Water9
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The Middle East Dries Up—Another Case Study in the Water-Energy-Food Nexus
As seductive as it is, depleting non-renewable aquifers to grow food is fundamentally unsustainable for the long term, as Saudi Arabia and other nations are finding out. According to a recent article by Lester Brown, in the 1970s the world’s largest oil producer realized it could use oil-drilling technology to tap deep underwater aquifers and—amazingly,…
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Record-Breaking Amounts of Snow Raise Problems for Cities
These record breaking amounts of snow have caused numerous concerns both economical and environmental and as snowfalls pile up cities run out of room to put the snow. One suggested solution was to dump the snow into waterways even though it became a mixture of many pollutants including, but not limited to, motor oil and…
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Water Human Rights: Pollution
In my previous blogs, I have been discussing different 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 pollution of water. Pollution issues are largely leading to contamination of the water supplies around the world. There are countless…
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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…
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Water – a Human Right?
In the world, over one billion people live without access to clean water resources. These people have extremely large death rates to completely preventable, waterborne illnesses. It is estimated that over two million people die every year from preventable waterborne diseases, and a large percentage of those people are children under the age of five.…
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Down by the River, Running Out of Water
Too little water for too many people is a growing problem in poor countries–and in thriving suburban Rockland County, N.Y., just north of New York City. A new website, Water Resources in Rockland County, lays out the case, and neatly puts it into global context. The site is run by the Earth Institute’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network…
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Arsenic in Bangladesh Water, Then and Now
Back in the summer of 1997 while working for a small newspaper focusing on UN development issues, I traveled to Bangladesh to see how far this often overlooked country tucked away in a corner between India and China had fared since its independence 25 years ago. At the time the only stories which came out…
