How we can avoid a world without water

There is no more of an insidious killer than drought because of its subtlety and silence. It creeps across the land and air sucking out its moisture and leaving nothing but devastation and hunger in its wake. It robs humans and other species of the sustenance they must have to survive, and it seeks to cast a dark shadow in the background of the raging fires it precipitates. It takes great pleasure in the misery it creates and shows no remorse for the lives it takes.

Too dramatic you think? I think not. Drought has been and continues to be a persistant and severe threat upon the Earth. Only now, it is excelerating and becoming even more of a persistant and severe threat due to our own intervention. Can you imagine that? We by our own hand are exacerbating the very condition that is leading to our own demise due to our own selfish oblivious actions or lack of action regarding it.

And as we see with many parts of the world including Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Australia, and now even the U.S., the balance between conservation and waste of this life giving resource is dangerously out of balance. The balance between a stable climate that supports life and an erratic climate that destroys life is also dangerously out of balance in concert with actions surrounding water resources. And its remedy now rests with human choices. So what can be done?

Besides an entire shift in consciousness and in how we see water, political will is one important way water policy is fixed from local to the federal level. However, as with consciousness surrounding the climate crisis people must be aware that there is a problem and that it effects their lives. Once that message is clear people seek to move beyond the confortable boundaries they live in to exact change. For many, severe drought in Kenya, China, or Gaza does not phase them as to them it is a world away. However, when we realize how the hydrologic cycle plays into all of our lives and how it is affected by pollution, waste, mismanagement, privitization, and now climate change, those areas of the world do not look so far away anymore.

And this is where we are at now. Looking across the great expanse of our world and seeing the effects of drought and how close to home it is to us and that its effects are not indigenous to just one part of the world. That is the first step towards action.

We need not live in a world without water, but that will mean living in a world without apathy and fear of facing problems head on to solve them. It will not be easy to do now as we already see the relentless shadow of drought moving across the landscape, but it is something we must do in order to save our most precious resource in order to save ourselves.

This article and interview with Peter Gleick gives us good insight into drought, the global water crisis, and the solutions that lie before us now.

How we can avoid a world without water

The Water Front: How a Michigan Community is Fighting For Their Water

The Water Front

From the site:

Water is the liquid gold of the 21st century. While corporations urge local governments to privatize municipal water, communities around the world are organizing to ensure affordable access to this life sustaining resource. THE WATER FRONT is the story of one community's determination to fight the seemingly inevitable path of water privatization.

Highland Park, Michigan – the birthplace of mass production is a post-industrial city on the verge of financial collapse. The state of Michigan has appointed an Emergency Financial Manager to fix the crisis. The Manager sees the water plant, which Ford built in 1917 to support his auto industry, as key to economic recovery. She has raised water rates and has implemented severe measures to collect on bills. As a result, Highland Park residents have received water bills as high as $10,000, they have had their water turned off, their homes foreclosed, and are struggling to keep water, a basic human right, from becoming privatized. THE WATER FRONT follows the personal story of Vallory Johnson, who transforms her anger into an emotional grassroots campaign, defending affordable water as a human right.

THE WATER FRONT is not just about water, but touches on the very essence of our democratic system. The film presents a community in crisis but it also presents the powerful enactment of local participation in finding solutions to the problems of our times.

This community portrait is also an unnerving indication of what is in store for residents around the world as cities look to update water systems and face increasingly complex issues such as water shortages and implications of the bottled water industry.

The film raises questions such as; Who determines the future of shared public resources? What are alternatives to water privatization? How will we maintain our public water systems and who can we hold accountable?
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This is but only one community in the United States now also feeling the squeeze on their water. This is real and it is affecting the lives of real people. People who do not deserve to have this human right kept from them. To not even have water to take care of your basic needs is a human rights abuse regardless of where it happens. That it is happening in the United States is a true travesty of justice and democracy.

Australian PM Warned Over 'Hell to Highwater State'

Australian PM Warned Over 'Hell to Highwater State'

Global warming/climate change is not only moving at an excelerated pace in Australia but on every other continent including the Arctic. To continue to dispute its presence is to be ignorant of the facts. Scientists around the world have been warning us of the repercussions of denial and apathy for years. These warnings can no longer be ignored. The cost of doing so is too great for the planet as a whole regarding the survival of our species and all others.

