Surface Water9
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Protecting Our Waterways: The Waterkeeper Alliance
At any given time, there are dedicated environmentalists around the U.S. working to protect our waterways.These “keepers” are all members of the Waterkeeper Alliance (WKA), an organization of over 200 keepers globally, defending their communities’ rights to clean water.
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E.P.A. Sued for Trying to Protect the Environment
Early last month, Florida sued the US Environmental Protection Agency in an effort to block new clean water regulations that the agency announced last month and which it plans to begin enforcing in 2012.
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At AGU, Earth Institute’s Columbia Water Center Adds to the Abundance of Scientific Riches
The annual American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting is an all-you-can-eat buffet of the most current scientific knowledge available on the planet. Name your pleasure: space, climate change, geomagnetism, nonlinear geophysics, volcanology, biogeosciences, etc. You have to be careful to indulge in moderation over the five-day event, or risk unseemly bloating. The Columbia Water Center contributed…
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A Milestone Worthy of a Party: the Municipal Water Plan in Brazil
I recently returned from a trip to visit our project site in Ceará, Brazil. While our project has included infrastructure construction, the heart of our work is a municipal water plan (PAM) for Milhã, an area in the central region of the state.
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Is New York City Ready for Drought?
All day long a flood of thousands scientists and students ebbs and flows across San Francisco’s 4th Street and Howard Avenue, coursing between the cavernous Moscone West and Moscone South convention buildings. The AGU is like a supercomputer of earth science, with human currents of data swapping information, heading from one talk to another, processing…
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Parched for Peace: The Fertile Crescent Might Be Barren
This past October, the Levant Desalination Association and Nosstia, an organization of expat Syrian scientists, arranged a conference in the capital city of Damascus to discuss Syria’s water crisis.
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Ceará, Brazil: With Electricity and Water, This Place is Heaven
“With electricity and water, this place is heaven on earth.” That is the opinion of several residents I spoke with last summer during a visit to Milhã, in the center of the state of Ceará, Brazil. In this rural, semi-arid region communities are small and close-knit, and many families have lived there, often in the…
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Plastic Bottles, Compost Toilets and Rainwater Catchment: Simple Solutions for Haiti’s Clean Water Crisis
There are many other low-cost, high-impact approaches to alleviating the clean water crises in places like Haiti, so it’s worth mentioning a few.
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California’s Water Rights Controversy: Should Farmers Be Allowed to Transfer Water to Developers?
Farmers in San Joaquin Valley, California have recently come under scrutiny for proposing to sell their water rights to developers. The selling of water rights remains a controversial issue especially as industry and home development compete with farmers for limited water supplies.
