One small step for man

One sensible step for a town:

The small Australian town of Bundanoon has become the first place in the country, and possibly the world, to ban the sale of bottled water.

Residents of the town southwest of Sydney voted overwhelmingly in favour of the ban on Wednesday night.

Local businesses have agreed to stop selling bottled water and free water fountains will now be installed in the town.

The voluntary boycott was triggered by concerns of the environmental impact of bottling and transporting water.

"Bottled water has a role to play in various parts of Australia and many parts of the world but we don't really need it as we have a wonderful municipal water supply," local businessman Huw Kingston, who led the campaign, told Reuters news agency.

One larger sensible step for a nation:

But the oceans, like the land, have gotten crowded, and now scientists and policy makers are looking for ways to plan ocean development -- with the aim of preventing our public-owned seas from turning into sprawling, watery versions of Houston, Texas, or Atlanta, Georgia.

"The oceans are kind of the last frontier for use and development," said Amanda Leland, ocean policy director at the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group. "Even in the 1970s we thought that the oceans were limitless resources of fish. We know today now that fisheries are collapsing all around the world."

In an attempt to address this and other crowding problems, governments are for the first time devising comprehensive plans for their marine waters.

The Obama administration on June 12 announced a task force devoted to federal ocean planning. By September, the group must recommend a national policy on the subject that's designed to protect ocean ecology, address climate change and promote sustainable ocean economies.

More on the future Water Wars

Keeping track of the 'escalating fights over water and water rights, between cities and farms, between states, between neighbors.'

Here are some articles that touch on quality and quantity available. Via Steve Bates of The Yellow Doggerel Democrat, AP's article on pharmaceutical contaminates in our drinking water:

A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

In the course of a five-month inquiry, the AP discovered that drugs have been detected in the drinking water supplies of 24 major metropolitan areas — from Southern California to Northern New Jersey, from Detroit to Louisville, Ky.

World's Water Supply at Risk:

One of the world's leading water experts explains how our local water supplies are threatened across North America and across the globe. Surface waters are being polluted, and we are mining our groundwater at unsustainable rates. At the very time when corporations are privatizing everything, our governments are allowing corporations to move in and take over the ownership of essential resources like water. The more our water becomes polluted, the more precious it becomes. The more desperate people are, the more they will pay for their water, and the more money there is to be made from cleaning it up.

The corporation KBR poisoned our soldiers in theaters of war:

The AP reports that, between 2004 and 2006, “dozens of U.S. troops in Iraq fell sick at bases using ‘unmonitored and potentially unsafe‘ water supplied” by KBR. The Pentagon’s internal watchdog said soldiers experienced skin abscesses, cellulitis, skin infections, diarrhea and other illnesses after from using the discolored, smelly water.

Expect more of these stories as we find out we have treated our most essential of needs so casually. Global warming also means less snow pack which leads to less water in rivers and in aquifers. Some burgeoning population centers which rely heavily on rivers are feeling this already:

The world is running out of water and needs a radical plan to tackle shortages that threaten the ability of humanity to feed itself, according to Jeffrey Sachs, director of the UN's Millennium Project.

Professor Sachs, who is credited with sparking pop star Bono's crusade for African development, told an environment conference in Delhi that the world simply had "no more rivers to take water from".

The breadbaskets of India and China were facing severe water shortages and neither Asian giant could use the same strategies for increasing food production that has fed millions in the last few decades.

"In 2050 we will have 9 billion people and average income will be four times what it is today. India and China have been able to feed their populations because they use water in an unsustainable way. That is no longer possible," he said.

Since Asia's green revolution, which began in the 1960s and saw a transformation of agricultural production, the amount of land under irrigation has tripled. However, many parts of the continent have reached the limits of their water supplies. "The Ganges [in India] and the Yellow river [in China] no longer flow. There is so much silting up and water extraction upstream they are pretty stagnant," said Prof Sachs.

(Psst ... turn off your taps!)

