Earth Day 2024: and a little video on water

Today, 22 April, is Earth Day, which reminded me that I haven't written a green blog in a while. In the last few years, we all seemed to be abandoning blogs and focusing on other online platforms for sharing news and ideas. But then Man-Baby from Pretoria bought Twitter and promptly broke his new toy, Substack gave Nazis a megaphone, Meta hasn't been much better, Google has gone to the dogs* (not really fair to dogs), and now we have AI content scrapers to contend with as well. So back to blogging. (Plus where else can I put the weird and wonderful stuff I find? Such as: the item of clothing you need to keep mending for as long as possible? Your BRA. Almost unrecyclable, and also hard to repurpose or donate. Topic for another day.)

I’ve indeed been keeping an alarmed eye on environmental news, especially the slow-moving but catastrophic implosion of Gauteng's water services. I suspect it might be time to update my water book (can you believe it's exactly six years since it was first published?) and tune it to the context up north: the Rand is running dry, and its citizens are going to need every trick in the Capetonian book (ha) in the very near future. Let me know if you think this is a good idea, and I might do a new e-book edition of the original, which is available online through that jungle place.

The research is once again the stuff of dystopian nightmare, but for all the bad news, there’s this: in future projections by Spain and other dry Mediterannean countries, it’s estimated that 20% of water savings can be made through “behavorial changes by citizens”, i.e., individuals. And that would be US. Twenty per cent is NOT insignificant.

And then I remembered an adventure I had over Christmas: to mark World Water Day, Brita (the water filter people) sent a documentary film-maker out from Germany, and together with a most delightful local crew, they made a little video about me and my book. So I thought I’d share it to give you a few ideas about how to be among those saving up to 20% of our stressed water reserves.

Water Warrior