What Is Happening To Us?

Are we becoming a nation of pathetic little soggy-bottomed, sad-sack jellies who are all incapable of taking a bump or a scratch or playing in the mud? Are we being led by our collective noses into believing that there should never be any possible dangers or risks in our lives, and that only a select few super-know-it-alls are able to decide what is good for us? Is the accumulated wisdom and knowledge and plain common sense of the past several millennia of no worth compared to this new-found indisputable realisation by a tiny group of pointy-headed gadgets secreted somewhere in a sterile, dust-free (and probably padded – for safety’s sake, of course) bunker, perhaps in Wellington? Do only they know with total certainty what it is we must do to survive – so we can die long and painfully three or five or 10 years later anyway?

I am incensed that in just half a century we have dribbled down our shirt-fronts to the point where we now are dictated to entirely by this microscopic (and almost certainly myopic) minority of “Don’t-Ever-Take-A-Risk” bird-brains who see it as their duty to save us from ourselves. They may even have seen it as their further bounden duty to take themselves off to a completely quarantined underground headquarters 50km east of the Chatham Island, just to be safe.

My outrage is sparked by a letter to the editor of my local community newspaper. Let me immediately hasten to add that I admire hugely this little publication, because it serves its community very well, and because of that it is one of the more prosperous community newspapers in the country. Most such little newspapers do their job very adequately.

Recently the paper carried a letter from a town resident who questions why communities are not being encouraged by local councils to install rainwater tanks for private use in our homes. It’s a subject I have agitated on before – why do we not utilised the hundreds of hectares of roofing in our towns and cities to catch rainwater, store it in tanks, and use it for every-day purposes in our homes, businesses, schools and hospitals?

Back comes the reply to the letter from the local council, no doubt delivered via the boa-constrictor legalities of the pointy-heads and their nation-wide issuance of constipated “regulations”. The reply states in part: “There is no reason people cannot catch rainwater and use it to alleviate the pressure on the water supply system. Setting up a rainwater tank for emergency water storage or outdoor use can be relatively cheap and easy. Using rainwater indoors for toilet flushing or in your laundry needs a building consent and installation by a registered plumber.

“It’s important to note, however, that water tanks still need to be ‘topped up’ by a public system when there has been no rain. That means a fully functioning public water system still needs to be maintained to meet the needs of property owners and to meet firefighting guidelines.”

Good grief!

No-one is suggesting getting rid of the present public water reticulation system, and it would obviously be stupid to do so.

But there are hundreds of millions of litres of perfectly good rainwater that almost every month gurgle uselessly down our roofs, gutters, drains, creeks and rivers. They could so easily be put to use, and in the process save communities millions of dollars annually in excessive water treatment costs.

And can’t you just hear the wails and shrieks from the pointy-heads, all anguishing about  the immediate and inevitable nationwide spread of every imaginable disease from bird-flu to tinea. They would be apoplectic at the thought.

Why?

Most people born in this country before 1960 were brought up on perfectly adequate supplies of water that drained off the house roof into corrugated iron tanks that stood on brick, concrete or wooden tank-stands discreetly located beside or behind every house. And yes, birds poohed on the roof, just like they do these days, and some of that pooh got washed into the tanks. And yes, leaves and dust and other rubbish sometimes clogged the gutters, and the water was strained through it all. And yes, occasionally a cat or possum or bird or rat dropped into the tank, drowned and rotted away. And yes, very occasionally the tanks ran dry.

During long hot summers a sturdy stick was kept leaning against the tank-stand, and after some weeks of no rain Mum or Dad would whang the stick on the lower rungs of the tank, to establish by sound just how much water was left. Then we may be restricted top‘n’tail washes in the handbasin, me using the same flannel and same soapy water my brother had used. And being kids and running round the farm, we may now and then have taken a small drink from a handy cow-trough if the day was hot and we were thirsty. We certainly often played in the troughs, even though the water may have been a murky greenish colour.

We survived, as did thousands of other farm kids, and we were healthy and happy to boot. We climbed trees too, right to the extremities of big branches 20 metres above ground-level; and we played in drains that further upstream accepted the run-off from the twice-daily cow-yard wash-downs; and we competently drove tractors barefoot on steep hillsides at the age of eight; and we wore bare feet in the cowshed; and we crept home sodden, smothered in mud and chilled to our skinny bones after an hour of racing up the home-paddock hill in the teeming rain and slashing down that same hill on an ever-broadening mud-slide.

And the same rain washed the bird-pooh and dust and detritus off the house roof into the tanks, and we bathed in it, drank it, cooked in it, washed our clothes in it – and all six of us kids, including a cousin, survived. We’re all still alive, all of us over 65 and spanning a decade beyond, and we’re all hale and hearty yet. So are most of the farming Otewa School friends from that era, virtually all of whom were brought up daily drinking bird-pooh water.

So let’s get off this ridiculous concept that the world and all its myriad microbes are out to get us. Most babies spend their first two years vacuuming up a million greeblies a minute as their cruise around the floors at home – floors which most caring parents and older siblings have regularly walked across wearing shoes, boots and bare feet that have recently had their soles well-impregnated with all the germs every city street offers. The crawling babies delight in sharing the tucker bowls with household pets; they try garden dirt, lawn clippings, dead moths, occasionally even the contents of the kitty-litter containers.

Yet they survive, perhaps growing more healthy and less susceptible to illness because early on they have developed strong immune systems.  I’m convinced that the mud and the cow-muck and the drains and the bare feet and the danger of being brainless little boys all added to us growing to adulthood with little or no major physical defects, deformities or diseases.

But if we keep up this nonsense of not allowing something as basic as perfectly good rain water to become part of our daily lives, and instead paying additional millions of dollars for unwarranted water treatment, I reckon our communities will eventually end up living in sterile cocoons we can’t afford. We’ll all die, germless, of boredom at the aged of 46.

Of course, we could go to the National Fieldays this coming June and have a quick look at the growing number of businesses specialising in rainwater purification for home use. And we could also demand a permanent 20 per cent rates reduction to cover installation in our homes and reduced dependence on town water supply.  If the councils won’t play ball on the rates reduction, vote ‘em out and bring in councillors who will. That’s democracy – in action!

Certainly, we need town water supplies. Any suggestion otherwise is fatuous. But let’s not waste the millions of litres of good rainwater that these days pour through the down-pipes and eventually out to sea.

Kingsley Field is a journalist and published author. He can be contacted at kingsley(at)accuwrite.co.nz 

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