It's Time to Get Very Serious About Water

There's an old saying that "it's too late to close the barn door when the horse is gone". And another saying that reminds us that "you don't miss the water until the well is dry".

Well the world's usable water supply is running mighty low and it's seems that, as in the gasoline and food crises, the barn door has been left wide open.

With summer (in the Northern Hemisphere) approaching and weather temperatures rising it's time for everyone to get very serious about water and water management. While Congress is busy debating approaches for addressing the impact of skyrocketing gasoline prices, meteorologists, environmentalists and farmers are already talking about how high temperatures and the lack of rainfall will impact the southeastern US.

The states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee are in an on-going dispute over water resources and land boundaries. The Michigan and Ohio State Legislatures are still trying to decide on participating in the Great Lakes Water Compact. Some states seem to have their head in the sand. Washington politicians seem to have their head stuck somewhere else. And, questions about water supply and US infrastructure were MIA during the US presidential primary debates.

I, for one, am pricing rain barrels for gathering rain water.

In the following video Mike Hightower of Sandia National Laboratories discusses the world water shortage with a reporter for KRQE in New Mexico

excerpt from:
How the World Is Realizing That Water Is "Blue Gold"
by Mark Clayton,

Public fountains are dry in Barcelona, Spain, a city so parched there's a €9,000 ($13,000) fine if you're caught watering your flowers. A tanker ship docked there this month carrying 5 million gallons of precious fresh water -- and officials are scrambling to line up more such shipments to slake public thirst.

Barcelona is not alone. Cyprus will ferry water from Greece this summer. Australian cities are buying water from that nation's farmers and building desalination plants. Thirsty China plans to divert Himalayan water. And 18 million southern Californians are bracing for their first water-rationing in years.

Water, Dow Chemical Chairman Andrew Liveris told the World Economic Forum in February, "is the oil of this century." Developed nations have taken cheap, abundant fresh water largely for granted. Now global population growth, pollution, and climate change are shaping a new view of water as "blue gold."

"We're at a transition point where fundamental decisions need to be made by societies about how this basic human need -- water -- is going to be provided," says Christopher Kilian, clean-water program director for the Boston-based Conservation Law Foundation. "The profit motive and basic human need [for water] are just inherently in conflict."

Will "peak water" displace "peak oil" as the central resource question? Some see such a scenario rising.

"What's different now is that it's increasingly obvious that we're running up against limits to new [fresh water] supplies," says Peter Gleick, a water expert and president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security, a nonpartisan think tank in Oakland, Calif. "It's no longer cheap and easy to drill another well or dam another river."

"We have ignored demand for decades, just assuming supplies of water would be there," Dr. Gleick says. "Now we have to learn to manage water demand and -- on top of that -- deal with climate change, too."

In the following video Patrick Barta discusses how Perth, Australia is addressing its growing water shortage.

Related articles:

Michigan House Passes More of Its Water Management Plan

Ohio Agreement to Join Great Lakes Water Plan Stalls Again

Florida Lawmakers Mad About Water

Poaching Water Isn't The Solution



Related posts:

Much Talk About Oil But Little About Water

Falling Bridges and No Water

Georgia Water Crisis: Sorting Out Priorities

US Sales of Municipal Water Systems to Multinational Interests

Would You Put Sewage Sludge on Your Lawn?

"Of Course Not", you say.

But don't be so sure. If your fertilizer lists "beneficial biosolids" as a key ingredient then your have just spread processed sewage on your lawn. I hope that you used gloves!

In fact, sewage sludge may have been used on your child's school yard, on the produce from the market and, it may be seeping into your well water.

According to the Center for Food Safety:

"Every time you flush your toilet or clean a paintbrush in your sink, you may be unwittingly contributing fertilizer used to grow the food in your pantry. Beginning in the early 1990s, millions of tons of potentially-toxic sewage sludge have been applied to millions of acres of America's farmland as food crop fertilizer. Selling sewage sludge to farmers for use on cropland has been a favored government program for disposing of the unwanted byproducts from municipal wastewater treatment plants. But sewage sludge is anything but the benign fertilizer the Environmental Protection Agency says it is.

