Green buildings and sustainable cities – news and views
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In Libya, in the era when Muammar Gaddafi still ruled, there were lessons in sustainability to glean, both environmental and social.
Among them a mud brick building with conical domes as a roof with small openings to allow light to enter the building and provide natural airconditioning keeping temperatures more than 10 degrees lower.
Ever since Muammar Gaddafi was interviewed by Jana Wendt on Oz TV in the early ‘80s, I’ve thought of him as Col. A name like Col fitted well with the glint of respect in Col Gaddafi’s eye when confronted by such an intelligent woman regardless of her great beauty.
Col proved to be much more astute than that fool, Eddie McGuire, who got rid of Wendt from Channel Nine. “Stupid is as stupid does” (Gump, 1994)
Little did I know when dubbing Gaddafi, Col, that I would end up visiting the desert-that-really-looks-like-a-desert that is Libya.
At the time Libya was a pariah state, due to the tenuous allegation of government involvement in the horrific Lockerbie bombing with strict UN sanctions against trade and travel.
But my employer, the English for Academic Purposes department of the Institute of Languages at UNSW, had a track record in pariah states.
At the time, a group of Iranian PhD students was undertaking academic English training before commencing their research studies.
When a good and thoughtful Iranian chemist began her research literature review with “once upon a time”, you knew that some fine-tuning was necessary.
The goss was that a bored Oz embassy employee in Tehran had an idea to imbue Iranians with Oz academic culture. Though all the women wore the hijab, contrary to general opinion at least 30 per cent of the cohort was female.
But this was somewhat of a norm in the early ‘90s; my undergraduate English for mechanical engineering class of some 35 international students was 60 per cent female with five from Indonesia or Malaysia wearing the hijab.
These were students who liked getting down and dirty with engines. In contrast, during one semester of ‘73 each time my cohort of 11 geology students including four women, joined a maths lecture of 200 all male engineering students, there would be an uproar because women had actually come to class.
My Libyans were all blokes though: eight hydrogeologists, one civil engineer, and one agriculturist. The only reason for me being in Libya was to test their academic English capability using a test based on the International English Language Testing System.
The UN bans precluded anyone not involved in the project from doing so. The project was the Col-inspired Great Man-Made River Project, where large amounts of pristine underground water were to be pumped from the desert in southern Libya to the population centres on the coast.
Ironically, considering the UN bans, UNESCO had called for tenders and accepted a joint application from the NSW Department of Water Resources, the Centre for Groundwater Management (originally at UNSW but now at UTS), and the Institute of Languages to train the Libyans for the best outcome for the project.
So off I flew to Paris with the director of the NSW Department of Water Resources for four days of contract negotiations with UNESCO prior to visiting Libya.
The UNESCO side of the negotiations consisted of five engineers or scientists from its African division.
They explained that the world’s best hydrologists were to be found historically in Holland (dykes) and Malta (keeping sea water out of the water supply).
But institutions from Oz had been chosen for the training program because Oz had found out the hard way with salinisation what not to do with the irrigation of deserts. UNESCO didn’t want to see widespread salinisation after only 50 years of lawns and golf courses in the Libyan coastal towns and cities.
The UNESCO Africans played hard ball with the negotiations and my director was having difficulties with their tightening of the budget. I had no oversight of monies at UNSW, so I wasn’t of much use in that sense.
However, a turning point came when I taught some of the Africans some Chinese during a coffee break. Each of them knew at least three languages but had no knowledge of Eastern languages or cultures.
Things went much more swimmingly after that. The director thanked me. The Africans seemed happy because I’d have a teaching role with the Libyans, however minor, and that I was a geologist who understood language. It’s funny what affects decisions in business.
Being in Paris again after living there over a decade earlier was exhilarating. The broad smile from une belle femme créole on the Metro when I happened by chance to catch her eye warmed the cockles of my heart for the remainder of the trip.
Being woken at 7am in our hotel by a blasting car horn from someone who’d been Paris-parked in by five centimeters at either end reminded me of the difficulties of finding parking in the arrondissements.
Again, because of the UN bans, we flew to Tunisia to drive into Libya early the next morning. We were surprised to find a desert-bound well maintained four-lane dual carriageway highway with passing Buicks and Mercedes all the way to Tripoli.
But the occasional glimpse of a comparatively new one of these seemingly abandoned in the middle of the desert made one think that there was more money here than sense.
From Tripoli we were immediately flown to Benghazi in a small executive-style jet, my only ever tangible rise above the hoi polloi.
Both Tripoli and Benghazi were sand-based cities. There was no grass to be seen. The only vegetation was the occasional stunted olive grove.
But in both cities, we’d turn a corner to find a towering gum tree planted decades before; our unique resilient flora is the reason Oz is mainly a desert-that-doesn’t-look-like-a-desert.
We arrived in Benghazi early enough to have a glimpse of the city near our hotel for the night including a walk through a bazaar, but this was not enough to grasp any feeling of the place such as the relationship between men and women.
We did, however, meet up with the UNESCO minders that were to accompany us south to the source of the Great Man-Made River: a chatty Czech mechanical engineer, a dour wiry Egyptian, and a 6ft 7in Syrian patriarch.
The ride south in our four-wheel drives was uneventful except for a few more seemingly-abandoned cars on the side of the road. But then we arrived at an oasis containing the 1000-year-old Atiq Mosque, a mud brick building with conical domes as a roof with small openings to allow light to enter the building and provide natural airconditioning.
