In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods, to the podcast where we believe that another world is still possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for that future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I’m Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And if you have listened to this podcast for any length of time, you will know by now that I believe the way forward is predicated on our finding shared values. I would go with integrity, compassion, courage and generosity of spirit as our baselines and then agreeing on a suite of clear asks in the outer world and undertaking three levels of healing in the inner world. In logistical terms, that’s the outer work, I think the absolute baselines are clean air, clean water and clean soil. These should be non-negotiable, and the fact that we currently have none of them is a really grim indictment of how much we live in an economy that sucks the life out of everything, rather than in a society that grows with everybody’s flourishing at heart. But we do have people who are working flat out to change the narrative on exactly these topics. And this week’s guest is an absolute superstar in this firmament. Tim Smedley is an award winning sustainability journalist who has worked with the BBC, The Guardian, The Sunday Times and Financial Times. He is also a celebrated non-fiction writer. His first book, Clearing the Air; The Beginning and the End of Air Pollution, was shortlisted for the UK’s Royal Society Science Book Prize. And his latest, The Last Drop; Solving the World’s Water Crisis, was a Times Book of the year and has been described as smart, sobering and scholarly, which it absolutely is.

Manda: This is one of those books that’s both terrifying, utterly compelling, and, I am so glad to say, ultimately inspiring. Because yes, the world’s water is in a desperate state. And yes, it has been horribly mismanaged almost everywhere by the kleptocracy that masquerades as a democracy in our modern world. But yes, we do have responses that will work. They have been carefully explored, and water is one of these unifying elements that brings people together across tribal boundaries. We all need clean water, and getting there means we need to find common principles by which we can all live together. And spoiler alert: turning water into a for profit commodity is not a part of the solution. Regenerative agriculture, rewilding our waters, bringing in beavers (yay!) and sane water saving and sparing practices definitely are. So this is right up our podcast street. Tim is so knowledgeable and his books are both brilliantly researched and utterly personal. He goes to the places he writes about, and his firsthand experiences are beautifully recorded and will last with you forever. I have put links in the show notes for both of his books, plus the Medium article on degrowth, which is where I first came across his work. So please do go and explore all of these. You will be glad you did.

Manda: And then here at the end, because apparently quite a lot of you don’t listen right through to the end of the outro, this is a reminder that we’re holding an online gathering within Accidental Gods on the 6th of July, entitled Becoming a Good Ancestor. It’s from 4:00 till 8:00 UK time. That’s British summertime. And you do not have to be a member of the Accidental Gods community to come along. You also don’t have to have been to any of our previous gatherings. We’ll explore what it means to be a good ancestor. My ideas of values and clear asks, and the inner and the outer work will be part of it. But you will have a lot of time to do reflective work alone and in breakout rooms. I might record it, but I very likely won’t, because these things tend to be very personal and I want it to be contained for the people who are there. So if you want to come and explore what it means to you to be a good ancestor, then sign up for the zoom link. I will put a link in the show notes. So here we go, exploring what it will take for us to get to the clean water part of our three outer asks; people of the podcast, please do welcome Tim Smedley, author of The Last Drop; Solving the World’s Water Crisis.

Manda: Tim Smedley, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you as we step into June and yet more sun?

Tim: Hi Manda, yes, lovely to be here. Thanks for having me on. I’m okay. Start of school today. Just had a half term. I’m in Oxfordshire. And yeah, it’s sunny and dry and has been sunny and dry for seemingly the last 2 or 3 months. So in a way, I can’t complain; that’s nice weather to spend with the children, but also kind of concerning weather, which I’m sure we will get on to as we chat.

Manda: We will, because you published an article in Prospect magazine in the middle of half term, as far as I can tell. I guess you wrote it beforehand, entitled ‘Why Isn’t It Raining? One statistic helps us understand climate change and why we are lurching from droughts to floods to droughts again’. And it follows on absolutely from The Last Drop; Solving The World’s Water Crisis, which I encourage everyone to read, although it will probably end up with you having considerably fewer showers and washing up very differently to what you did before. I thought I knew about water and I am working very hard to minimise my water use now. So talk to us. Talk to us about the Prospect article first because that’s going to be top of your brain, and then we’ll edge out into the overall world water crisis and how it interchanges. Because I first came to you through an article on Medium on degrowth, and it seems to me that everything is everything else, and water is a useful metaphor for our entire non-functional system. So talk to us about Prospect first.

Tim: Yeah. And to be clear, I did write in half term. Sadly, I was having to work through most of half term. But it was an article I’d wanted to write for a while, because there is a particular statistic that kind of explains what’s going on with our current weather system and our changing water cycle, essentially. Which is that for every one degree rise in global mean temperature, you get a 7% rise in humidity in the atmosphere. So 7% more humidity held in the atmosphere for every one degree rise in temperature. In a way, it’s quite simple to understand if you picture the images of the water cycle we were all taught at school. You see the evaporation coming up from the sea, with the heat from the sun. Also evaporation coming up from the soils with the heat from the sun. So it’s kind of quite easy to understand that more heat equals more evaporation and that’s exactly what we’re seeing. And we also now know that since pre-industrial times our temperature has increased by about 1.5 degrees already. There’s still some debate about whether we have exceeded the Paris threshold of 1.5 degrees. I’m sure that debate will be boringly talked about for the next couple of years, but essentially we’re very much on track to have exceeded it, if not we have already. We’re basically on 1.5 degrees now.

Manda: Yes. And even if we zeroed all the CO2 tomorrow, which can’t happen, we would still do it because there’s a lot of lag in the system. So we are heading for way over 1.5 degrees, which, if I’m doing my arithmetic right, means at least 10% increase in humidity, which must be huge.

Tim: Yes. So essentially we are now at a 10% increase in humidity compared to where we were at at the end of the 19th century. So that increased humidity means longer dry periods, because of that increased evaporation from the soil. So we have longer, drier droughts. But then when the rain does fall, we have more intense rainfall, which leads to flooding. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing now, a yo yoing between flood and drought. So constant 100 year record tumbling of once in a century floods followed by once in a century droughts. That’s what we’re seeing. The reporting hasn’t caught up with that yet because it’s no longer once in a century. So I mentioned in the Prospect article, I mean, I’m writing partly based on experiences here in Oxfordshire. Oxfordshire had its wettest ever months last year. Now some of its driest ever. But it was interesting to see exactly the same happening in New South Wales in the last couple of weeks. New South Wales have just had horrific flooding; 400mm of rainfall happening in 2 or 3 days. That’s close to their average annual rainfall in New South Wales. So imagine a year’s worth of rainfall falling in under a week.

Tim: That’s just happened in New South Wales. So obviously the inevitable happens there, you get awful floods. But again, it was reported not just in international press but also in some domestic press in Australia as unprecedented and once in 100 year floods. But exactly the same happened in 2021. So this this same decade, four years ago, New South Wales was hit by 400mm of rainfall and horrific flooding. So we are having to change our thinking very rapidly about what is normal in terms of climate, in terms of rainfall. And I do think that particular stat is a way of cutting through all of that and understanding it. We have more humidity in the atmosphere that leads to more intense rainfall. And we are yo yoing all around the world, whether it’s Britain or Australia or pick any country really that you care to name. Every country that I went to for the book for The Last Drop was experiencing the same thing. Longer dry periods followed by more intense rainfall and flooding. That is, and I hate the phrase, but that is the new normal. And that’s what we have to contend with and adapt to.

Manda: Okay. And yet, it seems to me there’s a lot of our current crisis is a crisis of narrative. And while the global hegemonic narrative is going, oh, this is unusual, this is a once in a century thing, even although it happened four years ago. So they’re not capable of joining the dots over a span of four years. Then the response to it is never going to be enough, because we’re not saying this is baked in, this is going to get worse. And with droughts, we’ve got wildfires, obviously, and a massive reduction in our capacity to grow the food that we actually need, particularly if we stay with industrial agriculture, which is strip mining the soil and incredibly reducing the capacity of the soil to hold water. With your Prospect article, did you get any uptake from the legacy media who might actually want someone to go, guys, this is not unusual. This is the new normal. And I think that’s one of those phrases, they always say to politicians you have to get to the point where you’re sick of saying whatever it is, and it will finally be landing with the people that it needs to land with. So we’re going to have to be saying the new normal until we are dreaming it and cursing ourselves, and then it might land with the people who still think that doing a bit more recycling and and perhaps buying an electric car eventually is going to be enough. When quite clearly we need total systemic change. So tell me a little bit; you were a journalist with the BBC, you’re now freelance trying to change the narrative. How are you getting on with changing the narrative? And then we’ll go back to actual water data.

