Desalination

If you did elementary Chemistry, Science or Physics...or indeed if you have boiled water for pasta...then the science of desalination is probably familiar to you.
Salty water is boiled. When it boils, the steam is actually free of salt, so if you can collect the steam and then reconstitute it to water (by cooling it back down) that water is salt free...and indeed there is a salt residue. Often in the science lab that is what you do to collect a soluble slat.
On the face of it the science is attractive in our present water crisis, if it were not for one small thing. And that is the big orange block at the bottom of the schematic diagram marked HEAT
Heat of course is costly to produce, and there has to be a weighing up of the relative benefits. (a relatively good discussion of issues involved here)..
The major way to defeat the cost issue is to build big rather than small, of course the trouble is that in election times where each side is calling the other chicken there is a tendency to tokenism, in order to be seen to be doing something.
Tokenism usually means the making of a gesture which looks like the real thing, but in reality is designed to give the impression of activity rather than actually embracing the difficulty. ( a related but different issues about the relative cost of 'organic produce' is here . The question becomes at what point does the activity actually become a reality or are we content that it might be some sort of chimera.(some sort of fanciful mental illusion or fabrication.) .... maybe more coming

Organic distance

In the way that we have of making the complex even more so, environmental issues seem to get more difficult rather than less as years go by. Here in Europe where so much fresh produce has to be imported from warmer climes an interesting debate about organic versus carbon is happening.


I often think of 'organic produce' as being those not entirely clean vegetables and tomatoes that you see at the Adelaide Market. But this is quite crude caricature. Of course the key thing is that they are grown without chemicals, either fertilisers or pesticides.


But the British National Farmers' organisation makes the point that a lot of 'organic fruit' (bananas for example) may be organic but have travelled an enormous distance to get to UK markets.


The usual sort of complaint you know a farmer in Shropshire, the heart of England's asparagus growing district (through which we recently travelled) noted that his local supermarket had abundant supplies of 'organic' asparagus from, of all places, Chile and none from local farms.


The hidden ecological cost in transporting the produce is difficult to pin down, though clearly there is more to be considered than whether or not the banana has been sprayed with Zyklon B (unlikely!!).


Australians don't yet appear to have got to such a keen point where the carbon footprint is examined alongside other factors, though clearly we will have to.


It would be nice to think that we will not just hurtle down the path of more and more cars and roads, cheaper and cheaper flights, until everything is just so gummed up that it is almost terrifying.


Organic, it seems to me, is good...but at what expense. There is much to be balanced in the scales