Sewage sludge includes anything that is flushed, poured, or dumped into our nation's wastewater system--a vast, toxic mix of wastes collected from countless sources, from homes to chemical industries to hospitals. The sludge being spread on our crop fields is a dangerous stew of heavy metals, industrial compounds, viruses, bacteria, drug residues, and radioactive material. In fact, hundreds of people have fallen ill after being exposed to sewage sludge fertilizer--suffering such symptoms as respiratory distress, headaches, nausea, rashes, reproductive complications, cysts, and tumors.

Despite the apparent danger of using sludge in food production, federal regulations are woefully lax. The EPA monitors only nine of the thousands of pathogens commonly found in sludge; the agency rarely performs site inspections of sewage treatment plants; and it almost never inspects the farms that use sludge fertilizer."

This is just one more reason to buy organic, support your local farmer's market and become a better informed consumer.


excerpt from:
Will the Toxic Sludge Industry Be Held Accountable for Human Health Risks?
| Health and Wellness | AlterNet

By Joel Bleifuss for Alternet

Nancy Holt, a retired nurse from Mebane, N.C., is beset by mysterious neurological problems. She blames the cause of her illness on the multiple unknown toxicities of the sewage sludge that has been spread since 1991 on the fields across from her house as "fertilizer."

And Holt says she isn't alone. People in her neighborhood have a high incidence of cancer and thyroid problems. Local creeks are no longer safe for kids to play in -- the danger of staph infection is too great.

In 2001, Holt began chronicling the health problems in her area of rural Alamance County -- 12 miles north of Chapel Hill. Soon she was tracking reports of sludge-related illnesses and deaths across the country.

"I put together the symptoms, the illnesses, the high cancer rates, the thyroid disorders in this community," she says. "It is non-scientific, of course."

"And we have precocious puberty, little girls developing breasts at 5 or 6 years old, little boys developing armpit hair. And that is something that people don't want to talk about," Holt says. "They will talk about their thyroid glands, their cancers, but they will not talk about early puberty. We are on a true toxic tilt."

For the first time since she became involved in the sludge issue, Holt is guardedly hopeful that her concerns will finally be addressed, and that the sulphurous alliance between the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), municipal sewer authorities and Synagro Technologies (the nation's largest sludge disposal firm, which was recently bought by the Carlyle Group) -- will be exposed for the blight it is.

In April, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, announced that her committee will hold hearings on the issue this summer. The catalyst is a confluence of recent news reports about sludge-related scandals.

In the Potomac River, 60 miles upstream from Washington, D.C., scientists have discovered many small-mouth male bass with eggs inside their sex organs. The cause of these "intersexed" fish is almost certainly endocrine disruptors -- also known as estrogen mimickers -- in the water, chemical pollutants that disrupt an animal's natural hormonal system.

In February, the Washington Post reported that the concentration of intersexed fish is greatest near towns or near heavily farmed land. One major source of these endocrine disruptors is thought to be the post-treatment "cleaned" water from municipal sewage treatment centers that is discharged directly into the Potomac River system and runoff from fields "fertilized" with sludge.

This news of male fish bearing eggs was followed with an April report by the Associated Press that in 2000, nine Baltimore families -- all black residents of the city's east side -- received food coupons in exchange for permission to allow researchers to spread "Class A" Baltimore sewage sludge (brand name, Orgro High Organic Compost) on their yards, till it into the soil and then plant grass seed.

The rationale for this experiment was to find out whether municipal sewage sludge could lower the amount of lead that children who played in the nine experimental yards would absorb. Veolia Water, the corporation that markets Baltimore municipal sludge as Orgro, claims its "beneficial biosolids" are so safe they are even used on the White House lawn.

"Beneficial biosolids" is the term that Powell Tate, a D.C.-based public relations firm, invented in the early '90s, in an attempt to linguistically detoxify the 7 million tons of sludge -- industrial waste, hospital waste, pharmaceuticals in addition to feces -- that the nation's 16,000 municipal sewer systems produce each year.

In the following video clip is from an April DemocracyNow newscast which discussed how toxic sludge was spread on the lawns on residents of a low-income Baltimore neighborhood