Table of Contents
‘We are in the middle of a desert and we get rain twice a year if we're lucky for an hour-and-a-half at a time.’ (Keith, Alice Springs)
‘We’re not short of water here.’ (Tom, Alice Springs)
‘I love water [laughs]. I think I have a fetish about watering gardens … I just get extreme pleasure out of being in the garden.’ (Jacqui, Wollongong)
I have recently been analysing urban Australian relations to nature through the lens of the backyard garden. The quotes above are from three study participants, interviewed by team members during fieldwork in 2002–3. Water surprised us by emerging as one of the most important aspects of people’s domestic environmental engagements. Nearly five years later, this consciousness is less surprising and likely even more entrenched.
Keith is referring to Alice Springs’ average annual rainfall of 286mm. He is apparently well attuned to the realities of living in the centre of the driest permanently inhabited continent. He has learned to live with nature, since it is nature that delivers his water. Tom, on the other hand, is talking about the unrestricted water supply provided by the Roe Creek borefield and piped to domestic houses. He understands well where his domestic water comes from, via the complex infrastructure tapping into the Mereenie aquifer outside town. This can be understood as an eco-socio-technological network (a hybrid, or assemblage, in Latourian terms). In such a network, nature is just one component, and then one that is only constituted by virtue of its relationships to other phenomena.
Is it nature-thinking or network-thinking that will serve us best in providing sustainable urban water supplies in the next century? In this chapter I argue that many urban Australians have a well-developed understanding of our low and variable continental rainfall patterns and the necessity of adapting to these conditions. This consciousness (‘nature thinking’) influences patterns of practice towards reduced water consumption in ways that policymakers would be pleased about. Examples of such practices are outlined here. However, because it represents a disconnect with the complex infrastructure of domestic supply in urban contexts, it is unlikely to be as resilient to changed conditions as ‘network thinking’. In what follows, I demonstrate detailed understanding of, and intervention in, networks of water supply and usage in the context of the backyard garden.
In contrast to a number of other environmental issues which stimulate more polarised responses, a commitment to reducing water consumption was shared across the diverse study population and manifest in a variety of changed practices. That such indications were present several years ago, at the beginning of the current drought, suggests substantial underlying support for stronger government action on water.
However, for many people their aspiration towards water-saving practices is in tension with the pleasure derived from water, and their expressed desires for more watery environments, as exemplified in Jacqui’s quote. Summarised around the concept of desire, this trend is explored here as a contradictory pressure to that of water conservation. It is exacerbated by the consumptive forces of capitalism.
In arguing that there is a significant cultural shift occurring, I am not discussing here the actual levels of water consumption. Rather this is a complementary perspective that seeks to understand everyday practices and habits, and the processes that reinforce or change them. I am influenced by Shove’s argument for a shift in the focus of social environmental research ‘so as to comprehend the collective restructuring of expectation and habit’ (Shove 2003: 4). Through a detailed focus on everyday practice, Shove shows, for example, how changes in what is considered ‘normal’ with regards to personal cleanliness and laundering have implications for water and energy consumption. Everyday knowledge and practice is an important issue for water managers in urban areas, with, for example, garden use accounting for 25 per cent of all household water use in the Greater Sydney area (Sydney Water 2003), and over 60 per cent in Alice Springs.
In bringing to awareness ‘routinised’ habits and interactions, retrieving them from the wordless background of ‘practical consciousness’, and subjecting them to scrutiny and reflection’ (Sofoulis 2005: 448), such research provides an important complement to more quantitative analyses of both attitudes to and consumption of water (for example, Kolokytha et al. 2002; Nielsen and Smith 2005; Hurlimann and McKay 2007; Zhang and Brown 2005). As Sofoulis (2005: 448) argues, ‘who normally entertains an attitude about a tap, a drain, or a sewage pipe?’ Yet it is precisely everyday objects such as these that connect consumers and householders to the wider socionatural networks that constitute ‘waterscapes’ (Swyngedouw 1999), so understanding habits of interaction with taps, pipes and buckets provides a crucial analytical link. Further, an emphasis on everyday practice can throw light on contradictory behaviours such as observed differences between attitude and practice (Askew and McGuirk 2004; Sofoulis 2005: 446), unrealistic perceptions by consumers of their actual water-consumption levels (Kolokytha et al. 2002: 399) and the use of discursive strategies to justify or excuse environmentally damaging practices (Kurz et al. 2005).
