Saturday, May 8, 2010

Transcript of Interview with Dr Sam Trowsdale

Sam makes some interesting points. Discussion around anything raised in this interview is most welcome.  Particularly interested in reaction to the comments about the age groups who care about the environment. I think I'm inclined to disagree with them!
 
3 May 2010
SPECTRUM PROJECT
Amelia Hitchcock interview with:

Dr Sam Trowsdale
Lecturer
Research Interests: Urban Hydrology; Water and Society; Water Sensitive Urban Design; Positive Impact Living

Amelia Hitchcock:I’ve been networking via facebook and have set up a blog to track this project.

Sam Trowsdale: Sure

So basically what I’m trying to do is network people into collecting water samples and then use the samples and the images of people that collected it in an installation based artwork. So whether I project the photos through the wall of water that I create, or whether I, I’ve been experimenting with red cabbage indicator paper and using the water to paint on that which I’m having various degrees of success with, so..

K

. ..Your Interests on the website were to do with water and urban hydrology so I just wanted to know what your point of view on where society should be standing with water.
And, generally what do you think of me as artist using this dialogue and scientific conventions, I suppose in not necessarily scientific ways?

(laughs) There’s quite a lot to unpack in that..there were a couple of questions you asked, one was on my views on the role of water in society.
One was around my view of you as an artist using water communicating the role of water through your art, and there were some others as well, but we’ll come to those. Let me just deal with those first two. So firstly I think it’s fantastic that you’re using water in art. I mean, the more prominent water can be in society the better. At the moment we’ve got this sort of, urban paradigm, pipe paradigm, we take water and we get rid of it as quickly as possible. We just stick it underground. It’s just out of sight, out of mind. I flush my toilet, I don’t think about it, it’s gone, right? Rain falls on my road, it’s into the drain, gone. I don’t want anything to do with it. It’s gone. I turn on the tap and then it’s gone down the drain. So we’ve got this disassociation right. It’s similar throughout the environmental field where we’re disassociating ourselves from reality. So anything for me that makes water more prominent, more visual, more evident an in front of us is a good thing. So there’s lots of work that’s been done to daylight water, to get it back into our society. I think some of the best work is involving kids in water. So making a children’s’ playground with water features, and using run off or storm water for rivers and things in this playground with stepping stones. As a kid I used to love stepping stones, and I can’t see why not incorporate this into a playground. So I think it’s fantastic you’re using water as a media. There’s lots of people doing it a the moment, it’s quite topical. 

Yes.

So where do I see water in society was the other question. I think my answer has partly shown some of my colours.

Yes (laughs)


Water is fundamental to life, yeah? but it’s also been fundamental to the development of society as we know it. I mean it’s fundamental to the development of language, it’s fundamental to the design of the whole economic system that we’ve got. IT’s completely fundamental to the ecosystem services. It created us, I’m 70% water just like you and so, completely fundamental. But also it was used in society, it was used to develop society. So used as a mechanism for irrigation...

So, Roman Aqueducts or further back??

So before that we had the fertile crescent, So Mesopotamia was developed, was probably the first complex society was developed. The reason it was able to develop language and art and culture was because the amount of free time on their hands. They had time. The idea is they weren’t spending their time looking for food. What allowed people to have that time to create, to develop art and develop language and writing..

Is irrigation?

Is irrigation. So we were able to develop crops. Or some people were able to develop crops and the people in power were able to develop an language and structure that allowed them to tax the people that developed the crops, so they didn’t need to go out and plant them and reap that harvest, so they had time on their hands to develop a social structure for society. Irrigation allowed that. So water is seriously fundamental. And we seriously mismanage water. We’re really bad about mismanaging water. 

Are you talking on a New Zealand or a Global Scale?

Global Scale.

What about specifically here?

Particularly here, we are seriously bad at managing water.

For me I think this is a global issue, my parents are from England, I’ve lived in Japan, I’ve been all over the world, but here we have this complacency, that we’re never going to run out of water because of the amount of rainfall we have and so on, so people just use. Even if you go over to Aussie, water is a key word everyone is trying to stick to having a 2 min or a 5 min shower, lots of people have timers in their home because water is precious. But here, it’s completely the opposite.

Yep. Again, it’s framed a different way. The way that society views water in Australia is that it is a scarce resource, it is limited. They view that they have undergone climate changed. This is the word of the Government and Local government is that climate change has happened, we’re in a drought, it’s a long term prolonged drought, and we’re in a water crisis. And that’s what their media portrays water as well. Whereas, you’re right, it’s a different perception here.
Actually it rains a similar amount in Melbourne as it does in south east England. Go to England and ask people how they feel about water and they say it rains all the bloody time. It’s miserable in England it rains all the time, but they’ve got the same amount of rain falling in Melbourne as in south east England. And you’ve got London in South East England, seven million people living in it, it’s a big city.

