18 February

‘Drought’ is still a highly loaded word in Australia for me. There’s a tendency to see rain as something that happens, or not, which we have no influence on. But rain is part of a wider water cycle, and we can influence that a lot. For example clearing land and preventing soil from storing water can drastically impact on rainfall. The Amazon rainforest, at the other extreme, makes nearly all of its rain itself. They say a river can survive humans taking about 20% of its water for irrigation and other uses. The Murray Darling regularly loses 50% of its water to irrigation in a standard year, and as high as 75% in a ‘dry’ year. Get the bullshit meter out next time you hear somebody say that river is dying because of ‘drought’.