The study contributes to a growing body of work examining commonalities and differences in cultures of water (Strang 2004; Allon and Sofoulis 2006; Jackson 2006; Gibbs 2006). The theoretical framing draws on moves within geography and elsewhere to go beyond ideas of nature and society as separately constituted entities. New conceptualisations framed around hybridity and networks, as articulated for example by Latour (1993), Swyngedouw (1999) and Whatmore (2002), provide lines of approach to the complex entanglements of humans and nature, and to earth-surface processes pervaded by human agency. In an age of accelerating urbanisation, some of the most stimulating work illustrates ways in which cities are themselves saturated with non-human nature, and enmeshed with non-urban landscapes through intricate networks for the transfer of goods and services (Cronon 1991; Swyngedouw 1999; Gandy 2002; Braun 2005; Heynen et al. 2006).
I build particularly on the work of Kaïka (2005), who has provided an important study extending analysis of the modernist urban denial of nature to the space of the home, using the example of water. She argues that:
[T]he social construction of the Western (bourgeois) home as an autonomous, independent, private space is predicated upon a process of visual and discursive exclusion of undesired social (anomie, homelessness, social conflict, etc.) and natural (cold, dirt, pollution, etc.) elements … while the familiarity of the bourgeois home is dependent upon the visual exclusion of social and natural processes, the very creation of the safety and familiarity of the modern private home is nevertheless predicated upon the domestication of natural elements (water, air, gas, etc.) through a socio-economic production process. (7–8)
Kaïka makes the point that while the processes of social exclusion in and around the home have been extensively studied, for example in Sibley’s (1988, 1995, 2001) influential work on socio-spatial classifications and boundaries, the exclusion of nature and socio-natural processes have not been adequately researched or documented (52). The above studies draw in turn on the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966). In illustrating how different cultural groups order the world, Douglas argued that the classification systems (albeit themselves all different) leave certain things not belonging. In different ways, these come to be labelled ‘dirt’; that is, disorder, or matter out of place. Kaïka argues that: ‘Natural elements are not in fact kept altogether outside the modern home; but rather are selectively allowed to enter after having undergone significant material and social transformations, through being produced, purified, and commodified’ (Kaïka 2005: 64).
Thus water is purified to become ‘good’ nature before it enters the house, and once it becomes ‘bad’ nature, in the form of sewage, it must not only be removed, but be visually excluded. In fact, of course, both the purified water and the sewage are hybrid forms dependent on complex material and social networks. The familiarity and comfort of the bathtub or swimming pool, Kaïka argues, require those networks to remain invisible, and the space of the home to remain clean and pure.
A number of recent studies have analysed ‘droughts’ as complex events in which rainfall scarcity, public discourse, changing regulatory regimes, technological networks and private behaviours are entangled (Nevarez 1996; Haughton 1998; Bakker 2000; Kaïka 2003). Full discussion of these wider networks in Australia is beyond the scope of this paper, but our fine-grained focus here on household behaviours provides important points of intersection with these other studies. Consumer resistance to water-conservation measures, and continued expectation of water as a ‘naturally’ abundant good, has been documented in cases where there is a lack of confidence in a privatised supplier (Haughton 1998: 426; Bakker 2000: 16) or a discursive disconnect between the householder and the networks of technology and supply (Strang 2004; Kaïka 2005). In Strang’s analysis, the combination of privatisation of supply, water technology that encourages visions of an unlimited resource and increasingly individualised social lives has created a situation where, ‘domestic users are … impervious to efforts to conserve water’ (208). As a site where these networks are rendered partially visible and with which people engage on a daily basis, Australian domestic gardens provide a contrasting example; they are both arena and agent of changing practice.