I had read of such conical domes when helping a migrant PhD architect student with his thesis on cooling via non-mechanical means but was more than impressed with their actual effect. The temperature outside the mosque was over 30 degrees, but it was a cool 20 or so inside with enough light to move around freely.
(The two-decade old Economics and Business Building at Sydney Uni was designed to be cooled by non-mechanical means. The architectural firm won an award for their design. But within three years of melting summer heat on the top floors, the entire building was retrofitted with airconditioning. I have thought ever since that architecture prizes should only be awarded at least three years after occupation).
The next stop was at a tearoom/petrol station, where we were approached by two young (maybe 16- year-old) Sudanese, speaking broken English. They were on their way to Europe to make money, they said, an early precursor to the present flood of economic refugees.
We turned off the highway soon after to drive through nothing but sand with no discernible road. But after a while we’d come across 200 metre diameter circular lush fields of sorghum, wheat, or barley every five kilometres or so.
The Israelis were not the only ones attempting hydroponics.
We stopped at a building next to one of these fields, where large broken drill bits were piled against a wall.
The Czech mechanical engineer berated those in charge, pointing out that these could be easily fixed, another example of a throwaway society from too much oil money.
A similar pile of broken drill bits was found at Sarire, the local name for the Sahara, our final destination, again much to the consternation of the Czech mechanical engineer. Here, we found 5m diameter sections of pipe ready to be placed into this beginning section of the River.
The size of the pipe gives an idea of the amount of water in the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer that supplies the pristine water. Some estimates are of a 1000-year supply at current usage even with no recharge.
The workforce was multinational with a Korean engineering company in charge of construction and Thai providores providing meals.
Unfortunately for us from Oz, there was no beer to quench one’s thirst after a hard day’s travel in the heat of the nothing but sand desert. This was, of course, due to Libya being an Islamic state.
Thus, it was inspiring to hear our Syrian patriarch companion declaim translations of pre-Islamic Arabic drinking songs that night, showing that the original culture was not so bound by religion.
The Libyan students were tested the next day, resulting in International English Language Testing System scores ranging from 5-6.5. We stayed one more night to be driven back to Benghazi the next day and put on an overnight ferry to Valetta in Malta, which arrived on Sunday. Sunday in Valetta was awe-inspiring.
It was a beautiful sun-blessed day and it seemed like the whole population was out for an afternoon promenade around the harbour. I recognised physical characteristics of school mates at Canterbury Boys and later friends. Multiculturism is bliss.
We were back in Paris the next day with the prospect of a flight back to Oz at 11 the next morning. I contacted a former next-door neighbour in Waverley, Frank, who was managing a jazz club in the Sixteenth at the time. Frank and his good woman, Daniele, had had both positive and negative Oz experiences.
The most negative occurred after they’d left Waverley to drive to Darwin to experience the bush on their way back to France. On a country road they’d encountered a car coming towards them in the middle of the road, and Frank’s automatic French reaction was to steer to the right much to their chagrin and physical pain. But happily, they survived without major physical damage.
Frank lured us to visit the club that evening with an offer of free entry and drinks. The director was somewhat chuffed to be in a Parisian nightclub very much enjoying the ambience, the music, and the drinks.
He left at 12am because of our early morning start but I waited to accompany Frank home to have one more cognac because he wanted to show me his rock collection. Frank presented me with a small piece of the Berlin Wall for my pains.
My pains were not assuaged the next day, however, because the flight from Paris to Singapore was punctured by the wails of a teething baby only three rows behind us. I have suffered here and there for my sins.
Col Gaddafi certainly suffered for his. He was an authoritarian autocrat who brooked no dissent and was a rabid anti-colonial. He was also somewhat up himself, a trait that didn’t endear him to Oz.
After all, he called the Great Man-Made River the eighth wonder of the world. This may be a bit rich, but it is still by far the largest irrigation system ever built.
Col was somewhat of a conundrum. He was a devout Muslim who organised a socialist Libya around that religion, but still kept the Islamists at bay. No Taliban allowed. He was also almost a feminist by ensuring equality of the sexes, wage parity, and female educational and employment opportunity.
On his death, both Obama and Cameron pilloried him as an evil dictator, but Nelson Mandela mourned him, praising his strong anti-apartheid stance in “the darkest moments of our struggle”.
Both NATO and later the civil war opposition bombed various facilities of the GMR. The logic of short-term advantage of warfare doesn’t care so much for the nurture of the general populace.
Nevertheless, today the GMR is again up and running. There has been some consternation as to the sustainability of the project, with some predicting a mere decade of future use.
Of course, no resource is forever. But one of the hydrogeologists returned to UTS to complete a PhD based on the GMR data. He asked me to look through his thesis; there was no evidence of a looming catastrophic collapse.
Jana Wendt never made it back into the public eye with her incisive journalism after her stoush with Eddie McGuire.
Yet he retains his power and puerile quiz show on our TVs even after his sad casual racist comments on the Adam Goodes and Collingwood sagas.
Our Oz southern culture deserves better.
Dr Michael Paton is an associate of the Centre for Chinese Studies, University of Sydney. He was previously the Teaching Quality Fellow in the Faculty of Economics and Business, co-founder of the research group Sustainable Management of Organisations Group (SMOG), and Vice President (Asia) of the Australasian Association for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science. More by Michael Paton
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