The “Solving the Water Crisis” video series shares Colin Austin’s search for practical answers to the global water crisis. What began as a hunt for better water technology quickly revealed a deeper challenge: how humans make decisions inside organisations, and why good ideas often fail to be adopted. The series is available online as free low-resolution downloads and also on DVD in high resolution. This page explains the series, the current episode, what’s coming next, and how to order.
About Us
This page sits within a simple set of themes:
- Managing water
- Technology
- Oldies but goldies
The focus is not on glossy marketing. It is about practical ideas, lessons learned the hard way, and tools that can be used by households, communities, and irrigators.
The “Solving the Water Crisis” Series
The Solving the Water Crisis video series is the story of my search for solutions to the worldwide water crisis. It began as a straightforward search for technology that could help us make more effective use of water.
However, traumatic events quickly changed the direction of the work. It became clear that the key issue was not only technology. The real key was the way humans, as individuals, operate within organisations — and how that affects decisions, priorities, and adoption of better practices.
In other words, the water crisis is partly a technical problem, but it is also a human systems problem.
Formats and Availability
The series has been made available as a set of free downloads from the web in low-resolution .wmv format. These downloads are intended to be accessible and lightweight, so people can view them without large bandwidth requirements.
The same series is now also available on DVD. (Cover notes are available separately.)
The DVD provides a high-resolution version of the videos compared to the low-resolution web files.
How to Order the DVD
The DVD is available by email request.
- Email: colinaustin@bigpond.com
- Running time: 75 minutes
- Cost in Australia: $15 (includes post and packaging)
- Cost overseas: $18 (includes post and packaging)
- Payment: PayPal or direct transfer (please email for details)
If you would like the best viewing quality, order the DVD version. The web versions are intentionally created at low resolution.
The Next Part of the Series
The second part of the series will start again in the new year. The next episode will look at how a household can become almost self-sufficient in water for garden irrigation.
Later episodes will cover irrigation scheduling — one of the most cost-effective ways of making better use of water. After that, the series turns to one of the biggest hazards in modern irrigation: salinity and the slow build-up of salt in the soil.
This Month’s Video
Part 5 — The Water Paradigm
We only harvest a minute amount of rain. We mainly catch large rains that fall on mountains, and we miss small rains that fall on plains.
In this episode, we introduce the concept of the useful life of water, and how we can save dam water by extending the useful life of rain.
Download Part 5
Previous Months Videos
The earlier episodes are available as web downloads in low-resolution WMV format:
- Part 1 — The Ghost Town (3.3 mb WMV file)
How a chance but traumatic visit to a ghost town in the Middle East, destroyed by modern technology, challenged my belief in a technological solution. We look for solutions by studying how individuals and organizations actually operate.
- Part 2 — Death of the Silver Bullet (3.6 mb WMV file)
I see that looking for some magic silver bullet is doomed. Science and modern society is based on the process of reductionism, breaking complex projects into ever smaller parts. But this leads to immersions and over simplification which can miss vital clues on how to solve the water crisis. I start to look for what we are missing.
- Part 3 — The Eco Village (7.6 mb WMV file)
What actually is the problem? We take the case of a small eco village which has to meet all its own water needs and manage its wastewater (greywater and sewage water) without polluting its water sources. We see that the quantity of drinking water should never be a problem, the issue is to control what is in the water. Irrigation water for plants is by far the largest user of water but how do we recycle our sewage, domestic wastewater and greywater (greywater recycling)?
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- Part 4 — How to Stop Our Dams Emptying (3.4 mb WMV file)
- Part 5 — The Water Paradigm
The current web videos are created at low resolution. For a high-resolution version, please order the DVD.
Coming Videos
The series continues with the following planned episodes:
- Part 6 — How a household can become almost self-sufficient in garden irrigation water.
- Part 7 — Scheduling (a): controlling irrigation depth.
- Part 8 — Scheduling (b): adaptive or self-learning irrigation.
- Part 9 — Sustainability and salinity.
- Part 10 — Adoption by the community.
These topics reflect a practical progression: first the household level, then farm-level efficiency, then long-term sustainability constraints, and finally the hardest part — adoption.
DVD Reminder
Now available on DVD — please email colinaustin@bigpond.com.
Starting again in the new year.
Contact
The current web video is created at low resolution. Order the DVD for the high resolution version.
Please email me at colinaustin@bigpond.com.
Author and Location
Colin Austin
Kookaburra Park Eco Village
Gin Gin, Queensland, Australia 4671
(Last revised 31 October 2005)