Tim: Yeah, it’s a really nice question. And so my background has been freelance for a long time actually. So I freelanced for the BBC as well as for The Guardian and for the Sunday Times, Financial Times.

Manda: Okay.

Tim: I started out as a business journalist, but then transitioned as soon as I could to writing about the environment and climate. But I’ve been writing about environment and climate issues for, well, I suppose at least 15 years, maybe 20 years. And for reasonably large mainstream publications. But it wasn’t until I started writing books, actually, that I really found that maybe I was gaining some traction. I think people’s interaction with books is different to people’s interactions with articles. Articles are relatively. You read the headline, maybe the first couple of paragraphs, maybe more if you have time. But books, you’re giving over a certain amount of your time and energy over a number of days, weeks, months even.

Manda: Yes. And you’re getting a big coherent narrative. Whereas with an article, it’s bookended by adverts for cruises and people telling you how to save better for your next new house and all of the business as usual bollocks (I think I’m allowed to say that on the podcast?) and so it’s instantly diluted. Whereas I read quite fast and it still took me quite a long time to read The Last Drop and Clearing the Air. Partly because there’s so much in there that I had to just go away and let it land and sink in. Just basic stats, like your question of which of the Australian national state capitals has more rainfall than London. And you said, I think, Sydney. And the answer was no, all of them. Which just blew all the fuses in my head; I had to go away and kind of go for a walk up the hill and and think, oh my goodness, that just threw everything out of my head. Anyway. All right. So people take more notice of books, which is good, but probably fewer people read a book than read articles in the Guardian. I’m very interested that you were with The Guardian and BBC and the Financial Times, so slightly to the left of centre and quite a long way to the right of centre. Were they allowing you to write the same things?

Tim: They were, in fairness. I mean my Sunday Times and Financial Times ones was when I was a bit more junior. But yeah, I would say I’ve never really felt leaned on to take a particular angle or narrative. Maybe I’m being naive in saying that. Maybe that comes more subliminally than you realise, but mostly I would say I was allowed to write the same things. Yeah.

Manda: Are any of them interested in your concepts on De-growth? We will get to that eventually.

Tim: Well, I’ve come to degrowth later in life. I did first write about degrowth for the BBC, so it was a BBC article. It wasn’t squarely on degrowth, it was on changes in kind of work life balance in the working week and could a four day week work for people. And then that led me to degrowth.

Manda: Right. Interesting.

Tim: But I did very much cover degrowth in that article. So, yeah, I mean, the BBC is a broad church, isn’t it? I think you can find almost anything you want in the BBC.

Manda: Yes, yes. Frankie Boyle, I think, who said we think of the BBC as one monolith that is against us, and actually it’s a federation of warring states, and some of those warring states are on our side. And that helped me to hate the BBC less, I have to say. So okay, but let’s head back into water because there is so much to unpick here. I am guessing you’ve done this often enough that you’ve probably got an elevator pitch on, first of all, we’re swinging on the pendulum from drought to flood to drought; we’re not managing either of them very well. Tell us a little bit of edited highlights of what you found around the world. And then more, I would like to look at the solution set that exists if we were able to get the narrative that told us this is what we needed to do.

Tim: Yeah, okay. And I could go on for a very long time on this. So do put your hand up and stop me.

Manda: That’s fine.

Tim: Yeah. The elevator pitch. We’ve covered some of it, which is the changing water cycle and climate change, making all of our problems far harder with water. The flip side of that is that a lot of the problems were of our own making with water. So water demand has increased 600% in the last 100 years. We are using far more water than we need to. Also far more than we ever have. A lot of that has been due to agriculture. And you mentioned the industrial agriculture has really changed everything with our water use. So globally, 70% of water use is agricultural, but much of that is very modern. So we didn’t really irrigate until last century. Now irrigation is huge and a lot of that is directly into aquifers, through boreholes that are drilled deeper than we ever had the capacity to until 100 or so years ago. Also, our attitude to water engineering and water management is again very much built on Victorian foundations of denaturalising our water system. So I think 12 million acres of British land were drained in the Victorian era to make way for agriculture. And many hundreds of miles, thousands of miles of rivers were straightened, dredged and canalised to make way again for agriculture. Draining of floodplains, but also some for transport and so on. But essentially we moved away from a natural water system to a completely grey engineered water system, with canalised rivers, with concrete bowls of reservoirs at the end of them and effectively no floodplains anymore.

Tim: So we used to have, every river would be bordered by floodplain meadow, many of these used for common grazing. They were often some of the best commons grazing ground in the country, with amazing wildflowers with medicinal properties, but these were drained and given over to agriculture. So we disconnected our rivers from the floodplains, which disconnects them from the aquifers beneath our feet, the groundwater beneath our feet. But it felt like that could work. And maybe it did work until the mid-20th century, when we had a smaller population, rainfall was more predictable because we didn’t have the climate change we’ve had since. But I think it was always a problem in the making. It was a ticking time bomb, really, in terms of once demand starts going up and once there’s a slight change in rainfall predictability, you’ve no longer got the natural system to give you that water. So up to about the 1970s, we just went through the creating more and more concrete bowls of reservoirs. And I’m talking here about the UK, but I could be talking about many other countries or even most other countries in the world.

Manda: Yeah. Yeah. And we put in dams across rivers. I mean, not so much in the UK, but obviously around the world. The Hoover Dam, big dams in China, big dams in Africa. We just took a river and slammed some concrete, a lot of concrete on it, and completely changed the ecosystem in the whole area in order to have a supply of water and perhaps some hydroelectric.

Tim: Yes. And that was the prevailing thinking. And yeah, I went to visit some of these mega dams. I went to see the Hoover Dam. And that’s an incredible one in terms of explaining really where we’re at, why we got there and what’s going to happen next. Because the Hoover Dam, for people that don’t know, is damming the Colorado River, creating Lake Mead, which is the largest reservoir in America. It provides water to some 40 million people. It’s also pretty close to the major agricultural areas of California. But anyway, again, the Hoover Dam, Lake Mead was last full around the year 2000. So there’s kind of every reason for maybe thinking right through to the end of the 20th century that this is a working model, this was okay. That the Rocky Mountains provided the snow cap that would melt, go down the Colorado River, fill up Lake Mead, and then you can do with it what you want. And doing with it what you want mostly means irrigation for agriculture. There is also a domestic use problem that we could get onto. Americans use a lot of water, basically, for their home as well as for their gardens. An amazing stat: lawn, the number one irrigated crop in America.

Manda: Which could change overnight. Doug Tallamy has this idea of the Home-grown National Park, because it’s not just it’s the main irrigation.  If you added up all the lawns, it’s more than all the national parks put together. And that was before Trump decided national parks were free game for industry. And if they were all allowed to just grow native species and not be like a bowling green, it would massively change the whole biome of the state and you wouldn’t have to keep irrigating it. But anyway, it feels a little bit like BP creating the carbon footprint of let’s get everyone to worry about their personal water and then they won’t be worrying about industrial water. But even so, it is something we could all change. So let’s get on to that later. But your visit to Lake Mead was mind blowing, in terms of the last time it was actually full was before some of the listeners of this podcast were born. And tell us what you found.

Tim: Yes. The last time it was full was in the year 2000. It’s been going down ever since by metres a year. So when I visited in 2021, and the stat in the book is that the decline since then is 43m. You could fit Lady Liberty of the Statue of Liberty in 43m, that’s how big a drop it is. I just checked before this call, because I knew we’d probably get on to it, to see what it is now. It’s now a further 20m down, talking 2025. So now 63m.

Manda: And they’re building roads and they can’t build the road fast enough to keep up with the water level dropping to let people go and play on the last remaining sludge of water. It’s astonishing.

Tim: Yeah. It’s kind of a sad sight because it used to be a real kind of a playground for Las Vegas. So people would go and take their boats there and have big boating harbours. But most of that’s gone because whole islands have appeared where there used to be water. And yeah, the roads they built going down to the water level to take your boats, as you say, they literally can’t build them fast enough now to keep up with the declining water level. But that’s more a way of just being able to envision what’s happening there. No one’s going to really weep for the Las Vegas pleasure boaters no longer having their playground.

Manda: No.

Tim: But it does give an image of how quick that change has happened.

Manda: And the incapacity of people to think forward, because they were literally spending billions building a road to nowhere, instead of engaging with the fact that this water was going down and that it would perhaps be a useful thing to work out how to mitigate this. And instead they just build more road. No guys, this is not useful.