One of the things predicted for the future

Was escalating fights over water and water rights, between cities and farms, between states, between neighbors.

Via Bryan of Why Now? water rights negotiations between three Southern states have broken down:

WASHINGTON - Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne acknowledged Saturday that White House-brokered water negotiations among Alabama, Florida and Georgia have failed.

Without an agreement, the Army Corps of Engineers and other federal agencies will begin implementing a water-sharing plan of their own, Kempthorne said in a letter to the governors.

"Regrettably, it will necessarily be a solution being directed to the states instead of our much hoped for solution coming from the states," he wrote in the letter, released Saturday.

Bryan points out:

This involves three Republican states and a Republican mediator, and has been going on forever, because none of them wants to make any tough choices. None of these states has done anything to limit growth in areas where the infrastructure is inadequate, and all have cut taxes to the point that they can’t afford to pay for what’s needed.

And from the AP article, the finger-pointing begins:

The talks appeared to unravel further in recent days, with Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue saying the water problems facing Florida and Alabama are not as critical as Georgia's and accusing the other states of approaching the talks without the same urgency as Georgia.

Alabama Gov. Bob Riley responded by saying that prospects for a negotiated solution were "indeed dim" if Perdue could not acknowledge that Georgia's needs are no more critical than those of the other states.

Against that backdrop, Georgia officials said Saturday they will not make a severe drought declaration for the lower Flint River Basin in the southwest part of the state.

No politician wants to be the one to tell us to turn off our taps and stop wasting potable water. Telling people to cut back is not the American way. We want it and we want it now and we don't expect to have to pay for it.

But the bill has come due:

Then, in 2002, the third dry year in a row and the driest on record in many parts of the Southwest, the flow in the Colorado fell to a quarter of its long-term average. That got people's attention.

The Colorado supplies 30 million people in seven states and Mexico with water. Denver, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, Los Angeles, and San Diego all depend on it, and starting this year so will Albuquerque. It irrigates four million acres of farmland, much of which would otherwise be desert, but which now produces billions of dollars' worth of crops. Gauges first installed in the 19th century provide a measure of the flow of the river in acre-feet, one acre-foot being a foot of water spread over an acre, or about 326,000 gallons. Today the operation of the pharaonic infrastructure that taps the Colorado—the dams and reservoirs and pipelines and aqueducts—is based entirely on data from those gauges. In 2002 water managers all along the river began to wonder whether that century of data gave them a full appreciation of the river's eccentricities. With the lawns dying in Denver, a water manager there asked Woodhouse: How often has it been this dry?

[snip]

In fact, the tree rings testified that in the centuries before Europeans settled the Southwest, the Colorado basin repeatedly experienced droughts more severe and protracted than any since then. During one 13-year megadrought in the 12th century, the flow in the river averaged around 12 million acre-feet, 80 percent of the average flow during the 20th century and considerably less than is taken out of it for human use today. Such a flow today would mean serious shortages, and serious water wars. "The Colorado River at 12 million acre-feet would be real ugly," says one water manager.

Unfortunately, global warming could make things even uglier. Last April, a month before Meko and Woodhouse published their latest results, a comprehensive study of climate models reported in Science predicted the Southwest's gradual descent into persistent Dust Bowl conditions by mid-century.

Global warming is here:

The future, though, won't be governed by that kind of natural fluctuation alone. Thanks to our emissions of greenhouse gases, it will be subject as well to a global one-way trend toward higher temperatures. In one talk at Lamont, climate theorist Isaac Held, from NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, gave two reasons why global warming seems almost certain to make the drylands drier. Both have to do with an atmospheric circulation pattern called Hadley cells. At the Equator, warm, moist air rises, cools, sheds its moisture in tropical downpours, then spreads toward both Poles. In the subtropics, at latitudes of about 30 degrees, the dry air descends to the surface, where it sucks up moisture, creating the world's deserts—the Sahara, the deserts of Australia, and the arid lands of the Southwest. Surface winds export the moisture out of the dry subtropics to temperate and tropical latitudes. Global warming will intensify the whole process. The upshot is, the dry regions will get drier, and the wet regions will get wetter.

