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Sandra Postel: Repairing The Water Cycle
Sandra Postel: Repairing The Water Cycle
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
The very deep did rot – Oh Christ!
That ever this should be.
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
El Niño has been dropping much-needed rain this winter on a parched American West. But it’s making little difference to the greater water scarcity issues the US as well as the rest of the world is increasingly facing.
Here to talk about the state of the world situation for fresh water — arguably the single most important resource to humans on the planet, next to oxygen — is Sandra Postel, Director of the Global Water Policy Project, author, lecturer, and former National Geographic Fellow. The punch-line to her message: as more and more demands are placed on our finite freshwater supply by human consumption and climate change, intelligent conservation is now an absolute must:
Competition for water that arises when you have increasing scarcity — competition between cities and farms within the same area, competition between states and provinces within the same country, and then of course, competition and tensions between countries that share rivers. And so these are fundamental concerns going forward: we still have rising population and we pursue economic growth — all this places rising water demand against a finite supply. And so just navigating that tricky course in the years ahead is a tremendous challenge.
Our water future is being determined by population, consumption and technology. As well as the failure of policy to move us toward a more water efficient set of practices.
Take agriculture: the fact that we are growing with water in California, water in the Colorado River basin where water is fairly precious, we are growing some very low-value crops and using a lot of water to do that and often doing it inefficiently.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
As the Gold King Spill Reminds Us, We All Live Downstream
As the Gold King Spill Reminds Us, We All Live Downstream
Around this time last year, I was walking the banks of the Animas River in Durango, the southwestern Colorado town blindsided last week when the river turned a sickly yellow-orange from a colossal spill of toxic mine drainage upstream near Silverton.
It’s hard to imagine a river more central to a town than the Animas is to Durango. Bikers, runners, and dog-walkers keep both banks in constant motion, as endless flotillas of tubers and rafters float the river through town.
Twice I hiked the Animas Mountain trail, which affords spectacular views of the river’s meanders and oxbows, and of the riverside town of 17,000 below. From on high, the Animas seems to knit the landscape of forest, farm and town together. If ever a river was the lifeblood of a community, it’s the Animas flowing through Durango.
So when I heard the news of the breach at Gold King Mine that sent massive quantities – ultimately some 3 million gallons – of drainage laced with toxic metals into the river, my heart seized up and my mind raced ahead. Not the Animas. How could this be? And how far will that frightfully colored plume of pollution go?
The tragic accident occurred as contractors for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were working to plug Gold King, which had been leaking acid mine drainage into the river system for years.
But the stage was set by decades of neglect and the near-absence of any requirements that mining companies take responsibility for preventing harm to people and aquatic life after they close their mines. Some 500,000 abandoned mines, most un-reclaimed, now dot the nation’s landscape.
And as we’ve learned from the Gold Kind tragedy, we all live downstream.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
With One-Third of Largest Aquifers Highly Stressed, It’s Time to Explore and Assess the Planet’s Groundwater
With One-Third of Largest Aquifers Highly Stressed, It’s Time to Explore and Assess the Planet’s Groundwater
Imagine if your bank statement arrived each month and told you how much money you had withdrawn and deposited, but told you nothing about how much money you had at the beginning or end of the month.
You’d know whether your balance had grown or shrunk, but you’d have no idea whether you could afford to buy a new house, take a vacation, or make it through that last year of college without bussing tables on the weekends.
This is pretty much the state we’re in with the world’s groundwater accounts, which supply 2 billion people with drinking water and irrigate a large share of the world’s food.
“[I]n most cases, we do not know how much groundwater exists in storage,” write the authors of a study published last month in Water Resources Research (WRR), a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
As a result, we’re clueless about how long we can keep drawing down these water reserves before they run out.
And we are indeed drawing many of them down.
One-third of the world’s 37 largest aquifers are highly stressed to over-stressed, according to a companion study published in the same issue of WRR. The eight most highly stressed aquifers receive almost no natural recharge to offset human use – including aquifers in Saudi Arabia, northwestern India and Pakistan.
Scientists at the University of California at Irvine led both studies, with doctoral student Alexandra Richey serving as lead author. Other team members came from NASA, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, National Taiwan University and UC Santa Barbara.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The “Sixth Extinction” Adds Urgency to Habitat and Climate Protection
The “Sixth Extinction” Adds Urgency to Habitat and Climate Protection
It’s now unequivocal: the sixth great spasm of species extinctions has begun. We – homo sapiens – are its cause. And only we can slow it down.
Over the last century, the average rate of loss of vertebrate species — fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals – has been up to 100 times higher than the background extinction rate, according to a new study published last week in the journal Science Advances.
In order to help settle the question of whether a sixth extinction episode has indeed begun, the scientific team chose assumptions that would tend to minimize evidence that it has. As a result, their calculations almost certainly underestimate the severity of the extinction crisis under way.
“[W]e can confidently conclude that modern extinction rates are exceptionally high, that they are increasing, and that they suggest a mass extinction under way – the sixth of its kind in Earth’s 4.5 billion years of history,” the researchers write.
The study team included scientists from Princeton, Stanford, the University of California-Berkeley, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and the University of Florida.
The last episode of mass extinction occurred about 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs and about half of all species living on Earth at the time were wiped out.
A huge crater off Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula dated to the time of this event suggests an extraterrestrial impact as a leading cause.
But, in a first, the current mass extinction is driven by human activities – deforestation, dam-building, over-harvesting, wetland-draining, pollution and the myriad other ways we destroy the lives and homes of the rich diversity of animals with which we share the planet.
And this will not end in some Darwinian-style victory for we humans.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
