I just had a lovely dinner with some journalists and film production folk from China and in all of the conversation that night – about everything from finding husbands, to styles of documentary production – the thing that really shocked me was hearing that it was a regular, everyday thing in China to have an hour-long shower.
I say shocked because despite the fact that we are being blessed with an amazingly wet Spring, it is still close to a cardinal sin in South Australia to stay in the shower for more than seven minutes (preferably four, under a specially designed water-efficient showerhead which I think you can get a government subsidy to install). In summer I actually put buckets in the shower to capture the splash so I can water my plants.
Here any hint that you might waste water – leave the tap on while you brush your teeth, wash the car with the hose - is like admitting you have a sexually transmitted disease - people actually go a bit white faced and pinched looking… they shift away ever so slightly.
Wasting water on the purely joyous and somewhat strange human desire just to stand under warm wet cascades of it is just not done.
You see green is the new black. The psychology of it is interesting. We have seen the eccentric slide into mainstream. All that flipped out hippy.. love the planet, hug a tree, save water shower with a friend button-pin sloganism is now totally and utterly the way things should be.
We have shifted - at least in our publicly professed attitudes. The green fringe has become the whole poncho.
But in a nation, which many here still refuse to acknowledge, produces more carbon emissions per capita than most, there is still a tension between needing to appear to be saving the planet and what we are really doing.
Oh yes there are some die hard environmental warriors out there but most of us don’t think twice about nipping down to local shops to get some milk in the car, and I am sure that in the privacy of many South Australian bathrooms showers run well over the prescribed four to seven minutes.
Our politicians are locked in a struggle at the moment over a Carbon Emissions Trading Scheme. The Government has put forward a scheme that was not carried earlier this year and are about to resubmit the Bill in the hope that having some legislation in place in Australia, will give them more street cred in influencing negotiations in Copenhagen. Good luck I say…both here and in Copenhagen.
The passage of that Bill will all depend a rapidly disintegrating Opposition and some divergent Independent voices - from Green extreme, to a member of the doubting Thomas Christian right (it is God’s will we get a bit hotter – perhaps a little taste of things to come if we don’t mend our wicked ways).
Meanwhile most of us in electorate land – the “sticky masses” as I once heard a Federal member of Parliament call us as he grimaced – don’t really have a clue what it all means. We don’t get the science except in its most simplistic form and we don’t get the economics either. Energy use = carbon emissions = hot atmosphere = melting icecaps = dead polar bears (awwah) + rising sea levels + plus hotter weather + more expensive everything.
Depending on how it pans out this could give me a tropical, beachfront property - nice!
But seriously – it is serious, complicated, intangible, distant, unimaginable. And I am sure in a sombre moment we are wondering why the hell everyone isn’t doing a lot more a lot more quickly.
It is a bit like peace negotiations only harder – “I am not giving up my car unless everyone else does and there is a train to take me to work or I can work from home”…and from the third world …”why should I go without the option of finally having electricity and a petrol powered car when you have had that luxury for the past 50 years!” Not questions I would like to facilitate.
Meanwhile in South Australia, as we gear up for another hot summer with our ancient Murray River shrinking like a hardened artery – I take a secret “un-green” delight in thinking of my Chinese friends singing a happy Chinese pop song in a tiny shower somewhere in Beijing – it is probably the only alone time they get.