Tim: And the reason it’s going down is obviously unimportant. So partly climate change, so the snow melt is no longer as predictable. The snow pack is no longer as predictable. The snow melts can happen now too quickly. So the transition from winter to spring, as again, probably wherever you’re listening to this in the world, you’re probably seeing this in your own country; is now really rapid. So whereas it used to be that that reliable snowpack would melt slowly and seep down and make it to the river. Now it’s often evaporating before it gets a chance to make it to the river. I’m obviously talking at scale here, but that’s not as reliable. But still we are overusing, or the Americans are overusing the water, all the way down from the snowpack onwards into Lake Mead. So there’s over use of the water there, there’s climate change, there’s also the question of was it ever the right decision to build the country’s biggest reservoir in the desert? This is the Nevada desert where Lake Mead is situated. So that amount of evaporation was never a good idea. So Lake Powell, which is the storage reservoir to Lake Mead, loses a cubic kilometre a year to evaporation. And a cubic kilometre is exactly how you picture a cubic kilometre. If you put a cubic kilometre on top of any city, it would tower over, you know, all of your skyscrapers. And that’s just the loss to evaporation. But if you put on top of that the reduced inflow from the Colorado River and snowmelt and the continued overuse, over extraction of the water from the reservoir itself, we’re just seeing this many metres decline. And the incredible thing about Lake Mead and that particular water system is that it will run out of water. This is the country’s biggest reservoir, it will run out of water. It’s on a trajectory to reach Deadpool, which is the technical term for when the water levels have gone down so far it no longer goes through the dam. It no longer goes through the hydroelectricity turbines.

Manda: It’s below the outflow, basically.

Tim: Yeah, it will reach that by the end of this decade. And as I say, the trajectory remains very much on track. And it’s 2025. We’ve got five more years.

Manda: Yeah. And there seems no political will. I mean, we could spend the entirety of this podcast, we could probably spend the rest of today discussing the completely screwed up (and I’m being very polite) politics of who gets the water and how we decide it, and what we’re all doing to ensure that when you turn a tap, there is still water flowing. Which is basically nothing except hopes and prayers, as far as I can tell.

Tim: Yes, and the politics are fascinating and insane, especially with the American West and Lake Mead. But it’s more an extreme end of a spectrum that all of our water systems are on. So we have the same mentality and the same acute issue, well, maybe not as acute, in the UK. But Lake Mead is a wonderful prism to look at it through because it is so crazy. The politics there, there is no real discussion about it really running out of water. There’s more discussion about, oh, we’ll just build a pipeline from the Mississippi. Thousands of miles away. Thousands of miles. It will never happen.

Manda: And totally destroy the Mississippi and everything downstream so that you can still have fountains in Las Vegas.

Tim: Yes.

Manda: And also, when Trump first came in, he opened some kind of tap to prove to California that he could, as far as I could tell, and totally screwed up this year’s water supply anyway. So we also have a madman who has a habit of just randomly doing stuff that’s not going to help anybody. Which happened since you wrote the book. So yeah.

Tim: The politics are going in the wrong direction, certainly in America. I mean, as you say, Trump insisted on and caused an opening of the levees, the dams in California, with this really spurious link to this was the reason that the wildfires in LA were happening, and all that needed to be done was a release of some reservoir water Downstream. But it just wasted a lot of water, when California doesn’t have the water to waste. And obviously it had no impact on putting out the wildfires. So yeah, the politics are going in the wrong direction. And sadly, it does seem with water, certainly often things have to get really bad before they get better. And I think that probably is a fairly standard sustainability problem and politics problem, that we need disaster before we respond. And I did come across a fair bit of that in the book. And yeah, even the American equivalent of civil servants that I spoke to for the book, they couldn’t make the mental leap to the possibility of actually running out. I do remember one of them memorably saying to me that the secretary wouldn’t allow it. Meaning the secretary of state. And we were talking during the Biden administration.

Manda: What do they think the secretary can do to prevent it? What power might they magically have? It is magical thinking at its worst, isn’t it? It’s also, I can’t remember who said it, but you will never get someone to believe in something if their job depends on them not believing it. And that seems to encapsulate a lot of the non-functionality of the current system, is that people don’t have the emotional bandwidth to go beyond their day to day ‘my job is to keep the water flowing. Therefore, the water will always flow’ is an interesting internal narrative. It just happens not to be true. So you went around the world and the first half of your book is quite scary in terms of the zero day concept. That you turn on the taps and nothing flows, and how close various places around the world have been to that. And this completely objectively inadequate response to it, particularly in the UK. Lets, because half of our listeners are in the UK, and we have pretty much the only privatised water and sewerage system in the world, as far as I can tell. So the British privatised water brought people in to show them the amazingness of a private water and sewerage system that then becomes an ATM for investors, because you can essentially use it to acquire huge loans, which you then use to pay your investors. And the whole structure, as far as I can tell, it is a financial Ponzi scheme that has nothing to do with providing clean water and useful sewerage systems. And even the Americans came and looked at that and went that’s a really, really bad idea; we’re not going to do that. And yet, very recently, Thames Water could have been taken back into public ownership. And I think it’d be really interesting to discuss the difference between government ownership and community ownership. And I would go for the latter. And Starmer proving himself to be a Thatcherite to the core, decided not to bother. So let’s talk a little bit about the havoc of a privatised water system and what it’s done in the UK, and how close we have come to Zero Day in a number of cities.

Tim: Yeah, sure. And again, another huge topic that I could go on at length. But just to set the context of the British system. So going from Lake Mead, which I guess from a UK context, we think okay, crazy Americans built a massive reservoir in the desert. We don’t have any similar problems here. And yet we do. So the current projections from the National Audit Office are that demand will outstrip supply in this country by 2034. That’s under a decade away. I also think it’s a fairly conservative estimate, lowercase c or uppercase depending on preference. We are very close to using more water than we have.

Manda: And to be clear, this is England and Wales because Scotland never went private and Scotland also has much higher rainfall, I think. So I’m thinking we’ve got quite an interesting controlled study about to happen, between still government owned water and private water with a border around Hadrian’s Wall, yes?

Tim: Yes, you’re right, we are talking England and Wales and that is an important clarification. Scotland doesn’t really have the same water problem as England and Wales, partly due to being much more water abundant. So many more natural lochs and lakes and a smaller population compared to the size of the country.

Manda: And a higher rainfall.

Tim: And yes. And didn’t privatise its water system.

Manda: Because Wales has small population, high rainfall. I live next to Wales and the thing is, if you can see the hills, it’s going to rain and if you can’t see the hills, it’s already raining. And yet the water is all sucked into England, as far as I can tell. So Wales would be like Scotland, except it has a similar water system, yes?

Tim: Yes. Has a similar water system and yes, a lot of that is sucked into England. I mean, Birmingham’s water supply is entirely from Wales, despite being in a different country. So yes, there’s big historical reasons for the Welsh system to be fairly appalled by the English one and English water use. England also has a unique problem in the UK in terms of its rainfall. So you mentioned a stat earlier that I have in the book about all Australian state capitals have more annual rainfall than London, which does sound crazy.

Manda: It’s terrifying.

Tim: When you get more towards the east of England and the east of the UK in general, we have a lot lower rainfall. Basically all the water, all the rainfall comes across the Atlantic dumps on the first landmass being Ireland, the west coast of Great Britain, and then kind of slowly runs out of steam. There’s some rainfall maps that I can share with you that show it really clearly. But by the time you get to the central and east of England, you’re getting average rainfall of about 600mm, right to the edge of the East coast more like 500mm. And that is comparable to very dry parts of the world. So yeah, there’s lower rainfall than most Australian cities.

Manda: Yeah. You were saying earlier New South Wales had 400 and they’d had it in a day. But it’s not that different.

Tim: No it’s not that different. It’s comparable to Lebanon. It’s comparable to Kenya. So it’s quite dry in England and in eastern England in general. And you mentioned narratives earlier. Changing that narrative is very hard. So as soon as I mention that in a book talk, most people’s minds are blown, because we think of ourselves as a wet and rainy country. We are to an extent, and there’s a lot more chance of it raining in any month here than in other countries that have dry seasons and rainy seasons. So we can have rainfall in August or July. We can have long periods of grey. But grey doesn’t really add up to much in the rain gauge. Drizzle doesn’t add up to much in the rain gauge. You need quite heavy sustained rainfall to reach the aquifers and fill up reservoirs. We have a lot of grey, drizzly days. We’re a grey, drizzly country.

