Across America freshwater supplies are becoming scarce [ark], and water efficiency [search] is needed as never before. Examples are all around us: "An epic drought in Georgia [search] threatens the water supply for millions. Florida doesn't have nearly enough water for its expected population boom. The Great Lakes are shrinking [search]. Upstate New York's reservoirs have dropped to record lows. And in the West, the Sierra Nevada snowpack is melting [search] faster each year." Clearly much of the problem can be attributed to over-population and global heating which are starting to have a more noticeable impact. The price of global climate change policy and rezoning development away from water resources will be immense. And the price of upgrading America's water pipes alone is given as $300 billion over 30 years. Around the world some 2 billion people are expected to face water shortages worldwide [search] by the year 2050.

Posted by Dr. Glen Barry at 3:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Bottled water is deeply environmentally damaging [search] and purchasing bottled water faces a backlash [ark] from an increasingly ecologically literate public. Water bottles number in the billions -- using petroleum in their construction, and taking up landfill space. Water needs to come from somewhere, and too often tap water is merely bottled and then driven long distances. We need to be concerned with maintaining our regional watersheds -- making sure our own tap water is safe and clean [search] -- rather than thinking we can continue to exploit mythologically pure bottled water from exotic locales. After drinking bottled water for years, an acquired taste we thought healthful, my family and I have happily converted back to using tap water. We tested the water prior to doing so and it was fine in all regards. It is heartening to see people doing the right thing, as rejecting bottled water becomes an ecologically beneficial and cool idea.

Some interesting facts from AlterNet article [ark]: "Americans drank some 37 billion bottles of water in 2005, despite the inconvenient truth that in most parts of the country, tap water is not only perfectly safe, but also more tightly regulated that its bottled counterpart... manufacturing plastic bottles for bottled water creates an astounding amount of pollution -- an annual equivalent of 1.5 billion barrels of oil... Bottled water 'very clearly reflects the wasteful and reckless consumerism in this country...' "

Posted by Dr. Glen Barry at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A whole range of environmental and social woes have emerged from an ill-informed, incautious rush into biofuels. Humanity's knee jerk reaction has been to seek to replace our dependency upon fossil fuels with a dependency upon living biomass; rather than embracing conservation, efficiency and true renewables. Emerging concerns with biofuels have included well-documented destruction of rainforests [search], human rights abuses [search], and an increase in food prices [search] as we choose to feed our cars before the poor and hungry.

Yet perhaps no element of biofuel policy is more alarming and unacknowledged than the degree to which biofuel production requires unsustainable use of scarce water resources [ark | search]. The National Research Council reports that the US ethanol rush will result in a drain on drinking water as corn production requires vast quantities of water for irrigation (planned cellulosic ethanol from biomass almost certainly will as well). Large scale, commercial production of biofuels mines water and soil resources, diminishing them -- making biofuels a non-renewable energy source. Biofuels are a deadly distraction from powering down the industrial Earth destroying growth machine.

Posted by Dr. Glen Barry at 9:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Even as climate change and poor land use cause deserts to expand around the world [search], Egypt is poised to use limited water supplies to irrigate their deserts [search]. The Egyptian government is moving forward with a US$70 billion plan to reclaim 3.4 million acres of desert [ark] over the next 10 years, using Nile river waters that are already near exhaustion and highly contested.

Such efforts may work for awhile, but particularly in arid nations like Egypt, water supplies are inevitably overutilized, population advances negate increased food production, and a whole slew of ecological problems are created. These include salination of soils, changing of local microclimates and exhaustion of regional water supplies. It is unwise to use precious water resources to grow food in deserts unsuited to cultivation and where water evaporates quickly. The plan is clearly "neither practical nor sustainable and might ultimately backfire", and demonstrates the desparate situation that over-populated, resource exhausted nations such as Egypt face.

Posted by Dr. Glen Barry at 1:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)