So this post is not to once again rehash the same rhetoric about whether it is manmade or not to push a partisan political agenda or grudge. I am SO DONE with that. This post is for serious people who understand the urgency of this crisis and its effects on this planet and our species who actually want to do something about it.

The recent tragedy in Australia regarding wildfires that were the worst ever there and may not be over, had the ground work for their ferocity and tragedy laid out by years of severe drying and drought resulting from climate change. Climate change one spark made into a hell on Earth. The Murray-Darling River basin is also a stark example of those severe effects. For anyone to look at that dwindling river that was declared dead just a few months ago and still deny that there is something more to this than just a 'usual dry summer' is someone who clearly cannot or will not understand the changing face of this planet due to our neglect and greed.

We cannot claim to be an evolving species if we continue to deny the consequences of our actions and not work to adjust those actions to the perceived outcome. Therefore, if you truly do care for what climate change is doing to this planet and want to do something about it, please plan to do something this year to wake up politicians to the urgency of this crisis and demand action.

This is not just some topic I and others who care cavalierly blog about on the Internet simply to have something to talk about to kill some online time. This is about the world our children will inherit. There is nothing more important than that. We have nothing else without a sustainable planet and there is no more time to waste in that goal.


Drought is the silent killer.

Ceremony Marks 'Death' Of Australia's Greatest River

Water-another global 'crisis?'

Water-Another Global "Crisis?"


If you look at the numbers, it is hard to see how many East African communities made it through the long drought of 2005 and 2006.

Among people who study human development, it is a widely-held view that each person needs about 20 litres of water each day for the basics - to drink, cook and wash sufficiently to avoid disease transmission.

Yet at the height of the East African drought, people were getting by on less than five litres a day - in some cases, less than one litre a day, enough for just three glasses of drinking water and nothing left over.

Some people, perhaps incredibly from a western vantage point, are hardy enough to survive in these conditions; but it is not a recipe for a society that is healthy and developing enough to break out of poverty.

"Obviously there are many drivers of human development," says the UN's Andrew Hudson.
"But water is the most important."

At the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), where Dr Hudson works as principal technical advisor to the water governance programme, he calculated the contribution that various factors make to the Human Development Index, a measure of how societies are doing socially and economically.

"It was striking. I looked at access to energy, spending on health, spending on education - and by far the strongest driver of the HDI on a global scale was access to water and sanitation."
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Yes, access to water and sanitation is the strongest driver of human development yet it is the one issue still put on the backburner in consciousness. Even in President Obama's 'stimulus' bill water, access to it, pollution of it, and fixing its infrastructure have been given little attention at a time when it is paramount not only in relation to climate change and envionment, but also to health and economy as the entire Southwest United States is in an unprecedented drought that threatens food and water security. It is frustrating to know the implications of apathy and see it practiced by those who have the power to change it.

For the past few years I have done much reading, research, writing, blogging and hopefully spreading of awareness of this important crisis that faces our world. As humans we have done a good job of betraying our own future. We have constantly and consistently taken those things of little significance and given them top billing over what sustains us, and we are now paying the price for it.

There really are days when I am then at a loss for words in trying to relay the importance of changing those priorities.

Russia and Central Asian Water

Russia And Central Asian Water

Excerpt
by John C.K. Daly

An integral element of the new Eurasian "great game" between Russia and the United States is a tussle for control of the Caspian's hydrocarbon riches and those of former Soviet republics farther east. But Russia is making a diplomatic play on another key resource -- water.

Russian and foreign energy consortia remain largely focused on the region's rich oil and natural gas reserves. Within the "Stans" -- former Soviet republics Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan -- an added element in the matrix is water, used by Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan largely to generate hydroelectric power, while the downstream states of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan view it as a resource for supporting agriculture rather than an energy source.