Manda: Right. So we use our umbrellas is not the same as we’re getting water.

Tim: Yeah, we need our umbrellas. And London is grey and drizzly, but it doesn’t add up to much. There’s not that much heavy rainfall. So yeah, that’s kind of going off on a tangent about needing to change that narrative. We need to start thinking of ourselves as what we are, which is a water stressed country, and act accordingly. So we do need to learn from countries such as Australia and such as some parts of West coast of America, what that looks like. Now in terms of running out of water, we now have this term called day zero. Day zero is a descriptor of cities that run out of water and it first happened in Cape Town in 2018. Now Cape Town is also a wet and rainy region. Cape town is the least likely place to run out of water in Africa, really. You can picture it right on the tip of the African continent. It’s quite cold and wet compared to most of Africa, but it has similar issues to the ones we’ve described to here and to America and to anywhere in the world.

Tim: Rainfall is becoming less reliable. Longer droughts, longer, more intense rainfall when it does come, but less predictable rainfall and also an overuse and overabstraction of water. So think of Cape Town you might think of wine, for instance. Huge vineyards irrigated all year round round, drawing on that water. That’s only one of them. I don’t want to just pick on the vineyards, but that’s kind of an explanation of how there is overuse of water. But anyway, in 2018 the rainy season didn’t really happen. Rains didn’t come. Reservoir levels are going down and down and down and down. And the local authorities there started to restrict water use, so a rationing of water use. I believe the first level was at 100l per person, per day. Went down to 75. Then it went down to 50l. Now again, to put that into context, 50l sounds like a lot of water, 100l sounds like loads of water. The UK average is 145l per person per day. If you put your washing machine on, that’s probably 50l gone, so there’s no water left for washing, for drinking, for cooking. So you have to become quite careful. Flushing toilets.

Manda: The insanity of our world is that we use perfectly good drinking water to flush our toilets with. I would like to talk about how we can not be doing that in a bit. But yes.

Tim: Flushing toilets became quite a big thing, so I guess the phrase predates it, but it’s certainly the first time I’d come across ‘if it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down’. That was put on signs above public restrooms and in hotels and in houses. So people got very used to not flushing; if it’s yellow, let it mellow. And there was even I remember seeing a picture of ones with like an arrow that moves to different numbers.

Manda: Right, like a scale.

Tim: Yeah, like a scale. Moving it to five. Once you’ve done five wees, then flush you can flush it. But all these kind of messages came from the local council essentially using this idea of day zero, which is if the reservoir levels get below, I think it was 13.5%, we will have to turn off all the taps. We will only be using standpipes.

Manda: You have to actually go and get your water rather than just turning a tap on.

Tim: You have to go and get your water. A small number really, of public taps that you have to queue at to get your water for the day. And that was going to happen in April. I can’t remember, it’s April 2018 or 2019, but it’s easy to check. But everyone was working towards the assumption or the belief that this could happen. And the less water you use, the more day zero can be pushed out. But if the rain didn’t come, it would happen anyway. It just got averted. So this day in April that everyone was moving towards, it would go down from your 50 litre cap to taps being turned off and using standpipes. Rain did arrive just in time and averted that crisis, but it kind of gave us the image of what would happen in a major city if the water ran out. Now, the next year, in 2019, it did happen in Chennai in India. Chennai is one of India’s top ten largest cities, a city of over 10 million people. And they did run out of water. And there it wasn’t meeting some 13% level. The major reservoir went to 0.1%. It was just caked sludge with cracked mud in it. There was no water. And the reality there for a good few weeks was just water tankers on the streets, private water tankers, fairly chaotic scenes of people queuing, but also having to fight for the water sometimes.

Tim: So it showed again, what could happen if a city ran out of water. And also, Chennai was a really fascinating case study in that again, it’s not synonymous with a dry area of India. This is a relatively wet area and in fact Chennai used to be famous for wetlands. It was surrounded by hundreds, if not thousands of hectares of wetlands. And those wetlands and wetlands in general, and wetlands in the UK, too, are fundamental to a water system. You need wetlands for the rainwater or flood water to sit in and slowly infiltrate down to aquifers. That’s kind of where we get our water from, and definitely something most countries have forgotten. But as Chennai developed and it became a major hub for the Indian IT industry, most of those wetlands were drained and concreted over and built over. And Chennai ended up with 10% of its original wetlands, and therefore it lost its water resilience. And a lot of the work since 2019 has been to try and restore. You can’t restore what you’ve already concreted over, but you can start to restore what’s left. And restoring those wetlands has been a major part of Chennai starting to restore its water system. So it’s a fascinating case study in itself.

Manda: Yeah. And I read somewhere recently and I thought it was in your book, somewhere in China, where they did actually take out the concrete and started turning cities into sponges. This is one of those key areas where it seems to me we know what we need to do, we just need the narrative behind doing it. And there’s a balance between increasing wetlands, changing agriculture, changing the way that we gather water and changing the use. So let’s talk about those separately and then join them together, I think. Because it also seems to me I’ve got two things written down that were not in the book that I’m interested in. And one is fracking, completely destroying aquifers, poisoning them for the rest of the life of this planet. And the other is IT use, which wasn’t such a huge thing until I came on stream, and every time I put my hand up on zoom, it spills a gallon of water somewhere in Cupertino to let you know. And that seems to me also we need to be mitigating that. But let’s have a look at the strategies that you got to in the book of, let’s use the UK as an example because it’s where we both live, but this would work anywhere in the world, as far as I can tell; to change the way that we do things so that we gather more water.

Tim: Yeah, well, actually I was left fairly optimistic after writing this book.

Manda: Me too.

Tim: It’s not always the feedback I get from people that have read it, but hopefully the second half is largely optimistic in terms of we do know the answers and we do know what we need to do. It’s actually fairly straightforward. It is about changing the narrative. And also we are currently so wasteful with water. Our water system is currently so badly run and designed that a few tweaks and changes will make a huge difference. So I think that’s largely the story. We could go anywhere with that.

Manda: Well, let’s have a look at changing the nature of agriculture and beavers. Because we spoke to Eva Bishop of the Beaver Trust way, way, way back, so let’s talk about beavers. Also, I listened to Tom Chi on Nate Hagens podcast a while ago, where he was talking about the big carbon capture and storage plant that was being planned in the States, billions of dollars. And he said he’d done a bit of a back of an envelope calculation that 200 beavers would sequester as much carbon as this billion dollar plant. But you can’t monetise beavers so no one had looked into that. But beavers for water they have definitely looked into; so agriculture, beavers and tweaks to the ways we gather water. I think also then let’s look at distributed water collection in cities, because that seems to be a total no brainer.

Tim: Yeah. And we can definitely cover all of those. The overarching concept to all of them is our water system is based on where the rain falls and how it’s captured. So the idea that you can just channelise rivers and put it into concrete bowl reservoirs, again, kind of works for small populations, but it’s not a great long term system anyway. But that’s the system we’ve got. We know it’s bad. We know it hasn’t worked. We know that private companies have made a lot of money from it, but are now going bust because they can’t keep it going. It’s bursting at the seams. Probably the wrong metaphor actually, creaking at the seams; the seams are expanding and cracking.

Manda: The house of cards is about to follow.

Tim: Yeah, that’s probably a good one. Yeah. So where that water falls, it’s not always in these owned by water companies or national water company catchment areas. It’s normally on farmland. So how you farm is hugely important. This led me to learning a lot about a subject that I know is close to your heart, Manda, and you’ll know a lot more than me about, which is regenerative agriculture. So again, the 20th century agricultural industrial model disconnected us from our water system and our nutrient and carbon cycle, and led us to believe that we could just consistently plough and fertilise and herbicide our fields. From a water perspective, why that doesn’t work is if you’ve got ploughed, uncovered fields in winter, you’ve got a hard cap created by your heavy engineering, your tractors, your ploughing system, just below a soft, crumbly cap of ploughed soil. If that has no protection over winter, which until very recently was the absolute standard, still is the standard in most regions, though I think we’re getting better.

Manda: Yeah. There was an idea of you let the frost get at the soil. This was a good thing. So you would plough it in the autumn and then leave it over the winter in order for the frost to kill off bugs or something. And actually, what happened was the rain came and washed it all onto the roads and into the river.

