Piping Mad

If you don't already think that the Victorian Government's pipeline from the Goulburn river to the Sugarloaf reservoir is a bad idea then the map on page 3 of today's Age newspaper should set you straight. While the media has highlighted that the route will follow the Melba Highway, I think the more interesting point is that most of the pipeline will loosely follow the course of the Yea River. The government is basically building a pipeline that will pump water back up the course of the Yea river.

It used to be that infrastructure planners came up with mad schemes to turn the rivers inland. Obviously they've changed their minds on that because now they are planning to use a river course that's flowing inland to pump water back to the coast. Even if one agreed in principle with these sort of mega-projects sure this should be opposed on practical grounds in favour of diverting water from higher in the Yea river and thus requiring a pipe a quarter the length of the current proposal. Admittedly the proposed pipeline will extract water from the Goulburn a few kilometers upstream from where the Yea river flows into it so the argument is probably that the Yea river is not big enough to provide the water on it's own. Yet the map just illustrates to me the flawed assumptions behind this project and others like it: the idea that we can just manipulate our environment on a large scale without worrying about the consequences.

When will we learn to simply live within our environmental means? We must come to fully value our interdependence with the environment, and work with it rather than to continually exert our power-over it. It is on this basis that I stand in principle against all these mega-projects that attempt to twist the environment to human purposes, pipelines and dredging included.