“PROBLEMS CREATE SOLUTIONS”

It was sunset. Ngarrindjeri Ruwi, lands and waters, lay before us. The sky turned from blue to mauve to indigo, and then under moonlight, the vast body of water now known as Lake Alexandrina, began to shine. Lights sparkled from Raukkan, ancient Ngarrindjeri homelands. My companion, an elder, was silent. We nursed a shared grief. With serenity above and below us, it was hard to credit that the lake and its inhabitants were stressed, almost to the point of exhaustion. But the uncharacteristic thin snake of a sandbar way off in the middle of the lake was a sign that something is wrong, so very wrong.

“The problem creates the solution.” Did Confucius say that? Or Dr Who? Whoever. The River Murray certainly has plenty of problems:

Over-allocation that has reduced the River Murray's flow by over three-quarters.
Drought.
Century's old squabbling between states.
Upstream "hoarders."
Downstream "whingers."
Water thieves.
Water gluttons.
Marginalized Traditional Owners.
Endangered sources of traditional food and medicine.
6 million trees felled in the Murray-Darling Basin.
Barrages. Locks. Weirs.
Evaporation.
Inappropriate European farming and crops.
Rising salinity levels.
Pesticides, herbicides that kill soil bacteria, rob the soil of moisture, and mobilize salinity.
Destruction of the natural water-cleansing biodiversity.
Species extinctions.
Inappropriate introduced species.
Impediments to fish passage along the rive
Disregard of the Ramsar Treaty to protect the habitat of migratory birds.
Unusable, undrinkable water, polluted by heavy metals, salt, pathogens, algal blooms.
Exposed toxic soils: sulphur acidification.
Stressed landholders and traders.
Shrinking profits, bankrupt businesses, shrinking communities..
Disoriented, depressed and dislocated families.
Resentment of "environmental" flows.
Increased groundwater use.
Danger of bushfire.
Climate change.
Reforestation altering patterns of run-off.
Reduced return flows from irrigation.
Australia's food bowl concentrated in the Murray Darling Basin.
And as Ngarrindjeri elder Matt Rigney pointed out: Population growth from two centuries of post-Invasion immigration....

If it's true that problems create solutions, then Australia's current water crisis will generate solutions of galactic proportions, given the hordes of challenges.