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World is running out of water, says UN adviser
Randeep Ramesh, Guardian
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.
(22 Jan 2007)
Analysis, planning needed to keep water plentiful
Bob Libra, Des Moines Register
With all the well-deserved attention water quality gotten recently, let’s make sure Iowa’s water is not only clean for our children and grandchildren but also plentiful.
The demand for water for ethanol and other industries has brought the issue of water quantity to the forefront. While we are by no means close to a water shortage, it’s important to make plans now if we are to continue supplying the necessary water to our citizens and businesses.
The floods of 1993 left Des Moines without drinking water for almost three weeks. That was a very visible but temporary glimpse of a water crisis. Today, our problem is less visible and more long-term. Even though we can’t see water levels slowly dropping in our underground aquifers, we shouldn’t ignore them.
Unfortunately, financial strains on state funds in recent years have affected the research and monitoring that help us understand long-term impacts on water supplies. Much has changed in that time.
Iowa’s ethanol industry can produce 1.6 billion gallons of ethanol annually. Plants under construction will almost double that, and those in the planning phase will push production to more than 5 billion gallons per year. It takes 4 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of ethanol. So we will soon need 20 billion gallons each year for ethanol production, likely drawn from underground aquifers.
(22 Jan 2007)
Book: Challenging the Chip
Ted Smith, David A. Sonnenfeld and David Naguib Pellow, Temple University
A revealing look at the dark side of the electronics industry and global efforts to move it toward greater sustainability and accountability
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“Challenging the Chip is essential reading for anyone who owns a cell phone or computer. As its vividly written chapters reveal, our digital possessions connect us not only to global information but also to global contamination and injustice. Happily, this book shows us that we can have technology and clean water, too: Electronics sustainability is organic agriculture for iPods.”
—Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D., author of Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment
From Silicon Valley in California to Silicon Glen in Scotland, from Silicon Island in Taiwan to Silicon Paddy in China, the social, economic, and ecological effects of the international electronics industry are widespread. The production of electronic and computer components contaminates air, land, and water around the globe. As this eye-opening book reveals, the people who suffer the consequences are largely poor, female, immigrant, and minority. Challenging the Chip is the first comprehensive examination of the impacts of electronics manufacturing on workers and local environments across the planet.
Contributors to this pioneering volume include many of the world’s most articulate, passionate and progressive visionaries, scholars and advocates. Here they not only document the unsustainable and often devastating practices of the global electronics industry but also chronicle creative ways in which activists, government agencies, and others have attempted to reform the industry—through resistance, persuasion, and regulation.
(Jan 2007)
First chapter and a q+a with Ted Smith available at the site.
Dead birds rain down on towns half a world apart
Daily Mail
It could be the plot of a horror film, but in two towns on opposite sides of the world the mysterious phenomenon of thousands of dead birds dropping out of the sky is all too real.
Officials are baffled by the unexplained deaths which have affected Australia and the U.S.
Three weeks ago thousands of crows, pigeons, wattles and honeyeaters fell out of the sky in Esperance, Western Australia.
Then last week dozens of grackles, sparrows and pigeons dropped dead on two streets in Austin, Texas.
(10 Jan 2007)
Tuna Stocks Close to Exhaustion, Says WWF
Justin McCurry, Guardian
Japan’s huge appetite for tuna will take the most sought-after stocks to the brink of commercial extinction unless more rigid quotas are agreed, wildlife campaigners warned yesterday.
WWF said that although Japan was the main culprit, burgeoning demand for tuna from other countries, such as China, had increased the threat to stocks.
“Tuna are fast disappearing, with important stocks at high risk of commercial extinction due to weak management,” the group, formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund, said in a statement. “Atlantic bluefin [tuna], used for high-end sushi and sashimi, is massively overfished and the spawning stock of southern bluefin in the Indian Ocean is down about 90%.”
(23 Jan 2007)
Also at Common Dreams.
