water matters43
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Is there such a thing as too much water awareness?
Gayle Leonard, in her blog Thirsty in Suburbia, posts about Jason Garland’s Twitter feed, which is set up to automatically update for all water use in his household, continually, dozens of times a day. It’s undeniable documentation, it’s shocking, and it would get old very, very fast.
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Cool tech: The ‘Savior Bud’ collects clean drinking water from trees
In dry areas of the world where access to clean drinking water is a matter of life and death, this novel design lets people get a little help from their plant friends. Yanko Design has developed the ‘Savior Bud’, which collects moisture directly from tree leaves during the natural transpiration cycle.
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How Will Climate Change Affect the Great Lakes?
With much of the world focused on the climate talks in Copenhagen, Denmark over the past two weeks, many of you in the Great Lakes area may be wondering, “how will climate change affect the Lakes?” So let’s take a moment to briefly look at this question.
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Water you drinking?
With Jenni’s recent post on “Water Human Rights: Pollution,” I started to question the safety and current state of the public water system here in the United States. Charles Duhigg’s New York Times article confirmed my suspicions of the potentially dangerous quality of water in the US municipal water system. The Clean Water Act of 1972 and…
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Water Problems: No Prediction Needed
With Copenhagen heading for an apparent impasse, the world faces an uncertain and potentially dire climate future. Of particular concern is the inability to predict how rainfall across the globe may change in intensity, frequency and seasonality. If there are droughts in some places and floods in others, there will be direct impacts on agriculture,…
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Is it time to water down Copenhagen?
With the Copenhagen climate talks kicking off today, I thought it was worth highlighting the close connection between water and climate, particularly as it pertains to energy use. While goodness knows the delegates in Copenhagen will have enough to do to hammer out even a “framework” agreement, I hope some attention will be paid to the close…
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Osmotic power — prospect of sustainable energy, or water liability?
Today, Statkraft, a company in Norway, opened the world’s first osmotic power plant—a model of a sustainable energy system which uses osmosis to harness the energy of fresh water’s natural movement toward salt water through a membrane. The idea for power generated through the movement of water, due to osmosis through a specially designed membrane,…
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Water Human Rights: Physical Scarcity
In my previous blogs, I defended water as a human right and began the discussion of ways in which the human right to clean water is violated. I have already discussed how economic scarcity occurs, and this week I will be discussing physical scarcity of water. Physical scarcity is the issue that the water just…
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Water Human Rights: Economic Scarcity
In my earlier blog, I began arguing that water is a human right, and that the extreme lack of potable water is a significant human rights violation. The scale of the human rights violation of the right to drinking water is on an extremely large scale. The largest occurrence of this right being violated is…