In the 17 years since the Soviet Union collapsed, the Central Asian nations emerging from the debris have yet to resolve the issue of an equitable distribution of the arid region's most precious resource. The most significant amounts of oil and gas are found in the westerly "Stans" of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan; the region's aquatic reserves are largely under the control of the most easterly (and poor) mountainous states, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, which between them account for more than 85 percent of the region's groundwater reserves, primarily in the form of alpine glacial runoff that feeds the region's two largest rivers, the Syr Darya and Amu Darya.

Earlier this week Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, during a state visit to Uzbekistan, weighed in on the issue, telling journalists: "The construction of hydropower stations in Central Asia should meet the interests of all neighboring countries and should correspond to international rights' norms of transboundary rivers' usage. It is impossible to act in isolation. It can cause tensions which can only be solved not by economic but by political means. ...

"Hydroelectric power stations in the Central Asian region must be built with consideration of the interests of all neighboring states," he said, adding, "If there is no common accord of all parties, Russia will refrain from participation in such projects."

Medvedev's comments delighted his hosts, who have argued that if Tajikistan proceeds with constructing its planned Rogun hydroelectric cascade, which would be Central Asia's largest, it would severely impact the water needs of downstream states. Uzbek President Islam Karimov stated: "I would like to especially speak on one issue. Uzbekistan counts on Russia's well thought-out and considered position on issues relating to the implementation of hydropower projects in the Central Asian region."

Sayfullo Safarov, deputy director of Tajikistan's Center for Strategic Studies, opined that Medvedev's statement "regarding the region's water question is most likely a diplomatic dodge of this problem," adding that while Moscow is interested in normal relations with all Central Asian nations, the water issue remains today the "most painful" unresolved issue in fostering the relations.

Building Rogun is beyond Dushanbe's capabilities; the government was forced to announce a tender for participation in the project, because the cost of the work was appraised at $5 billion to $6 billion.

Medvedev's statements caused Tajikistan to deliver a diplomatic protest, fearing that Moscow was favoring Tashkent's position over its own. There are, however, alternatives to gigantic Soviet-legacy projects like Rogun, first begun in 1976, such as smaller, more numerous hydroelectric facilities that would alleviate many of the downstream nations' concerns and have been advocated by Western specialists with such institutions as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank.

The equitable division of these waters remains at the heart of the contentions, with the downstream agrarian states both seeking regular water discharges for irrigation while maintaining that water is not a resource for which they should be charged. In turn, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan maintain that if fiscal or energy assistance is not received to tide them over through the bitter winter months, they will release the water during the autumn and winter to generate electricity as they have no other power options, whatever the agrarian concerns of their downstream neighbors.

It is not as if the Stans have not attempted to grapple with the issue. In 1992 the five countries established the Interstate Coordinating Water Commission to formulate a regional solution to the problem, but despite more than 50 meetings during the last 16 years, little of note has been accomplished, leaving each country to pursue its own interests or bilateral relations.

end of excerpt:

To me it does not seem feasible for Central Asia to now be pursuing hydoelectric projects (dams) in light of the persistant and pervasively severe drought that has been affecting water resources and agriculture in this area of the world for several years already:

Central Asia Drought

Also, with population movement in recent years due to these conditions there are more people living in landlocked areas with less arable land who depend on that land for food. This is also the area of the Syr Darya and Anu Darya Rivers which are fed by glaciers that are now receding due to climate change.

I believe in the future it will become harder for countries to come together to work out plans for hydroelectric power in regions such as this when food is scarce due to lack of water resources. This is why I am such a big proponent of solar energy. It would surely solve their water management problems in this region. At least in regards to having more to use for agricultural purposes. I also notice that in these articles when leaders of countries speak on this they rarely mention conservation, more efficient irrigation methods, and switching to different crops to be grown to save water. Cotton is a popular crop grown in this region, but it is also very water intensive.

With a humanitarian crisis already affecting millions in this area due to the depletion of the Aral Sea for agriculture years ago, I would hope people in this region would learn from the mistakes of the past.

From a strategic standpoint it also now makes perfect sense as to why the Russian president has now volunteered to "help" America in Afghanistan. It takes water to extract natural gas. Water surely will be and is fast becoming the new oil.