Yeah, I’ve lived there.. it's huge

Well that’s right, well how do you provide water for that many people? It’s a very different perception of in the Uk compared with Australia, where in the UK they’re mainly concerned with flooding. Same rainfall, but very different perception given by the media... so flooding is driving many of our funding efforts towards research and development in the UK, whereas drought and preserving water, water crisis is...

Funding it in Australia...?

Yes absolutely where as it’s Enviromental values that get funding in New Zealand, so when we think about water, we’re taught to think about contamination of waters in New Zealand and these competing demands for waters in our split society, the farmers and the rest of us... Should the farmers or the urbanites get the water? Are the cows polluting my aquafilter, you know? Usually the cities are down stream. There’s a big tension, how do we allocate water?
We’ve got tonnes of it, how to we allocate it?
Who has got the right to it?

So what do you think of selling our bottled water overseas, I mean in terms of the way that we market it, as coming from a pure country. The quality of the water once you get away from the source is so questionable.

Look we have very high quality water sources here. Bottled water is a fashion, iIt’s a fashion and we’re all buying into it. Whether you like it or not, we buy bottled water in New Zealand. Costs 1000 times more expensive than the water comes out of the tap, but we still buy it. It costs more than petrol, but we still buy it.


(Laughs) I know.

So I give my example in class as : if you could fill up your car by turning the tap on at home and it costs very little, really, it’s all subsidised? Would you then drive to the petrol station and pay 1000 times more to fill up your car.

Everyone says no, but we do.

Of course they do. I look round class and everyone has a waterbottle. It’s just a fashion we’re buying into. Makes us feel sexier. Advertisers have got us. 

That’s where the Nipple fridge as they like to call it is New Zealand Pure – baby bottles full of filthy water. Because for me teh reality is that there’s only a very small amount of our streams taht you can take water from. The number of bottled brands sold in New Zealand is a lot less than the brands that we export. Google New Zealand mineral water and you come up with 20-30 brands that you never even see here, they’ve all got your pure mountain stream etc. I’ve been talking to Mike Joy from Massey in Palmerston North, he does freshwater ecology, and he says that the lowland streams, it’s almost 90% that you can’t swim in, you can’t touch.
So the whole idea of this project is, well I collected the dirty water for the fridge, and it had visual impact, it made you think, but for me going to the stream where they’re pumping effluent, sure it’s treated, but it’s from a sewerage facility from a town where they haven’t upgraded their facilities in 20 years and the population has more than doubled, but they’re spending 3 million on an artificial beach in the recreation centre, but the kids can’t swim in the stream anymore. For me that smell, that interaction with the water, was really important for my awareness of the environmental cost of my living is. So the idea of getting people to get water is really key to this. To get that secondary involvement. Not just about them being part of the artwork, it’s them experiencing their local body of water, however pristine or degraded it might be.

Yeah, that’s good. Again, there’s that disconnectedness- our complacency is partly driven by our disconnectedness between us and our environment, or us and our water sources. Like you say, the stream that’s thickly polluted due to the sewerage effluent plant, and the artificial beach that’d downstream of that probably... yeah, we’re not aware. We flush our loos and we just forget about it. It’s a sure sign of our complete bungheadedness. It’s the biggest microbial contaminator of water. We take drinking quality water, poo into it, flush it, and with minimal treatment, then give it back to environment to treat essentially.
 
Yep.

So we’re not very good at managing water. So groundwater, Groundwater for me portrays an example of what we’re doing to our fresh waters. So we don’t really think about ground water. It’s under our feet, we can’t see it, it’s hard to conceptualise what ground water is, how much there is, where it is. But it’s the source that so much of our society relies on. 

The nutrient levels in New Zealand are going up though...from what I've read.

So of the worlds fresh water, most water on earth is in our ocean. About 3.5% of water is fresh water. About two thirds of that 3.5% is icecaps, generally in Antarctica and up in the Artic, so away from where we live, unless we get very cold or drag icebergs round the world, and that’s not going to happen...
So there’s a tiny minimal proportion at any one time stored in our lakes and rivers, and they’ve got a high turn over time, they’re easier to visualise and manage and store and distribute. It’s an engineering paradigm.
But of 3.5% of our freshwater, 2% locked in icecaps, 1% is groundwater, and only tiny percentage is surface water. 