Tim: Exactly. And I’m sure we can all picture that driving along a country road in winter of seeing topsoil basically running down the road. I still see it sometimes. But yeah, so that water has nowhere to go other than sideways because it’s hitting a hard cap, soft, crumbly soil on top of that hard cap. It’s washing that hard cap, which is our vitally important topsoil. Washing it off down the road. The water isn’t infiltrating down, because what rainwater needs to infiltrate down is vegetation. Essentially, it needs a root structure. It needs life in that soil to help the water start going down slowly towards our aquifers. This is why meadows are so important. Floodplain meadows are so important. We need to bring those back. But it is also why farming is so important. We don’t want to move fully away from farming. Our food still needs to come from somewhere. We we all saw this in 2020 very acutely that a global food system can’t be fully relied upon. Even ignoring all the other problems of the global food system.

Manda: Yeah, six continents, ‘just in time’ supply chain falls over when the supply chain falls over.

Tim: Yeah. You also need local food security. But to produce that food, we can do it in a much better way for nutrients, for communities, but also for water. So a regenerative system that uses no till, no ploughing always has a cover crop on those fields, ideally with some rotation of livestock, certainly with rotation of nutrient injecting crops such as clovers, and so on. This is the way that agriculture was always done as well. So this isn’t kind of some crazy modern thinking, this is almost the opposite of that. Anything pre 1850, I suppose. This is just how agriculture was done for hundreds, thousands of years. It’s relearning that and reconnecting that water to our aquifers, to our rivers, to our floodplains. So that’s where agriculture comes in. And there’s obviously so many connected conversations about that. But that’s why agriculture is so important. And there have been in recent years, some really quite positive trends towards certainly cover cropping. Interestingly, some of that has come from the waters themselves that’s paying farmers directly, because they’ve realised they’ve not got the water to supply people come summer because the water’s not getting into their reservoirs. Why is it not? Because of farming partly.

Manda: Yeah. And they’ve also realised, I think, that if they pay farmers. We were talking to a local ecologist here and she had been part of a team with the catchment area of the River Severn, paying industrial farmers to go more towards regenerative so that they didn’t have to spend the money taking out the nitrates and phosphates and the glyphosate in order to create water that was actually safe to drink. And even then, I remember way back when I was in East Anglia and I had a period where I was really into fish, and I put the tap water into the fish, and I tested it with my little dip in test, and it went to weird colours. And I got online, early little forums and said, hey, my nitrate’s this. And I had two sets of results: half was the Americans going, do not drink any of your water, only drink bottled water, don’t touch that water. It’s going to kill you. Don’t go anywhere near it, that’s absolutely dangerous. And the Europeans going, yeah, we had to raise the minimum level of nitrate that was allowable because the UK nitrates were so high. Everybody’s drinking that, you’ll be okay, but your fish will die.

Manda: And that was way back in the 90s. The EU, had had to raise their minimum allowable level because nobody in the UK could get to that level. And so they said okay, well double that amount of nitrate’s obviously safe. And it isn’t and it isn’t good for anybody. And so at least Severn Trent, which is our local, was understanding that if they could pay farmers to use less nitrates, phosphates and glyphosate, it cost them less than if they had to clean it out. What they weren’t doing, the local ecologist said, was she had several organic farmers on the books who were being paid nothing for already doing that. Which struck me they would have been better financially to go to industrial farming for five years and then go organic again, than to stay organic. And I don’t think organic is the answer. I think regenerative is a whole step up, provided it’s not just minimum till and glyphosate, but that’s a separate conversation. But anyway, at least some of the water companies were realising that if they could change the nature of agriculture, they were getting more water uptake in the land and also getting fewer outputs that they didn’t want.

Tim: Yeah, that leaching from the soil is hugely important. Because obviously water pollution is the flip side to water scarcity. And yet again, a lot of that is coming from the way we farm. There’s a really scary phrase I got introduced to, which is the nitrogen time bomb, which is the the sheer amount of nitrogen fertiliser that’s being put on soils over the last 50 years. So if you’ve got a really deep aquifer, some of that has not reached the aquifer yet. So that will at some point from decades ago. You know, your policy has a long term impact and the way we farm.

Manda: It’s going to leach into aquifers that were previously clear.

Tim: Kind of. Yeah. So running off into rivers that go into reservoirs is one thing, and that’s the most immediate concern for water companies. But yeah, some some aquifers will at some point get decades old.

Manda: And then it’s going into the sea and creating dead zones the size of Belgium in the Gulf of Mexico, etc., etc., etc.. One of the things that I read early on during this podcast was the GOES report, the Global Oceanic Environmental Survey in Roslyn, saying that a combination of nitrates, phosphates, both of which have exceeded the planetary boundaries on the Stockholm curve, and microplastics and glyphosate was going to wipe out the photosynthesising algae in the oceans by 2045. And that’s half of our oxygen supply, which is one of those things that doesn’t seem to have occurred to many people. Is, you know, breathing 9% oxygen is equivalent to standing on top of Kilimanjaro, and that’s not fun. Most of us can’t run around like that. So, yeah. Anyway, runoff is not good. Aquifer time bomb waiting, not good. But if we can reverse it now, at least we can begin to do something. So where are you seeing an uptake when you went around? Because you did the wonderful burying the cotton underpants. Tell us about that, actually. That was quite fun.

Tim: Yeah. Okay. Because a lot of this was theory in terms of what I was reading, I wanted to see it in practice. So I went to a local Oxfordshire farmer who farms other people’s land for them. He doesn’t travel too far. Yeah. So he farms a farm that’s traditional agriculture. Wrong word really…

Manda: Industrial agriculture.

Tim: Industrial agriculture model. It’s, you know, all the fertilisers and and pesticides that you want. Ploughing. But he also does a full organic, so the opposite of that, but still plenty of ploughing. Interestingly he said his organic farm used the most diesel because he had to plough more to get rid of the weeds. So he ploughs more on organic than he does in industrial, but that’s kind of a side note. And then he also has a no till farm. He actually owns some of the no till farm. So no till is kind of where his heart lies I think. But he will do any of them. And essentially I wanted to see the differences there. So he showed me around and I’d read about a movement in California which is called Soil My Undies. The idea being that you take cotton underpants, it doesn’t have to be underpants, but you know.

Manda: But it’s fun for the kids.

Tim: I guess it makes it more memorable. You bury cotton underpants in your farm soil, and you dig it up three months later, and it gives you an indication of your soil health. So if those underpants are fully destroyed by your microfungi, your worms, you know they should degrade, they should be destroyed by soil life. You know, those crazy stats of a teaspoon of healthy soil has more living things in it than all the humans on Earth or something like that. So it gives you an indication. So we buried three cotton underpants, farmer James kind of looking at me oddly as we did all this. But he was very good sport. And then three months later, I came back and we dug it up and it did pretty much what we expected. Probably even more so. And it was all the same crops, they all had spring barley in, all in a very small area. I think we drove a longer than a 15 minute drive, so there’s no reason for those soils to naturally be different. But in the industrial farmed soil, the underpants came out almost usable. I mean, you could almost rewear them.

Manda: Bit wet and muddy, but that’s it. Stick them through the washing machine and they would have been okay.

Tim: Not even that wet and muddy. I mean, it was incredible. Almost pristine. There’s 1 or 2 holes.

Manda: God.

Tim: So basically, there’s no life in that soil. The organic fields, they they came up pretty muddy, eaten up, there’s good evidence of healthy soils there. And the no till, again, really muddy, really eaten up. The most eaten up of the three. Not hugely different to the organic in terms of how degraded it was, but noticeable in terms of just kind of the dirt level around it. And there was little white strands, microfungi. And it was a much healthier soil than the industrial one and a much healthier crop. Of all three that crop was the densest, clearly to my eyes, I’m not a farmer, but it looked likely that was going to have the best yield of the three. I’ll have to follow up with names to find out, but it was just the better field all around. Then in terms of water infiltration, we also know that’s far better for them to get down to the aquifer. Because the the difference really, and what got me to visiting Farmer James, I think I read a blog of his or like a YouTube post or something, but he said that in winter the situation in some other fields is that the topsoil is running off and running down the roads, you know hugely muddy fields. He said even at that time he could walk wearing normal shoes on his no till field, and he wouldn’t get muddy, because it’s a sponge that helps that water go down rapidly, as well as retaining enough moisture. So it’s an incredible field. He never needs to take any heavy machinery on it, never waters it. And yeah, so that was what gave me the insight into the depths of the soil differences really, between different farming methods. And it was really mind expanding.

Manda: It’s amazing. We could spend an entire episode on that, but let’s move to beavers. Beavers and changing the courses of rivers. Let’s have a bit of that.

