How our miraculous transportation system turns water into brine
Salting roads in winter makes them safer to drive on. But all that salt has to go somewhere and it’s starting to be a problem.
water
Reflections on Water: Film, Water and Storytelling
The wider ‘Ecosinema’ programme offers a chance to expand our collective consciousness around what we can do to care for the health of our waters and our world. And weather the storms to come.
Fighting Water Privatization with ‘Blue Communities’
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.
Climate change, water and the infrastructure problem
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.
America’s ‘Cadillac Desert’: Is there a substitute for fresh water?
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.
High & Dry: Talking Groundwater
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.
Along a Desert River, A New Breed of Rancher
Schwennesen is among a new cadre of farmers and ranchers that brings a more holistic, ecological way of thinking to land management.
Too Much Water to Waste?
Does California have too much water? Seriously. Because our actions are sending peculiar messages.
From drought to deluge: an ecological approach to California’s water crisis
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.
EPA Study: Fracking Puts Drinking Water Supplies at Risk of Contamination
The Environmental Protection Agency has released its long awaited draft assessment of the impacts that fracking has on the nation’s drinking water supplies.
A Thirst for Economic Change?
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.
A Year Without the Colorado River, as Seen by Economists
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?