By Tara Lohan, The Revelator
A Blue Community is an act of hope. Instead of being against the many threats to water, a Blue Community offers a vision for the future based on the belief that water is a human right and a public trust. It also tackles the growing crisis of plastic pollution by committing a municipality (or university or place to worship, etc.) to phasing out bottled water on its premises.
By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
The naive notion that we can, for example, "just use more air conditioning" as the globe warms betrays a perplexing misunderstanding of what we face. Even if one ignores the insanity of burning more climate-warming fossil fuels to make electricity for more air-conditioning, there is the embedded assumption that our current infrastructure with only minor modifications will withstand the pressures placed upon it in a future transformed by climate change and other depredations.
By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
There is no substitute for potable water—despite what economic theory may wish to assert. To get enough of it in many locales will be increasingly expensive as we turn to ever more exotic means to extract water while both population grows and climate-enhanced droughts diminish replenishment of existing sources.
By Alex Wise, Sea Change Radio
How will we meet the challenges of the world's growing dependence on groundwater? Authors Bill and Rosemary Alley on one of the globe's most deadly threats.
By Sandra Postel, National Geographic Newswatch
Schwennesen is among a new cadre of farmers and ranchers that brings a more holistic, ecological way of thinking to land management.
By Debbie Cook, Post Carbon Institute
Does California have too much water? Seriously. Because our actions are sending peculiar messages.
By Erik Ohlsen, Resilience.org
While the media focuses on larger-scale challenges, small-scale, implementable solutions seem absent from the discussion. Small-scale solutions are beautiful because they often address both drought and flood problems. With one of the strongest El Niños on record developing in the Pacific, California may see a massive deluge this winter. It could be damaging if we don't prepare now. On the heels of a multi-year drought, flash floods and the inundation of dry, crusty soils will be especially damaging.
By Sharon Kelly, DesmogBlog
The Environmental Protection Agency has released its long awaited draft assessment of the impacts that fracking has on the nation's drinking water supplies.
By Erik Alm, The Daly News
Perhaps the catalyst could be a life-altering dearth of a critical resource that, until recently, most of us in the United States have taken for granted: water.
By Sandra Postel, National Geographic Newswatch
Imagine if each tap that delivered water from the Colorado River – whether to a farm, a factory, or a home – suddenly went dry for a year. What would happen to the West’s economy?
By Sandra Postel, National Geographic Newswatch
The timing might seem odd, even self-destructive. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti issued an executive order calling for his southern California city to cut its water imports by half within a decade.
By Alexis Rowell, Transition Free Press
We humans need water for life, we love it for leisure, we make art out of it; yet we also waste it, dirty it, privatise it, use it as a weapon and, most dangerously, stir it up brutally in the form of manmade climate change.