Tim: Yeah, because I guess everything I’ve just explained, there’s still some point to doing it, but if your river next door is still concreted, canalised, has no connection to that soil that we’ve just been talking about, there’s almost no point in doing it. You need to also rewild your rivers. Those rivers need to be able to spill out into floodplains. We need to be able to capture floodwater, especially going back to how we started the podcast conversation. This yo yoing between flood and drought means you have to hold on to the flood water more than perhaps you used to, because you’ll need that flood water in time of drought. So it sounds such an obvious statement. I mean, it is such an obvious statement, but we have to start doing it again. And doing it again means flood plains. It also means you’ve got to protect your areas of habitation from floods. Another thing that’s all about straight, canalised rivers is they essentially speed up floodwater and cause devastating flooding downstream. So where beavers come in. You can rewild rivers without beavers. So there is a town in North Yorkshire called Pickering that had this flood problem every year. Every year it would flood, causing major problems.

Tim: And in the mid 20 tens, they were going to spend £20 million on flood defences in the town. It’s a small town, huge expense, but there is a conversation between a number of NGOs and local authorities to suggest let’s try the alternative. The alternative being rewild that river upstream, slow the flow of water before it reaches the town, and slowing the flow meant and means re meandering that river. So if you picture a straight line compared to a wobbly line, the wobbly line goes for longer. The water is being slowed down because it has to go round bends and curves. They also put what they call leaky dams across. So lots of felled trees, hay bales, heather bales, so again like a natural river should work, that the water should be hitting fallen trees, it should be hitting obstacles. And that slowed all the water down. Lo and behold, the following year, same localised flooding happened all around North Yorkshire. The only town that didn’t flood was Pickering. So they had proof this worked and that cost 10% of the cost of the concrete wall. So it’s still £2 million, still a lot of money.

Manda: But it’s money that’s put into the local economy. I think we have to remember that the money wasn’t just burned or flushed down the loo. It went locally. So it’s okay.

Tim: Yeah. It went locally and obviously saved £18 million. But where beavers come in is we can do all that for free. You don’t need the leaky dams.

Manda: A pair of beavers cost a lot less.

Tim: You don’t need to artificially create all those hay bales and heather bales and fallen trees, beavers do it for us. Now, this is mind blowing for me. When I did the book Manda, and maybe you were well ahead of me on this, but I didn’t really know that beavers were, until fairly recently, an index species to the UK. So the last beaver recorded was in York in 1789, which is pretty recent, right?

Manda: Yeah. Not within living memory of anyone, but yes. And then we hunted them out of existence.

Tim: They hunted them out of existence. But it’s not like, you know, you read about woolly rhino bones being dug up in a cave in Lincolnshire. We’re not going that far back. We’re going very much into kind of fairly modern history. So up until the 1780s and certainly up until, say, the 1500s, most rivers would have beavers in and most rivers are naturally meandering, covered with these leaky dams that are created by beavers, that slows the floodwater down before it reaches habitations. So it has a flood defence benefit in and of itself. But then when we look at it through a water scarcity lens; which we increasingly need to, given the changes in the water cycle that we’ve been talking about; it also helps that flood water to have somewhere to go, spreads out onto floodplains, goes down into aquifers, gives us water for drought times, and so on. So beaver reintroductions are starting since the 2000. They started in Scotland. There were some, let’s say, renegade beaver reintroductions that weren’t entirely legal to start with. You know, that we have to thank, really, because a lot of these benefits started to become apparent in Scotland then in the 2010’s. The first introductions in England and every time it’s happened, everywhere it’s happened, we have seen these benefits; slowly slowing of flood water downstream, a flood prevention benefit, also an aquifer recharge benefit. So there was a study. This might have been by Severn Trent, actually I’m not sure, that found that 60% more water was retained in the aquifers post beavers being in a particular area than pre, and also that the same percentage 60% less flood water downstream. So you hold on to that water naturally without having to spend millions of pounds. And it really is a win win for everyone. Beavers. So I’m very pro.

Manda: You just have to persuade the farmers that losing a certain amount of their land is not a bad thing, and if necessary, you pay them for it because the advantage to everybody else is worth it.

Tim: You have to pay them for it. Now this is very live and very much changing topic in terms of sustainability payments for farmers. I believe that environmental land management payments still exist. Elms.

Manda: Uh, no.

Tim: Have they gone?

Manda: Yeah.

Tim: I thought it was this farming sustainability.

Manda: Well, we we can’t get them locally, but what we can get is FIPL, which is farming in protected landscapes. Okay, so yeah, ELM’s are gone as far as I know.

Tim: Okay.

Manda: But there’s still planning stuff and the water companies are still doing stuff.

Tim: Yeah. And there will always be some element of payment from DEFRA to farmers to do something that isn’t farming. So there are still wildflower strips along farms and fields. There are many mechanisms possible to pay farmers for doing things that aren’t farming. So for for land stewardship payments essentially. So then you have to add beavers to that list. Interestingly, though, beavers are only really damming and flooding areas that would have flooded anyway, that would have flooded every large rainfall.

Manda: And the flooding brings in nutrients. I think this is the thing; that the reason those were the best fields to graze in the summer was that they got flooded with silt in the winter and it brought in the kinds of nutrients that the floodplain plants needed and wanted. So we’re going back to a biome that has existed for millennia and is integral to farming, a proper regenerative farm where everything moves around. So yeah, we could we could go on about that forever. One really fascinating thing I learned on another podcast, again, farmer in the US who wanted to put in a dam at cost of taking out a huge loan, many tens of millions. And his friend went, no, no, you just need beavers. But there aren’t any beavers. And he said, ah, but we can make the beavers because they come to the sound of running water. And they played a recording of the river running where there was no river, and the beavers turned up and created a dam, in spite of the fact there being no river. And the river arose as a result, because it dammed what tiny bit of water was there. So you don’t even need the river, you just need the sound of running water. That’s so cool. That’s where being an ecologist really makes a difference. So that’s changing the nature of the way that the water is absorbed into the land and into the aquifers. Let’s talk a little bit about what could be done in terms of collecting water. It seems to me such a no brainer, if every house collected the water off the roof. So if we had grey water recycling essentially, and changed the nature of flushing perfectly good drinking water down the loo, we could transform our use of water. And I don’t want it to turn into a BP carbon footprint let’s all blame ourselves and let everybody else off the hook. But we do have to change the way that we are using water. So talk to us a little bit about that.

Tim: Yeah. Because so far I guess we’ve talked about these wide scale catchments of huge farmed areas. That’s where most rain falls. And we can’t rewild our cities and towns and villages; they are where we live. But yes, we absolutely can do a lot about the water that falls where we are, the rainwater that falls and reusing rainwater and grey water. Grey water, meaning water that’s already had one use. So water that’s coming out of your shower or water that you’ve washed up with. But rainwater and rainwater harvesting? Yeah, it’s hugely underused. And we can have any impact.

Manda: Yeah.

Tim: So yeah, water re-use is a massive one we don’t really do nearly enough of. And we can all play a part in doing. This again has a bit of a flood prevention element. So looking at the water companies again, they would much prefer to have one huge engineering solution, build another big reservoir, so if we keep kind of doing what we always did but a bit more of it we’ll be fine. But where pilots have happened, where trials have happened of fit all the houses on a street with a large water catchment tank. These can be, you know, in the loft. These don’t have to be dig up your garden water tanks. Those do exist and are also great, but you can see why not everyone wants to dig up the garden. But all the houses on the street with rainwater capture tanks, which they do in other countries, by the way, that’s mandatory in Belgium, mandatory in certain states in Germany. You reduce your water use by typically a third. 50l is normally the amount that comes up in Belgium, Germany and the trials that have happened in the UK. Now, if your average water use in the UK is 145l, if you’re below the 100 litre mark, that’s a huge difference. Although farming uses 70% of water internationally, nationally in the UK the biggest water user is households. It’s domestic. So actually reducing our water use by a third would kind of solve all problems.

Manda: For a while anyway.

Tim: For a long while I would say.

Manda: And if every new house were fitted, I don’t understand. Labour said they want to build 1.5 million new houses. And I watched the film Holy Shit, which was all about the fact that in places in Switzerland, they have entire apartment blocks that have composting loos, and instantly that’s 40l a day per person. And I did the arithmetic and it’s billions of litres saved per day if every new house had composting loos. It’s a narrative thing again, because Daily Mail head would explode if we decided every new house. I thought we have to somehow get the Daily Mail to think it was their idea and support it, then it would happen overnight. If the Daily Mail went on a campaign of what we need is composting loos in every every new build house and look, they’re amazing and they don’t smell, and look, you can use the humanure on your allotment, which of course you need to have because we need you all growing your own food. It would be happening by the end of the year. But you had a different idea, which was a loo that uses much less water. Tell us a little bit about that.

