Solving the Water Crisis DVD
The 'Solving the water crisis' series are now available on a
DVD, running time 75 mins.
These are available by email at
colinaustin@bigpond.com.
Cost is $15 in Australia or $18 overseas,
including post and packaging. Payment by
PayPal or direct transfer.
(Please
email me for more information)
DVD Cover Notes
This DVD contains the first 5 episodes of a series aimed at
challenging the fundamental way we think about water and shows
alternative technologies.
The world of water is full of myths. We hear catch phrases like
Australia is the driest inhabited continent'.
The truth is that we, in Australia, receive almost a million litres
of rain, per person, per day; - many times more than we need. We are
not short of rain; we suffer an excess of evaporation.
The whole community needs a paradigm shift, a realisation that water
management technology developed in the wetter and more mountainous
regions of the old world is not, by itself, an adequate solution in
a much flatter land subject to long periods of baking sun.
We only harvest the heavy rains, and collects only 1 in 2,000 of the
litres of the total rain that falls.
We need dams, but they should be integrated into a holistic system
of water management more suited to the Australian conditions
Episodes
Communal Intelligence
How a traumatic visit to a ghost town in the
Middle East, destroyed by modern technology, challenged my belief in
a technological solution.
Organisations and creativity
Science and modern society are based on reductionism, this leads to
omissions and over simplification so we miss vital clues on how to
solve the water crisis.
Kookaburra Park
We take the case of Kookaburra Park Eco Village which has to meet
all its own water needs and manage its wastewater (greywater and
sewage water) without polluting its water sources.
Water in dams
We have water restrictions in the middle of a drought.
We see how we can fill our dams during the rainy periods, by using
water collected locally, so we have water when we really need it.
Useful water
We only harvest a minute amount of rain, we catch part
of the large rains that fall on mountains but miss small rains that
fall on plains. We introduce the concept of useful life and how we
can save our dam water by extending the useful life of rain.
Colin Austin
Colin Austin built up one of Australia's leading technical software
companies based on a pioneering technology called Moldflow and
became internationally recognised as a leader in computational fluid
flow.
He realised that water was going to become one of the critical
restraints in the modern world. He sold the company, and set up a
team of some dozen researchers to carry out speculative research
into ways of resolving the water crisis, hoping to use his skills in
running a creative organisation and computational fluid flow.
It seemed incredibly hard to get the bureaucracy to think outside
the square and decided the only way was to get the message out to
the public at large and hope that there are some enlightened people
out there prepared to be proactive.
Frustrated by the tunnel vision and lack of support and interest
within the bureaucracy, he changed tack and moved into an Eco
Village where there has been widespread adoption of his ideas, as
shown in the film.
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