Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and other countries, European governments are beginning to push farmers, industry, and municipalities to cut back on fertilizers and other sources of nitrogen that are causing serious environmental harm.
Some will say it’s too difficult to up-end long-held water habits, practices and entitlements. But those difficulties are certain to pale next to those wrought by empty reservoirs and dry wells.
Earlier this month, the foreign ministers of Sudan, Egypt and Ethiopia reached agreement on basic principles for managing what will be Africa’s largest hydroelectric dam.
It’s getting harder and harder to separate nature’s role in disasters from our own, and the dire water predicament confronting São Paulo, Brazil, is no exception.
Without serious efforts to stem the mining of groundwater, food production will decline.
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?
A surprisingly large share of the world’s cropland is found not in rural areas, but within cities and their immediate surroundings.
The satellite image of the Aral Sea recently released by NASA just about knocked my socks off. It wasn’t that the sea was shrinking; that’s been true for decades. It was how fast it was disappearing.
It might be surprising that globally we don’t systematically monitor the health of our rivers. Imagine damming and diverting the arteries in our bodies without taking care to monitor the consequences. Our health would turn precarious, to say the least.
With mining growth comes larger, deeper, more unwieldy tailings ponds, experts warn.
"We thought that the picture could be pretty bad, but this was shocking."
When residents in Denver, Colorado Springs and other cities on the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains turn on their sprinklers to irrigate lawns, they rarely think about the fate of fish in the headwaters of the Colorado River on the other side of the Continental Divide.
