatment swale. The green rectangle marks a possible location for a grey water treatment system, while the larger pinkish square shows where a blackwater system (and wormfarm) could go.

Click to see images larger

Here's a plan showing a possible integrated blackwater, greywater and stormwater treatment system. I’ll run over the possibilities for greywater now, and cover blackwater and stormwater in later posts.

There's a lot of greywater capturing & storage devices out there which individual households can use for their own gardens. Because the greywater isn't processed, each household would have to manage their choice of laundry and toiletry products so that the water was suitable for their garden, or else use the unprocessed greywater on ornament plants which are tolerant of the salts and chemicals it contains. Subsurface delivery systems are recommended (less health risk).

But if we think on a larger scale we can do a lot more with our greywater. We could divert the water we use for washing from entering the main sewerage system and have it carried from our laundry and showers by underground pipes to a series of reed beds housed in a greenhouse located in the existing community garden area.

This reed bed will be capable of processing our greywater, regardless of products used in it, to a level where it is safe for use on all plants (including edible plants). Strictly speaking it would be potable, but the recommendation is that you use this kind of water for everything except drinking.

This wouldn't be a cheap intervention, and I imagine the main cost would be in upgrading the existing sewage infrastructure. Of course it depends on who is paying the bill. If we cover the cost as residents, then it will probably take a long time before it pays for itself (assuming water stays as cheap as it is) - but if state government decided to invest in the local treatment and recycling of our water then it would have the benefit of helping to relieve the pressure and cost of maintaining and upgrading our major centralised infrastructure, and maybe then it's not such a bad deal.

In terms of infrastucture the most complicated aspect would probably be setting up the plumbing to capture the greywater in individual houses - some houses in our neighbourhood have suspended timber floors and would be pretty straightforward, but others would be quite difficult. Digging down to the existing sewage and running an greywater pipe alongside wouldn't be technically difficult, but would require a significant amount of earth works.

So what are the benefits of having a greywater treatment system? Well, we'd reduce the amount of drinking water we use for watering the garden (and possibly, for flushing our toilets) which would in turn reduce the pressure on the existing infrastructure, and it would be easier to keep our gardens and street tree's alive in summer. And we'd also reduce the amount of water entering the sewage system, with flow on benefits to existing treatment systems, and the amount of water entering the bay.

Possible location of greenhouse housing reed beds

Precedent: Image below is of a 'Living machines'; a type of biological treatment systems based on the processes of wetlands which are housed in greenhouses, and can be used in small urban areas.

Outside view, and reed beds inside a 'Living machine'

Public Enemy Number One

Do you ever wonder if it might be easier to generate the sort of massive changes we need to make to our lifestyles if we were engaged in some kind of war or a pitched battle?

The problem is that when it comes to environmental issues there really is no enemy. We can direct our aggression to a few amorphous corporate entities, and maybe people who drive massive 4x4 SUV’s if you're so inclined. But really, the actual enemy is ourselves.

This poses a dilemma because we’re really not good at coping with the ‘enemy within’. The enemy which is us.

Improving our sustainability is more like going on a diet than it is like going to war, and we all know how successful the average diet is.

We’re simply better at initiating changes to our attitudes and lifestyles when we’re at war – which is probably why we try to cast problems into that mould even when it’s completely counter productive to do so, perhaps we create the war against drugs, or attack Iran and Afghanistan as part of a war against ‘terrorism’ because that's the only way we know how to respond.

So anyway. Good news. I think I found someone who can be our scapegoat...our environmental bogey-man.

I’ve been reading Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything” – fascinating and entertaining in equal measures – and he recounts the story of an engineer come chemist called Thomas Midgley Jr.

Thomas Midgley Jr. is the devil. Except he's not really. He's just a scientist with few scruples who was well respected by many in his day, and that is what makes this sorry tale so scary.

If you ever get a chance to borrow a time-machine to travel backwards in history in order to ensure someone is never born, consider visiting Mr and Mrs Thomas Midgley Sr.

Thomas Midgley Sr. was an inventor, and his son Thomas Midgley Jr. initially trained as an engineer, but eventually took after his father to become an inventor as well.

The first problem Midgley turned his attention to was engine knock and associated fuel efficiency. His unfortunate solution was to add a lead solution to the fuel (tetra-ethyl lead or TEL). There were less toxic solutions available which he discovered at the same time, but lead was the cheapest, had the least offensive odour and was the most efficient, so Midgley ran with it. And the evidence indicates that he ran with it while being fully aware of the toxic affects of lead in the atmosphere and in the human body.

People started dying almost immediately from the affects of his innovation. By the mid 1920’s more than 40 factory workers who produced the lead fortified fuel for Ethyl (the corporation who produced the product) were dead or deranged. The Ethyl factory in Deepwater was nicknamed the 'House of Butterflies’ by the workers because of the hallucinations they experienced while working there.

Midgley’s crime is that he knowingly introduced a "creeping and malicious poison" into the environment, and also that he then deliberately assisted in the large scale corporate cover up which followed for the next 50-60 years.