Less water, weaker trees, bark beetle infestations, fires:

People are not yet suffering, but trees are. Forests in the West are dying, most impressively by burning. The damage done by wildfires in the U.S., the vast majority of them in the West, has soared since the late 1980s. In 2006 nearly ten million acres were destroyed—an all-time record matched the very next year. With temperatures in the region up four degrees F over the past 30 years, spring is coming sooner to the western mountains. The snowpack—already diminished by drought—melts earlier in the year, drying the land and giving the wildfire season a jump start. As hotter summers encroach on autumn, the fires are ending later as well.

Yes. We experienced this just this last year in California:



More people, more polluted oceans and dead zones, less potable water, breaking infrastructure, more contaminates.

No politician will ever admit the world is changing as we speak. Especially the Bush Republicans. It is not good for the economy to go negative. And we're going to have to take drastic steps to change our comfortable lifestyles and habits. No politician will dare tell us to do it.

We're going to have to do it ourselves.

(Psst .. turn off your taps.)

That's MY drinking water you're wasting!

Via Cookie Jill at skippy the bush kangaroo, The Christian Science Monitor:

Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which supply water and power to millions in the American Southwest, stand a 50 percent chance of running dry by 2021 unless dramatic changes take place in how the region uses water, according to a new study.

Causes include growing population, rising demand for Colorado River water, which feeds both lakes, and global warming, according to scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., who conducted the study.

The results underscore the importance of water-conservation measures that many communities throughout the region are putting into place. Other studies, some dating back nearly 20 years, have projected that Lake Mead could fall to virtually useless levels as climate warmed, but they lacked a sense of the timing. The new results, the Scripps scientists say, represent a first attempt to answer when lakes Mead and Powell would run dry, squeezing water supplies in Arizona, California, Nevada, and New Mexico.

Here in Southern California, we've been through droughts. The worst came with restrictions on water usage: no washing of cars, no watering of lawns, no automatic glasses of water given at restaurants, a certain percent drop demanded of each household based on the last year's usage unless appealed. We had neighbors reporting on each other, dead of night furtive sprinkler usage, general idiot behavior exposed for what it was. Politicians cringe at activating drought prevention programs. We need to make it part of normal life so people don't feel their liberties are being denied when they're asked not to waste water.

We need to educate from kindergarten up: respect potable water no matter where you live. Water that has been processed so that it is safe to drink is a wonderful luxury and we need to respect it.

Start by turning off the water while you brush your teeth. Do you realize how many gallons you just saved?

Update: In China: (my bold)

Beijing, China (AHN) - More than 40 percent of drinking water in rural China is unfit for drinking, a health ministry study said Monday. The drinking water in the country's rural areas has failed to meet government standards leading to outbreaks of diarrhea and other diseases, a Ministry of Health spokesman said.

[snip]

Unhealthy water led to outbreaks of diarrhea and other diseases, with 40.44 percent of surface water and 45.94 percent of ground water below the regulatory standards released in 2006.

The Ministry of Health and the National Committee for the Patriotic Public Health Campaign conducted a joint survey of nearly 7,000 samples from villages across the country. The survey found that 74.9 percent of people drank underground water while 25.1 percent drank surface water.

"Most people living in rural areas do not have their drinking water sterilized. Often they just drink the well water, which may have been polluted," Mao said.

The unhealthy water is mainly attributed to unchecked industrialization, polluting factories that cause disruptions to water supplies and microbial contamination.

However, in densely populated areas, 85.23 percent of people living in villages or counties often having their water boiled before drinking, thus lowering the chance of contracting a serious enteric infectious disease.

Hot water from the tap should never be used for cooking or drinking.