Tim: Well, yeah, there are air flush toilets that exist. So a bit like a toilet in an aeroplane you can use air to flush your toilet. So you move away from that a little bit. In terms of I think we can just use rainwater, I think rainwater.

Manda: But you still then end up with the same volume output, which then ends up needing to be cleaned out somewhere. And the sewage systems are not coping that well anyway. They’re flooding, they’re backing up. Our local town, this is an aside, but the grandkids came home recently. My partner picks them up from school and she’s driving along and they’re  going “we had the poo man today”. I beg your pardon? What? And it turns out that the local water authority was sending somebody into the primary schools to explain to the kids that it wasn’t their fault that the water was going into the river, and the river now is completely unswimmable, because otherwise it would come up the toilets and it would flood your house because the pipes are too narrow.

Tim: Wow.

Manda: Faith’s in the car going well, I think you’ll find the humans actually got millions upon millions of pounds. What would you do if you had millions and millions of pounds and the pipes were too narrow? And the five year old thinks for a little minute and goes, I would put in bigger pipes. Thanks. Yes, I would. If I were not busy paying my CEO all the money that we make. It’s not hard. But if you weren’t having to process as much sewage, there is less sewage going into the water system, it seems to me.

Tim: Yeah. You’re right. I think there’s two ways of looking at that. The sewage scandal, the sewage crisis, which again is a whole podcast in itself, is a problem of lack of infrastructure investment over many years by privatised companies that have been allowed to get away with that. So they’ve essentially inherited monopolies, inherited assets, all of them started with zero debt, by the way, on privatisation. The idea of privatisation was that it would bring in private investment into our water system, but they didn’t factor in the very obvious likelihood that they wouldn’t do that. They would just siphon off as much money as possible to shareholders and investors.

Manda: And still are.

Tim: And still are. And still are doing it.

Manda: That Australian company that was kicked off Thames and has now bought out another one. I can’t remember its name, begins with M. Do you remember.

Tim: Yeah. Macquarie. Yeah.

Manda: So I mean basically it’s predatory capitalism at its most venal. The death cult is functioning as a death cult, thank you. But it’s our water! Sorry, I get quite cross about this.

Tim: It is our water. It is our sewage. But the sewage works should have been upgraded many times over the last 30 years. So the problem shouldn’t be that the pipes are too small and the sewage works are too small to deal with our sewage. We should be able to flush our toilets. That investment needs to happen, the change in the private structure has to happen.

Manda: Is it happening?

Tim: It’s not. It is really frustrating that Labour did miss the opportunity to renationalise initially.

Manda: Really frustrating.

Tim: Yeah, I mean, there are special administrative measures in place to renationalise water companies that could very easily be used. Regulation has been proven not to work. Thames Water have just been fined a record £100 million. But Southern Water were fined around that, 90 million in 2021, it doesn’t make any difference.

Manda: It’s a rounding error for them. They don’t care. They’re pushing billions into their investors.

Tim: The Southern Water got that record fine of 90 million, it was one of the highest profit years. So it’s a slap that means nothing to them. It’s laughable the idea that regulation will change the way that private water systems run. We have to see some renationalisation. And as you kind of hinted at earlier, that shouldn’t be the end goal. I think we then need to move towards community interest companies to then run water companies. But the first step is get it out of these predatory capitalist hands for sure.

Manda: Are you seeing any likelihood that that will happen under the current administration?

Tim: No, I’m not. But I also feel it’s probably inevitable. So there’s only so much sewage that people can deal with in their lives. There’s only so many rivers, such as the nationally, arguably internationally important River Wye that has just been killed, and we’re watching it die, that I think people put up with. So I feel it will have to happen. And we’ve just had huge price hikes on water bills. I at my most kind of weirdly optimistic, think that that might be being done in advance of being able to renationalise. So all the private companies put your put your water bill up, but then that adds a platform to have a bit more money in this to to allow for renationalisation. And that’s based on nothing.

Manda: Yeah. And this government is not proving itself to be in any way interested in what happens to ordinary people. So it seems to be wholly in the pocket of predatory capital. I can say that you don’t have to agree with me. Okay. Without getting too depressing, because your book actually ended up, I felt, we have all the answers, we just need the political will to make them happen. And it’s partly on the change the nature of the way that we gather and store water, and change the way that we use it. And each of these is completely possible. If people listening want to do stuff for themselves, other than taking showers less often and not washing up with the tap running, and never keep the tap running when you’re brushing your teeth. All the obvious things. What are the less obvious things that can be done for people who have the means to spend a bit of money on their own infrastructure?

Tim: Yeah, and what you were saying earlier about we don’t want to make this another carbon footprint thing is, is completely true. It shouldn’t be on people to install their own rainwater harvesting systems. It does typically internationally come from regulation. So in Belgium, if you build a new house it has to have rainwater harvesting, but it also has to be plumbed into the house in some way. So your washing machine typically runs on harvested rainwater in Flanders and in parts of Germany. So that’s a regulation issue. And so that has to happen. And yeah politics comes into this. So we can keep badgering our local MP on why aren’t building regs including rainwater harvesting? You know, we’re starting to see possible movement on new houses will have to have solar panels. That’s great. I really hope that happens. But yes,  rainwater harvesting also has to be included.

Manda: And an air toilet. Why not? It would be obvious.

Tim: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I do always think that that is job done. Weirdly, if all houses had large rainwater harvesting tanks and air flush toilets then that’s the job done, really. So we need to start moving towards that a bit. And that is a political issue. But yes, if you’ve got some time and money to install a larger water butt than you currently have. Find a local plumber, I’m yet to manage to do this,  this is on my to do list; find a local plumber that will help you plumb that into, say, your downstairs loo. It’s doable. Internationally in some regions it’s common. It’s just very unheard of here.

Manda: And I had a friend recently who reckoned his job was about to be taken over by AI, and he was thinking of retraining as a plumber. And I’m thinking train as a grey water plumber, because there aren’t many of those.

Tim: Yeah.

Manda: And it would be really useful thing to do.

Tim: Yeah, it really would. I mean, there’s interesting kind of technology coming online. Again, the nice to haves rather than the need to haves. But there are water recycling showers. I think there’s one called Flow Loop which Ikea were on board with for a while, I don’t know whether it’s still an Ikea thing. But essentially it captures water as it comes down the plughole and beneath your shower. It puts it through recycling system and puts it back. And a running shower or a running tap can use up to 16l of water per minute, so it’s quite easy to see how that can rapidly add up to your 145l a day, and that’s on average. We ideally want to be getting down to around 100 litre mark, but I think Hydraloop said they could do it essentially two litres per minute, because you’re recycling it on. There is another company that is essentially doing that for the whole house, so all the rainwater coming out of the house goes through a recycling unit and puts it back in again. Greywater use. Not for drinking or cooking, but again for toilets, for washing machines and so on. It massively reduces overall water use. So giving water a second life. If you can find a way of giving water a second life, do it.

Tim: The day zero in Cape Town was to shower with a bucket. Now, I’m not ever going to do that, but if you’re into it, you can do. Most of the water from your shower that you’ve showered with is going to be reusable. Water butts: install a water butt or two. If you’ve already got two, get a third. There are many ways we can use our water, and if you start to look at this on an urban scale or a neighbourhood scale, we start to be moving towards something that in China they call sponge cities. Which is about, again, catching rain when it falls, domestically but also along the sides of roads on your pavements. Greening your neighbourhood would go a long way to making your neighbourhood more pervious. So again it slows down water. We’ve got to get used to floods happening much more often, or heavy rainfall events happening much more often. The reason why that then floods is the water has nowhere to go. It’s hitting concrete, hitting tarmac. It’s going straight into drains rapidly, going to your canalised rivers. That’s what causes flooding. If the water has somewhere to go, it’s hitting something that’s pervious and greenery, then that water is absorbed.

Manda: It can soak it like a sponge. Yeah, right.

Tim: Yeah, exactly. Soaks it like a sponge. So that’s where the Chinese sponge city concept comes from. Here we call it SUDs. Sustainable Urban drainage, which is a far less interesting title.

Manda: Sponge city sounds so much nicer, but yeah. But then the sewers are not overflowing as much, which is a big problem.

