Sometimes I wonder why people seem to have stopped caring about climate change. Is it because it’s too big? Is it because we have a Prime Minister who is in a dirty love triangle with coal and gas? Or is it the convenience of the flushing toilet?
I lay in bed the other morning listening as someone in the far recesses of my house flushed a loo. I wondered, from the sanctuary of my repose, about the convenience of the detritus of our ablutions being taken away from our residence with the push of a button! Like Magic! Poo is here. Poo is gone. It’s like there never was poo. Evidence of the human stain on the planet is whisked away. And unlike so many women in the world without a flushing toilet, I never had to lift a finger. I never had to dig a hole. I never had to carry a bucket. It’s just gone. I haven’t even left my bed.
Can we please have a climate change button? Something we can push so that someone else can deal with it? Ah, there in lies the rub. Just because something is ‘gone’, doesn’t mean it’s no longer a problem. It just means it’s gone from my realm of responsibility, so the soothing flush of my waste is also my agency over my impact being whisked away.
It’s not really gone. It’s just gone from where I have to deal with it. It’s gone in a pipe, to a treatment works, then into rivers or into the ocean. While the systems are certainly better in first world countries, 80 per cent of the world’s sewage is discharged into the ocean untreated. The ocean is a great place to hide our waste because we don’t see it. The ocean is so big.
I believe flushing toilets are part of a deep psychology of denial and laziness around our human inability to take responsibility for our impact. If you had to literally deal with your own shit, I think you’d be more aware of your footprint. It’s the same with garbage services. We just put stuff in a bin and it magically disappears from our premises. Not as magic as the flushing toilet, it does require a couple of hi vis operators in a truck, but as long as you remember to put the bin out, then the evidence of how you live is gone. Taken away to be dealt with by someone else.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my bin service and my flushing loo. I am not fantasising about the days of the gong farmer (someone who dug out human excrement from privies and cesspits) or the Shit Carters. What I am wondering about is if this psychology of convenience is something we need to disrupt. Climate change seems to be the cancer the first world has created with our need for convenience. Convenience lies at the heart of our economics. It’s one of our key drivers. It is the drug we won’t give up.
Climate change is not convenient. It forces us to look at how we live. It asks us to innovate. It asks us to take responsibility. It asks us to think about our impacts. It asks us to do what humans resist the most: change. It asks us to stop using fossil fuels. It asks us look at our economic system and consider reform. It asks us to avoid the convenience of a massive supermarket and instead to grow our own food, and to shop at markets, or buy from local growers. It asks us to reconsider buying cheap clothing made by children in developing countries. It asks our governments to stop taking money from big corporations who fund coal and gas development and exploration.
The other day federal Labor resources spokesperson, Madeleine King, positioned climate activists as being just as naive and dangerous as climate deniers. Wow. I’d say knowing what we know, and after the humiliation of our PM rubbing himself naked in coal at the G7, we have some serious climate terrorists at the wheel and about to do a few burn outs.
The psychology of the flushing toilet is pervasive. But I know one thing for sure; coal is not the magic button they’d have you think and every time we pursue it, more turds float to the top.
It’s time we buried our shit. Or at least our shitheads.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
