Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Oklahoma restricts oil field wastewater injection within a half-mile of public water wells to protect against pollution. Regulators have let companies do it anyway. Officials are taking on the oil industry by calling for additional protections against oil field wastewater injection.
A deal to bring Colorado River water to Native American communities in northern Arizona, where a third of homes lack running water, is being blocked by neighboring states, caught up in a broader battle over how to divide the dwindling river.
From collapsing rivers to groundwater depletion, Iran’s water crisis is often framed as a failure of governance or infrastructure. But it reflects a broader reality: water stress is emerging wherever human demand pushes beyond ecological limits.
For 6,000 years, human societies have sought to control water through ever-larger infrastructure. As climate change brings more extreme floods, droughts and heatwaves, a growing number of cities are exploring a different path: adapting to water’s rhythms rather than trying to dominate them.
Intense floods in Algeria’s Sahara in 2024 exposed how modern desert cities shed water instead of storing it. Redesigning infrastructure to hold rain, not rush it away, could help turn arid regions into resilient, living landscapes.
While we need to consume this sacred water to exist, we must also work hard to repair our relationship with this almighty medicine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
