Opinion: Jeremy Loops On What Cape Town's Water Crisis Can Teach Australia

South African singer Jeremy Loops is back in Aus this week for a run of shows. His latest album, Critical As Water, sees Loops tackle tackle the serious water shortage facing his home city of Cape Town, South Africa in several songs. Predicted to be the first major city in the world to run out of water, the artist touches on the crisis during songs like Flash Floods and the haunting ballad Vultures. 

Written exclusively for The Music, Loops takes a look at the issue, and what it could mean for Australia, in this opinion piece.

I think Cape Town’s water crisis is a warning sign for Australia and the rest of the world that this ‘environmentalism stuff’ isn’t just hokey, and there’s real consequences to consuming more resources than the planet is able to produce.

My fear is people will change their ways when it’s too late. And the job of the environmentalist — a group I identify with having co-founded a tree-planting organisation — is to educate people about the state the environment is in and working to accelerate behaviour changes before it’s too late.

The thing is 'it being too late' isn't in the distant. Look at Cape Town, a major city where we faced the real prospect of running out of water as a city this past year. The thing is this could have been avoided, if it wasn't for human indifference.

Around the time Cape Town’s water crisis came to a head, we began learning that our local government had been warned as far back as 2009 that if our city’s consumption habits did not change, any notable change in rain patterns would lead to a water crisis.

The thing that’s wild is that the city’s governance received this warning in a white paper from the Department Of Water Affairs & Forestry, so it wasn’t as if these were amateur geologists and water specialists crying wolf. And whether it was bureaucracy, 'head-in-the-sand; ignorance, or some other inexcusable reason, nothing was done at city level and the citizens of Cape Town only realised the severity of the situation when the rain patterns did change, and as a city, we’re on the brink of disaster.

I know Australia’s suffered some heavy droughts in recent times, what with the Millennium Drought at the turn of the century. I recall reading that this most recent round of droughts in Australia may be the worst there’s been in 800 years. Here’s the thing - that’s terrifying, and I hope the terror has spread nationwide.

I know as a nation, Australians are used to extremes in weather patterns, but my hope is people aren’t behaving as if ‘things will return to normal’ because it may never return to normal, and so it’s everyone’s responsibility to behave that way.

I’m a musician and I’m an environmentalist, and so I spend a lot of my time figuring out how to use the platforms music gives me to spread important messages. Preserving our planet for future generations - and, hell, our current generation - seems an important enough message to me.

You can catch Jeremy Loops on his Australian tour this week; head to theGuide for more info.