Tim: Yeah, exactly. So it absorbs the flood water. It sends less water down. Again, you can picture that, if all of your houses or streets have got these rainwater harvesting tanks. That’s less that’s less floodwater,  less water to go running down your drains. And so all it all has an impact. And again, the way you garden. You know, you can rewild your garden a bit if you’ve got a garden. Not mowing as much. We’ve just finished no mow May, all of that has an impact. If you let your lawns go longer with some wildflowers, those roots are going deeper and then you start to look a bit like Farmer James’ no till Fields. You’ve got root structure, somewhere for water to go down. So all these things start to make an impact.

Tim: What I don’t think we need to do is get hugely obsessive about, you know, seeing some suggestions of microwave rather than boiling water or, you don’t you have to be really careful about how much water you use from the tap for cooking or for whatever. The amount of water we actually use for personal consumption, for eating and drinking it’s so minuscule that don’t worry about it would really be my suggestion. But washing up afterwards? There’s an impact. Some people might think that hand washing is better than dishwashing. Typically that’s not the case now. Most modern dishwashers will recycle water in almost a mini example of that flow I was talking about. So my dishwasher has a six litre cycle. Now if I was running a kitchen tap for a minute that’s 12l, and no one’s hand washing in a minute. So typically dishwashers are better than hand washing. So yeah, I do think there is an element to this kind of footprinty thinking that we don’t want to go too far down. Not all on us, actually. More on on regulation, on city planners, town planners and building regs and the politics of that and us influencing the politics of that is big. But getting involved in local river restoration, that would be a really big one.

Manda: Okay.

Tim: So helping to rewild and renaturalise our rivers and floodplains.

Manda: And every big river in the UK has a group now. In Shrewsbury it’s called Up Sewage Creek. And I can’t remember the one on the Wye, but every single one has a group of amazingly diverse people who come from right across the political spectrum, and what they care about is the river not being full of sewage. And being able to swim in it without getting sick. There was another stat in your book that one of the rivers had 42,000 times the allowable amount of E.coli in the river water. And it’s not surprising the kids get sick when they go and swim in water that their grandparents were able to swim in as children totally fine. And swimming in the river should be a thing.

Tim: Yes. And if I remember rightly, that stat came about from a local river group like the one you’re talking about. I think this is the one in Ilkley who wanted to have their local river designated as a bathing spot, because everyone was using it for bathing spot anyway.

Manda: Right.

Tim: To make it official, because you are officially a bathing water area has to be tested a lot more often than areas that are not. And they  knew full well it was full of sewage, the idea is to make that a newsworthy item.

Manda: A legal requirement.

Tim: A legal requirement. And they really did. And Yorkshire Water had to start dumping less sewage upstream of that. They will then dump it somewhere else, but the more we are not accepting of that, the more   noise we make about the state of our rivers, the more people have to pay attention. And yeah, it can make a real difference. The group were amazing. The one local to me is called WASP, the River Windrush against sewage pollution. The guys that run that really small group, Ash Smith is one of them, could be central to blowing the lid on the sewage crisis nationally. I mean, their local monitoring, they just did voluntarily and they’re making a noise and holding the Environment Agency to account is partly why it’s a national issue. So yeah. Local water groups, local river groups have a big impact and can have a big impact.

Manda: Yeah. And if our MPs got more letters and emails about the quality of the water than they do about immigrants, it would change the way they behave and it would change the way they vote, I think. And our local group had a people’s assembly about the water, and the local MP was invited to watch it happening. And I think we can create changes in local democracy around we all need water and we would really like it to be clean and safe and there to be enough of it. It’s pretty much one of those things we can stop getting tribal about and all agree about. I have taken up so much of your time. I am so grateful. This is so amazing. We could talk forever. Is there any one last thing other than read your book, actually read both of your books and your medium post. Anything else that you would like to say to people as we head to a close?

Tim: I think what I would like to say is, and I should have a stock answer for this, shouldn’t I Manda, really? Because I’ve done a few interviews by now.

Manda: Yeah, but it changes. The world is a shifting place.

Tim: Yeah it is. It does often end with, you know, harvest rainwater and use a bit less water. But no, I think this really is don’t be too despondent. My book’s guilty of it in the first half; there are a lot of reasons to be scared and despondent and look at the mess we’ve made and the worry about the rapidly increasing changes in climate. But with water, we have been so wasteful with it that a few changes will go a long way. And we can make those changes. We can make those changes at home, we can make those changes in our neighbourhood. We can help to make those changes in our towns and cities and countries. And areas have done so. There is a lot we can do. And what I really like about tackling water, and actually this is something I liked about tackling air pollution in my first book too, is that if we really do it, if we’re really serious about it, we do end up with a much nicer world. We end up with a much nicer future. I would much rather walk along a naturalised river that has beavers in it, and natural dams and

Manda: Fish.

Tim: Floodplain meadows. I visited some of the last remaining floodplain meadows, but they’re still clinging on and there are amazing groups working to create corridors of restored floodplain meadows. We can end up with a much greener, more pleasant world with locally produced regenerative foods that no longer is covered with chemicals. You know, this positive future is there for the taking I think. So we’ve got to keep with that optimistic vision and do a lot of what you’re doing, which is kind of creating narratives and conversations about that. The scary stuff is there, it’s scary, and we all need to know about that. That’s kind of our reason for doing it in a way. But what we end up with is potentially far better.

Manda: Yeah. Yes. That. What we end up with is potentially far, far better. And we would be proud to leave it to the generations that are coming after us. Fantastic. That’s a very good place to end. Tim Smedley, thank you so much for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. I look forward to talking to you again sometime.

Tim: Thank you Manda, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Yeah. Hope to talk to you again soon.

Manda: There we go. That’s it for this week. Huge thanks to Tim for all of the astonishing work that he puts into his books and then into his articles. I didn’t mention in the intro I’ve linked to the Medium article on degrowth, and also to the Prospect article that references the drought flood pendulum that we should all know by now is the new normal. And yes, that’s a particularly tedious phrase, but we have to say it often enough that it lands with everybody. We can only really change the narrative if we say again and again and again that the existing narrative is wrong and that we have one that everybody could get behind. If we could have clean air, clean water, clean soil, clean, clear, courageous and compassionate connections between all parts of ourselves, ourselves and each other and ourselves in the web of life, we would be in a completely different world and we would have that sense of being, belonging, becoming. That sense of meaning, that sense of pride in ourselves and each other and our place in the world that is what we crave as human beings. And Tim, I’m hoping this became really clear, is one of those who really gets this. He’s written about clean air. He’s written about clean water. He clearly understands the nature of regenerative agriculture, and the move back from the toxins of industrial farming to actual clean soil, and the need for that to stop poisoning ourselves and to give ourselves nutrient dense food. So his books are brilliant because he starts off really laying out the chaos that we have created, and then walking us through the ways that we can change it.

Manda: And wherever you are in the world, there are going to be local groups devoted to clean water. I know in the UK they are literally everywhere. Every single river, as far as I can tell, has got a group. And if you are one of those groups and you want to email me. I will put a link in the show notes so that over time, this podcast becomes a resource for anyone who wants to join up. You can start monitoring the local water. You can go on demonstrations. You can write letters to every single political entity in your area because everybody needs clean water. Everybody wants to be able to swim in the rivers. Everybody wants there not to be sewage backing up in the drains and/or being flooded out into the rivers, because the water companies have got nowhere else for it to go. And we want to end the nitrate and phosphate build-up that is causing the dead zones in the oceans. This is a win all round. The only people who lose out are the big corporations that have been selling us the toxic muck that we’re dumping on the land and into the water. And frankly, it’s time they stopped. They could be doing other things. I am sure they could be doing things that would actually heal some of the damage, so we don’t need to feel sorry for them.

Manda: We can just get on with making sure that the future generations have got clean air, clean water, clean soil, and the emotional literacy to heal the traumas of our culture, to create community, and to reconnect with the web of life. It’s not hard. We know what we need to do, we just need to make it our absolute priority. Every single one of us. And if you want help with that, genuinely, reading Tim’s books is going to be a massive kickstart. When you’ve really read through the things that he saw, you will never unsee them. And we only touch the very tip of the iceberg in the podcast. So go find the books, read them, and go out and be active.

Manda: So that’s your homework for this week. We will be back next week with another conversation. And in the meantime, thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot. To Alan Knowles of Airtight Studios, for the production. To Lou Mayor for the video, Anne Thomas for the transcripts, Faith Tilleray for the website, for all of the tech and for the conversations that keep us moving. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who wants to understand how we can get to grips with the water crisis that is assailing all of us, then please do send them this link. And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

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