 I'm going to do a little poem for you all this morning. This one I think requires a little bit of explanation to begin with so you don't get a little weird at it out. But I was working about eight years ago in Canada in Saskatchewan as a water issues officer with a local environment and conservation agency and was teaching water conservation to people but was finding a lot of the stuff, the facts and figures, the data driven stuff, the behaviour change that I was trying to tell people was all pretty dry and so I thought I'll do something a bit different and put myself on a water conservation diet of deciding for a whole month that I was going to use no more than 25 litres of water per day to meet all my daily needs and to give you context that's about this much cubed that much water and so that was for cooking, cleaning, bathing, flushing, laundry everything you can imagine and then I wrote a little poem about it which was much less yeah, dry and boring than the powerpoint presentations that I had been doing so here we go I haven't had a shower in 28 days and it's fair to say that nobody executes a sponge bath quite the way that I do I've earned my black belt and a PhD in the ancient art of sponge bathery tomorrow's job bucket laundry is my plumbing broken is my bathroom being renovated no, this is about me using my voice and this is about those who have no choice and the reason I do this is to make you think how much water was used when you were last at the kitchen sink and between your ingrained habits and the taxes you pay and the ability of your grandchildren to freely play in a lake devoid of blue-green algae between the energy used to pump sacred life into your home through subterranean water highways between all of these things can you make a link 25 litres a day is all I'm allowed this manic month of scribbling and jotting I am the calorie counter of the water world and now I realise with the sharp clarity and the sudden compulsion of somebody who's rapidly losing her footing in the crumbling sandstone the CD chasm why diets never work I want to etch on your minds with a water-based ink and I want you all to be thinking about how much water you use and how much you abuse I've been labelled alarmist, a dirty hippie and more I've been called an attention-seeking whore beware the iron firm grips some people were maintained they're God-given claim to remain apathetic now whilst measuring out bathing water I can almost already feel the sleek ribbons of cascading warmth soon to be delivered by my trusty yogurt container this sponge bath has earned and I'll enjoy it more than ever before that I've reached out to turn on that shower dial up the stairs with my bucket and I'm careful not to slurp I can't afford to waste a single drop of the bathroom ready to go with my luxury steaming H2 tragedy struck and my haste to have stumbled and spilled my bucket I watched my efforts drain away blue gold on porcelain in the bottom of the tub down the sewer lane pretty much unchanged from the freshwater traffic on the intake highway and as it passes by it may honk and wave on its way back from the river from whence it came and now I must walk down stairs measure out more water and return to the stove with it novelty has worn off and at this stage I'm over it still I walk down 16 stairs and as sure as hell beats 16 miles from a sunbaked village on a dusty road a woman with a jug on her head she goes and where this woman she goes she walks with her hopes and she walks with her dreams and the woman hears her story in three short days my stand of solidarity comes to an end but I will not forget her story echoes in every drip of a leaky shower head in every careless flush the weight of that clay jug sits on my shoulders every time I see somebody turn their back on a running tap tomorrow's wars won't be fought over a thirst for oil but over thirst in and of itself with three days to go I'm struck by the irony that water makes up 70% of my body so when the wells run dry and the fields turn to dust I wonder will they be coming to tap me? Kia ora