TEL is still being produced, although we stopped adding it to fuel in the 1980’s. Of course we’re stuck with the lead; which is now in the atmosphere forever.

So just in case you think that’s not enough to earn Midgley some kind of serious enemy-of-the-planet status – just wait, there’s more...

The second problem Midgley addressed was the serious one of poisonous gases leaking from early refrigerators.

“Midgley set out to create a gas that was stable, nonflammable, noncorrosive, and safe to breathe. With an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny, he invented chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs.”

So first he flooded the atmosphere with lead, then created the ultimate ozone annihilator. The man was a planet killer!

A postscipt: In case you'd prefer a hero to inspire rather than someone to revile - there's no shortage of those, and we could do worse than to look to a man called Clair Patterson. Patterson discovered a method of measuring lead in the atmosphere and then sacrificed his career by carrying out a courageous long term campaign against Ethyl and other large lead producing corporations. It is largely due to his efforts that lead was finally banned from food containers and fuel in the 70's and 80's.

...

For the first time in my life I saw the horizon as a curved line. It was accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light—our atmosphere. Obviously this was not the ocean of air I had been told it was so many times in my life. I was terrified by its fragile appearance.

Ulf Merbold
German astronaut

Monday was the first day of spring here.

I celebrated by biking around in the sunshine with my daughter, doing an informal playground tour, and chatting happily to people we met about the weather.


And today is another beautiful spring day. Walking around in a t-shirt (maybe being a little over confident of the sun) I found myself thinking about how today was the perfect day to go hunting for Easter eggs. But of course we don't do Easter in spring here - we do it in Autumn just as the weather is getting grimmer and the winter winds are starting.

It's crazy stuff, after all Eostre was the goddess of spring, and the Christian celebration is supposed to be about rebirth. On the first warm spring days like today I feel like celebrating all those things - but in March/April - it's all academic.

And our Christmas is even more ridiculous. Christmas is a profoundly wintery event: It’s holly, puddings, candles, yule logs and all those reworkings of pre-Christian Winter solstice celebrations (Yule, Natalis Solis Invicti, Saturnalia).

And all these things are beautiful on the coldest, shortest, darkest day of the year…Christmas is supposed to be a little twinkling light in a dark cold place.

But we celebrate it right in the middle of summer. Hot turkey dinners, sweaty tinsel and fake snow in the heat and dust. It’s a little sad...we should be dancing around maypoles instead.

Melbournes seasons, based on writing of Dr. Beth Gott of the School of Biological Sciences, Monash University.
Click image to see larger


I'm not saying we should do the whole Christmas in July thing- but I think it's a shame. It's a shame because when we have a beautiful spring day like today - we have no way of celebrating it.

And I also wonder whether this serves to increase our sense of disconnection from the landscape and the ecological systems that we exist within.

When the people who established the city of Melbourne arrived, they bought with them the Roman calendar, their northern celebrations, and a year which is divided into four seasons - along with their ideas about the landscape and how it works. Those of us who still live here have inherited all of these things.

How many of us still think of winter as a time of dormancy, and summer as a time of growth and life, rather than something closer to the opposite? Or else think of wild fire as a purely destructive force, rather than a process which brings life and regeneration, without which many fragile ecosystems would die?

The Wurundjeri people certainly didn't have a 4 season calendar; they based their seasons on the local weather conditions, and the behaviour of plants and animals. I've drawn up a (possible/approximate) Wurundjeri calendar above, alongside the traditional Roman seasons, and a seasonal calendar created by researches looking at the climate and ecosystem of the Upper Yarra. Makes for interesting comparison.

Would we be less disconnected from our environment if we had seasons that were more responsive to the local ecosystem? What would happen if we didn't think about the seasons as Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter - but as something like Pre-spring, True Spring, High Summer, Dry Summer (Old man summer), Autumn and Winter?

And if, instead of being fixed to the climatic conditions of far off European landscapes, those six seasons were linked to the markers of actual seasonal changes as they happen here - like summer grasses flowering, the appearance of kangaroo apples or of tadpoles spawning in the Yarra?

(images on right: Chocolate bilby (the local easter bunny), and Christmas on Bondi Beach)

I've been reading about these bioregional thinking questions – adapted by Bill Devall and George Sessions in their book Deep Ecology. It's an interesting test to do on yourself - I can't answer more than half - which is a bit depressing. I tested Adrian (my partner), and he did quite well actually. Anyway, good luck, let me know how you go...

1. Trace the water you drink from precipitation to tap.

2. How many days till the moon is full? (Plus or minus a couple of days.)

3. Describe the soil around your home

4. From what direction do winter storms generally come in your region?

5. Where does your garbage go?

6. How long is the growing season where you live?

7. Name five resident birds and any migratory birds in your area.

8. What primary geological event process influenced the land form where you live?

9. From where you are reading this, point north.

10. Were the stars out last night?

Maybe these questions (and the answers) could be turned into a billboard, or artwork in our neighbourhood.