Oh. Wow. Thanks:

Lead is rarely found in source water, but can enter it through corroded plumbing. The Environmental Protection Agency says that older homes are more likely to have lead pipes and fixtures, but that even newer plumbing advertised as “lead-free” can still contain as much as 8 percent lead. A study published in The Journal of Environmental Health in 2002 found that tap water represented 14 to 20 percent of total lead exposure.

Scientists emphasize that the risk is small. But to minimize it, the E.P.A. says cold tap water should always be used for preparing baby formula, cooking and drinking. It also warns that boiling water does not remove lead but can actually increase its concentration.

So... don't drink the hot water while you are showering?

And how do you check for lead in your house? Low grades at the elementary school? Are we poisoning our kids by making them drink water? Do they have a test that enables people to check their water supply? WTF?

Californians, don't say you weren't warned

About our aging infrastructure for water and power:

At least China's indifference to humanity isn't just to the rest of the world

They pick on their own people too...

A large explosion has levelled a karaoke nightclub in northeast China killing 25 people and leaving another 33 injured.

State media did not give a cause for the blast on Wednesday night in the town of Tianshifu in Liaoning province.

[snip]

China has recently seen a spate of explosions, fires and accidents in shopping malls, cinemas and other public places despite repeated government promises to improve safety standards.

And forget about drinking water:

Beijing - Contamination of a river in east China by chemical plants upstream has left 200,000 people without water for two days, local media reported Wednesday. Water supplies were cut Monday afternoon in Shuyang county of Jiangsu Province after ammonia and azote polluted the Xinyi River, which originates in Shandong Province, according to Xinhua news agency.

The pollutants detected were about three times the upper limit for drinkable water. The exact cause of the poisoning was still unclear, however waste water from chemical plants upstream were suspected.

Which might explain why some Chinese do this:

Beijing, China (AHN) - In an attempt to gain healing powers, villagers in central China boiled a ton of dinosaur bones into soup or ground them to a powder for traditional medicine. They believe that the bones belong to flying dragons had special powers.

According to AP reports, these fossils were being sold in the Henan province as "dragon bones" at about 4 yuan (50 cents) per kilogram (2.2 pounds). Villagers also feed the calcium-rich bones, boiled with other ingredients to children as a treatment for dizziness and leg cramps.

The practice of grounding the bones to make a paste to apply directly to fractures and other injuries had been going on for at least two decades. In Henan's Ruyang County, scientists have recently excavated a 60-foot-long plant-eating dinosaur, which lived 85 million to 100 million years ago.

Why would you spend 250 to 10,000 times more than what you need to

When you buy bottled water instead of tap water? Via Eli at Multi Medium, an article on the benefits and disadvantages of the waters:

Market studies show that the reason most Americans drink bottled water is its perceived superiority—most importantly in taste, and then in safety—compared to municipal tap water. But a widely publicized 1999 study by the Natural Resources Defense Council debunked at least some of these perceptions. The study found that the source of about a quarter of bottled water was municipal tap water, usually filtered to remove chlorine—the primary objectionable taste—and other chemicals such as fluoride. So much for the idea of pristine, undisturbed sources.

And instead of the widely held notion that bottled water harbored fewer chemicals and microorganisms, the study found little difference between the two; both are usually of exceptionally high quality in the United States. In fact, water quality standards in this country are more rigorous for tap water than for bottled. (Bottled water is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration; tap water is overseen by the more stringent Environmental Protection Agency.)

Besides the enormous cost of bottled water compared to tap water (bottled water is between 250 to 10,000 times more expensive), there’s an additional expense: its effect on the environment. First there’s the crude oil necessary to produce the plastic bottles, which the Earth Policy Institute estimates at about 1.5 million barrels of oil a year in the U.S., enough to power 100,000 cars. Then there’s the transportation of this weighty product (though about 75 percent of bottled water is produced and consumed regionally). Finally, there’s the issue of getting rid of the empty bottles, only about 10 percent of which are recycled.