British Columbia Water

Dear Readers,
I wrote an article that some of you may be interested to read.  It's a political piece—not my usual.  I include as much of the Big Picture as possible. Waiting to hear from rabble.ca's editor to see if they publish it. Fun!
 
With love, Sally

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This article is about one of my favorite subjects: water.  It is about living a human life on a water-bearing planet.  It is also about being a British Columbian and pertains to all British Columbians, with very few exceptions.  

With very few exceptions here in BC, we would all consider ourselves “BC Hydro customers.”  (What percentage of us, exactly, live either in the Kootenays, New West, or off-grid?)  We all depend upon this particular service provider for the delivery of hydroelectric power from our precious river systems.  Whether you are a BC Hydro customer working for BC Hydro or not, the normal routines of your everyday living depend upon the consumption of safe and efficient water power in the form of electricity.  It brings light to our darkness, heat to our winters and cold to our food preservation endeavours.  With it we grind our coffee beans and do internet research and cook tonight’s supper.  For electricity—among the fulfillment of countless other basic needs, we all depend upon British Columbia Water.

The water isn’t ours, of course.  There is no such thing as British Columbia Water.  We partake of a mysterious and intelligent planetary biosphere, no less.  A molecular miracle with the chemical code H2O hydrates, and nourishes and grows, and feeds, and transports... life.  The fact that life as we know it can inhabit our Earth is due to an utterly mind-blowing complexity of symbiotic living relationships, all made possible by the presence of water.  What also makes this miracle molecule special is that it is forever “on the move” and sharing itself everywhere.  Because water moves, we can harness its tremendous energy to create electricity.  You are reading this article in large part due to multiple electrical processes; the downstream flow of a river is the source of each one.  

The water that makes up our bodies, too, never remains static.  All day, every day, we drink in water for hydration while simultaneously releasing it through our excretory functions.  Both ends (beginnings?) of this intimate system represent the planetary flow of water from one place to the next, in continual transformation.  We have no choice in the matter.  What creates us doesn’t belong to us.  The fact that H20 is called water when it appears in its liquid form is because of liquidity itself.  Water “runs.”  It cannot remain static.  Water cannot be owned.

The human brain is 85% water.  Our ability to think, feel, and execute day-to-day life tasks is due almost exclusively to the electrical (that’s right, electrical) wiring of our brains.  One of the main responsibilities of our brainwater is to act as the beholder of electrical potential shared between neurons.  Without a consistent supply of electrochemical signals dancing around inside its skull, a human body cannot exist.  Let alone, thought. 

Among these and a million other reasons, water is life’s own miracle on our planetary home—as far as we know the only cosmic body that is liquid water-bearing, and therefore life-bearing, within at least a few long light years of distance from us.  That makes Earth pretty special.  Naturally, however, this bigger picture within which our particular cosmic body sits makes us hardly a speck of dust floating somewhere in endless galaxies.  

So we needn’t worry or get too worked up about how special we are. 

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Until recently, I have remained happily ignorant and aloof in the midst of a major transformation of the power grid system in our province.  Having read something of the science about our new smart meters, I felt put at ease by the fact that the amount of wireless radiation from a home meter might be comparable to 30 minutes of time spent on a cellular phone in one year.  For health as well as other concerns I choose not to use a cell phone, though having to communicate via one of these devices for just 30 minutes in the course of a year certainly would not give me cause for alarm that a health risk was present.

A drop in the bucket.  No big deal.

I rent a ground level suite in a neighbourhood of our province’s capital.  A friend owns the house and lives upstairs.  In early January, he received a letter from BC Hydro informing him that an installer would be visiting to “upgrade” the meter that has effectively measured our home’s hydroelectric energy consumption for 50 years.  Previously, my friend had contacted BC Hydro to decline our upgrade to the smart meter.  His reasoning was not on the basis of a health risk, but rather was out of some frustration that—from his perspective—there was a glaring lack of invitation for public input and engagement respecting a massive overhaul to our grid system throughout the Province.

The letter we received is not a personal issue, and I know nothing about the person who wrote it except that his role at BC Hydro bears the title Chief Project Officer, Smart Metering Program.  With all due respect, it would be remiss to not point out that the language he relied on to write this letter reflects a style of leadership that is designed to deliberately exclude its recipients from a due process of collective dialogue.  Officers often work utilizing this communication style; it comes with the legacy of the job title itself.  What else could he do?  Clearly, he was simply fulfilling his duty to the crown corporation that employs him.  He was “just doing his job.”

As a British Columbian wishing to participate wholeheartedly in advancing the possibility of true health, well-being and equality for all people (and certainly not just people—we are only one miraculous species among billions inhabiting this Earth-speck-of-dust in endless galaxies), I feel it is my duty to ask some well-conceived and relevant questions.  I feel it is my duty to reinvest the deeper intelligence of life that is the source and possibility of all my thought and action in this Great Intelligence itself, on a human scale, via inclusive organizing principles by which we can live together, interact with one another, and share the preciousness of our world’s resources for the benefit of All.

In reading the January 4^th letter from BC Hydro, my bucket became filled with concerns and questions.  Many of my questions have been answered on the website (www.bchydro.com/smartmeters).  I perceive here a dedicated, comprehensive attempt to fill in the gaps for people who, like myself, wish to be better educated about how our utility provider works for us and to avoid reacting from a stance of personal opinion, fear or NIMBYism.  In a phone conversation with a Hydro representative I learned that by January 11^th approximately 93% of the upgrade was completed, which had involved installing 1.73 million meters.  While my bucket is still overflowing, at this stage of the grid upgrade it doesn’t interest me to make a fuss about the installation of our home’s smart meter.  The massive overhaul is nearing completion.  The officers have fulfilled their duty.  Almost all British Columbians have already been converted.