Of that groundwater, half of it is too deep, or too saline to be of use. And about a quarter of it is too polluted to be treated, already. We’ve just nuked it.
And the rest of it, we’re pumping out at vast levels. In order to irrigate our fields, to supply our foods, to build our societies, build our populations, grow our populations grow our economies, so we’re just mining this water rapidly around the world, in order to produce the food we rely on. 

Then combine that with glacial melt and so on...

Yeah well glacial melt, well it’s more evocative right. Beautiful glacier melting, poor polar bear, swimming around drowning... tugs on those heart strings..whereas groundwater, there’s nothing living underground, it’s all damp and dark anyway, let’s just pump it..

But I mean, combine those two things, the pollution of the bore water, and then you’re using all the glaciers which are blocking the lakes which supply major waterways it’s a combination for disasters isn’t it.

(nodding)

So.. what are your thoughts about pushing this further? Because I’ve reached the extents of my network and I’m pushing my network to tap into their networks, but maybe I’m not accessing the right people. There are a lot of artists that are so caught up in what they’re doing that they don’t want to get involved in something else...Who would you approach with this sort of project?

Good question, I don’t know. I don’t have the answer for that. If I was an artist and I was trying to make a statement about water, I would be targeting public installation. You can draw a crowd quite quickly, a fountain becomes a landmark, a children’s playground with water becomes a landmark, that’s how I’d get my audience. 

Are you teaching classes on this sort of dialogue, am I able to send you links to this project to disperse to your students?

Yeah sure.

They obviously have interest in this so it might be easier to get them involved. I’ve tried to get in contact with Waicare but they haven’t got back to me. I’ve got permission from DOC to collect samples under 250mL.. so that’s not an issue. It’s just a question of getting people out there.

Well yeah, I get accused of preaching to the converted, these are environmental science students they obviously have an environmental consciousness. If I were an artist, I’d be targeting the rest of society. 

Well I’m trying to involve both. The idea of connecting people through their faces is because the human face is something we react to very strongly, we can’t avoid that. We look for similarities or differences. With the projection, I have no intention of stating what they’re studying or why they’re involved in the project.

So how about looking at that dual society between the rurals and the urbans. How about focussing on involving farmers who have this perceived connection with the environment? Asking farmers to sample their local watercourses that run through their farms, and bring that into the cities. Addressing that disconnectedness of urbanites compared with famers – and what they’ve done to their lands? Is it our disconnection with these things?

I’ve found it’s a hot bed when you approach farmers.. I’ve had a very irate email from one woman who denies all the environmental statistics attached to the quality of water that runs through her farm. Just doesn’t want to know, thinks that I’m misquoting statistics that I don’t know what I’m talking about, that this water is pure and unaffected by farming. Very angry responses. Like the chap who has been done 17 times and has now lost his empire over dirty dairying.. there’s a lot of farmers you think they might be connected to the land, but the reliance of our economy on farming has seen a turn to chemical enhancements and bad practise to meet demand...

So play on that. It’s very... prevalent in New Zealand. You’ve noticed there are very strong feelings about that....

But I think it’s equally important to get people from Urban areas to go to their stream in an urban area. . So the whole act of them going to get water out of their stream, maybe getting muddy, to get water out of the stream is something I want to push.. because for the farmer who interacts with that every day, it’s not a big deal, but for someone to go out of their way, I hope it will make them think more.

What about... We picked up on something that was sexy and trendy at the moment, particularly in urban areas, is bottled water... so what about asking people in Urban Areas to collect tap water? Because it’s really simple and obvious to do... it doesn’t involved getting muddy, getting my shoes dirty, it’s just going to the sink and filling a bottle and sending it off.. you could play on the idea that most of our bottled water is tapwater... 

I’ve been getting people to used recycled bottles to send the samples to me.

I think it’s a great idea getting urban people more connected with their environments... but I find there’s only really two types of people that care about their environment. There are young people, that don’t know any better, they still are about the environment, and then there are old people, who have nothing better to do. Everyone in the middle is so caught up in the rat race that they don’t have time to care...

I’m hoping to tap into that by using the image as part of it, because there’s something about art that has prestige that people like to buy into.

That’s great, it’s good you’ve got a mechanism to tap into the people that have time for art.. it’s great! But getting them to go and sample their streams... it’s going to be quite a push. Getting people to question themselves and their realities, where their water is coming from and how much we take water for granted. You could have bottles of stream water on one side, and bottles of tap water on the other... you might end up with 1000 tap samples and 5 stream samples... would be an interesting comparison...?

It would be! I think that would be a whole different installation (laughs).

Well, it’d be good to get many pieces out there.

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