Please note: I’m busy moving blogs, and copied this content over. The image links are going to break, if they haven’t already. It is what it is.
WaterBus = Schools Water Awareness and Education Project. Continue reading “Waterbus”
Forbes!
Please note: I’m busy moving blogs, and copied this content over. The image links are going to break, if they haven’t already. It is what it is.
Forbes! Continue reading “Forbes!”
Tame is not sustainable
Please note: I’m busy moving blogs, and copied this content over. The image links are going to break, if they haven’t already. It is what it is.
A talk I gave at Green Drinks: Bernelle Verster, 18 September 2011. It’s still a favourite.
Rickety Bridge
Please note: I’m busy moving blogs, and copied this content over. The image links are going to break, if they haven’t already. It is what it is.
The transcript of the talk I gave at the SA Geography teachers conference, on 24 September 2014.
The title, roughly, is Permaculture, water and the landscape: the connectedness of things
The attendees made for a lovely audience, so much laughing in all the right places that I got totally overexcited. 🙂 I’m not quite happy with the structure and content of this talk yet, but I think it’s starting to get there. (As a point aside, I think I should make a talk that gets into the nitty gritty of Permaculture, water and the landscape, but first, I need to write 3x 4000-6000 word essays on the PhD… sigh) Also, this was the first talk where my special person was in the audience. That was … different.
Motto in the drought
After being caught with a dirty house yet again when a film crew arrives, I decided to just embrace it ….
Embrace your inner scruffy. Design it well from the start.
It being anything from good quality odour absorbing clothes, low maintenance houses, rainwater collection devices …
Dry toilets for all, forever?
This post was developed as a submission for The Conversation. I have to rework it because “the article covers a huge amount of ground, and that there isn’t immediately a ‘golden thread’ that can be easily identified.” I like it, so it’s going to live here in its current form 🙂
When the probability of Day Zero was first announced in January 2018, the realisation that the extreme drought in Cape Town may affect the functioning of the sewer systems became apparent to everyday people. Through my work in [resource recovery from wastewaters](http://www.futurewater.uct.ac.za/FW-WWBR) and particularly how [sanitation can contribute to the circular economy](http://www.toiletboard.org/media/17-Sanitation_in_the_Circular_Economy.pdf) I have been thinking about the benefits of dry sanitation. I am intrigued by the potential of biological means to recover value from diffuse pollution. But could they ever be introduced at large scale?
Experting in times of crisis: Ethics of care.
This piece brings together concerns that I have from observing responses to the Cape Town water crisis. It was developed as a talk (slides here) which I never got to give, so I would appreciate input to guide me to develop this further.
This talk is in 5 parts:
- if innovation is by poor people, does it count?
- experting 101: ethics of care
- expert #fail: how not to expert
- advanced experting: how to jouissance
- in closing
Continue reading “Experting in times of crisis: Ethics of care.”
Response to an interview request 16 Feb 2018
I wrote this for a journalist a while ago. I don’t have time to make it pretty right now, but wanted this out there for a stressful presentation in a short while. 🙂
Marcel Hartmann, science reporter for Zero Hora
Bernelle Verster, Future Water institute, University of Cape Town 16 Feb 2018
- What are the reasons for the water shortage in Cape Town? Global warming? Population growth? Lack of environmental politics? I’d like to explain each one of them to our Brazilian readers.
Continue reading “Response to an interview request 16 Feb 2018”
Scaling water interventions
Conversation with someone chatting to me after the UCT water crisis lecture today (by the way, this Future Water page has many interviews and chats about the crisis, in balances informed tones). I didn’t go. Was duckfood shopping with a brief stop to do retail therapy. (The stress to submit the thesis has caused insomnia and to get myself to fall asleep I have been watching, wait for it, nail art videos.) So I went buying nail art stuff. Yup. Glitterified.)
Neil’s been working on sustainable urban water management for a long time. – http://www.uwm.uct.ac.za/
His comment about the rainwater tanks (being: rain tanks are a waste of money for the amount of buffering they provide) comes from his PhD student Lloyd Fischer- Jeffes’s work, where they saw that rainwater is more expensive than stormwater harvesting and managed aquifer recharge – which is effectively a huuuuuuge rainwater tank underneath the city.
[another UCT researcher said “imagine if 1/2 a million people had 2000 litre rain tanks, that would be 1000 million litres of water buffered. ]
Keeping the loop in mind
Presentation at the UCT Summer School, the pdf is available on the Future Water Institute website.
Kevin asked me to present on Innovations in Urban Water Management, through talking about my house. Instead I wanted to talk about systems, and took a term from the start-up scene ‘keeping the end in mind’, as in, keep your goal in mind, what you want to achieve, or what you want to sell it for. But really, we’re working with systems, and I want to focus on where these systems, these loops come full circle.