That’s all she wrote.

The letter presented a number of convincing arguments on behalf of the smart meters we bought from Itron Inc. for a base contract value of $270 million (www.bchydro.com/news/press_centre/press_releases/2011/itron_selected_smart_meters.html), including the statement: “The old meters are becoming obsolete and require us to manually perform services that have now been automated by smart meters.”  Any informed reader can attest to the fact that this kind of statement is being made all over the world in the name of new, “advanced and smarter” technology.  In the name of modernization.  Automation.  Wherever and in whatever context such statements are being made, it remains surprisingly rare that we humans acknowledge and give voice to the elephant in the room: our well-practiced mantra that new, advanced and smarter always means better.  Healthier.  Safer.  Happier.  (Which most of us will agree, ultimately, the word better comes down to, at the core.)  It begs the question of the degree to which our obsession with automation is currently helping us achieve these basic human ends.  It begs the question of why we so desperately avoid public conversations that allow us to unpack and freshly review our assumptions in an open, inclusive, mutually respectful way.  

What makes us resist a dialogue in which we humbly concede with our whole human intelligence that we can never know or understand the full impacts of allowing automated technology to replace our ability to “manually perform services”?  What makes us embarrassed to confess that automation cannot provide any ultimate guarantees?  What keeps us always looking elsewhere so we can consume the next shiny-modern-zippy-trendy thing instead of working creatively and collaboratively with the material legacies we have already created for ourselves, prioritizing before newer things more engaged people— their work, their natural skills and talents, their creativity, their questions?  Why do we continue to deny ourselves the (yes, often challenging, yes, sometimes frustrating, and no, probably not nearly as expedient as we would all like) learning and enrichment that such conversations would afford us?

If the biggest proponents for automating manual services succeeded in automating “manual” right out of the equation, what could we possibly agree, then, is left to bring hope of greater health, safety and happiness?  Where are we in this equation?

Which brings me back to water. 

Collectively, as a species, if we do not learn to love our water—to demand less of it and stop polluting it and clean it up and reduce our tampering with its natural flows and ensure people around the world have enough of it to meet their basic needs—we perish.  It’s that simple.  You, the reader, know this.  We don’t need statistical data or longitudinal academic research studies to “know.”  It only takes the normal circuitry of the brain in its electric dance of deductive logic and a well-functioning limbic system.  We know it because we feel it.  When we make our water sick, we are sick; the two go hand in hand.  Water makes us what we are.  Water makes us life.

As an informed reader, you may know that the intensive industrial production of information technologies is a highly water-consumptive and water-polluting endeavour.  If you are reading this article on a wireless device or some other form of computer technology, you can be quite certain you purchased a device whose production leeched toxic chemicals into a waterway somewhere.  You can be quite certain that the mining, manufacturing and assembly of the 1.73 million+ wireless smart meters we purchased has had a significant impact on water and its ecosystems.  This is something we cannot take back.  We have unleashed this impact long before measuring any of the purported environmental benefits of our upgrade to the smart metering system.  Likely, the impact was more than just a drop in the bucket.  Or, if it really was only a drop in the bucket, the drop fell in a bucket that is already bursting at the seams here on Planet Earth.  

The cracks and leaks are quite evident.   Like a dam ready to break.

I imagine that this particular issue, among many others, would have arisen in an atmosphere of public consultation and dialogue, had one been created prior to July 2011 when the grid upgrade began.  How would BC Hydro customers be served under the direction of a “Chief Project Collaborator,” or a team of Project Collaborators?  How would we, in turn, serve?  Under this style of leadership, would customers participate with more conscious responsibility for the complex and intricate systems we inhabit, making our primary role as consumers of hydroelectric power one of stewardship, precaution and care?  Would we have an opportunity to become better at not taking for granted what we are so apt to take for granted?

Having not been able to raise my hand before the deed was done, I’m hoping I’ll one day be able to take for granted that the production of two million shiny new meters was just a drop in the bucket...

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One of the most obvious saving graces of the smart metering system is standardization.  All our meters look the same now, across the province!  Thank goodness we have officers at BC Hydro.  Thank goodness the Crown took care of that for us.  An obsolete grid system would have required far too many manually performed services to maintain... more people working creatively with old stuff.  In the case of a power outage, I would have continued to rely on my landline to make a phone call to a real person about what’s happening in real time—using my own power of observation via the hydroelectric technology that sits on top of my shoulders.  

Non-standardized analog metering is messy and unwieldy, and it requires the wielding of a whole lot of wrenches and hammers.  Best we don’t depend too heavily on those gadgets, or invest our public money in them.  Especially when the people wielding such devices have to come to my house.  I used to engage in conversation with people like that, and sometimes I would learn something.  I would get to ask questions.  But now I don’t have to worry about these inefficiencies, and my privacy is better protected.  Everything is sure to work for me much faster and better, with less effort on my part.  

In respect to the provision of this essential service, standardization is no doubt much better.  The alternative was becoming impossible to predict and control, like a bucket coming apart at the seams.  Like a dam ready to break.

Like water.  Like life.