Let’s talk about the beautiful Gulf of California, which exists in all of its beauty because of the flow of freshwater from the Colorado River. A flow that is reaching the Gulf less and less nowadays. You see, since the damming of the Colorado River the amount of water that reaches the mouth of the river in Mexico has dropped, and in certain years no water reaches the mouth. That’s a problem. The Gulf of California is important forcontinue reading
When most people think about water they think of liquid water, but we cant forget about all of the frozen water in the world. Actually about 70% of the worlds freshwater is frozen in glaciers and ice caps. This picture was taken from the top of the Franz Josef Glacier in New Zealand.
Sanitation is a huge problem in developing nations. While the world has made significant progress on providing clean water to those who need it leaders have fallen behind when it comes to sanitation. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation put sanitation as a high priority for their organization, and with that in mind they funded the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s Sanitation Ventures project. Because most people in developing nations don’t have infrastructure to take away the wastecontinue reading
Agriculture uses 70% of the world’s available freshwater every year. With 20% of the world’s population living without access to adequate water giving 70% to agriculture is not very sustainable. Good thing there are really smart people out there, and some of them came up with a system of using the ocean’s abundant source of water to irrigate crops, an idea that transformed into seawater greenhouses. The idea of seawater greenhouses was brought to the world in 1991 by acontinue reading
Take a look at the picture above of a slum in Jakarta, Indonesia. Now tell me how you would get a typical large sanitation truck through the slum in order to collect human “sludge”. That’s a question that Mercy Corps’ Indonesian team asked themselves, and they came up with a great answer. In Indonesia 50,000 people die every year as a result of poor sanitation, most of them being in slums like the one above. It’s understandable since none ofcontinue reading
I had a couple of hours the other day so I decided to watch a Frontline documentary called Poisoned Waters. As the name suggests it’s about water pollution and the consequences of that pollution focusing on a couple of different areas in the US. I’ve never written a movie review so hopefully this will give you a good idea of what the movie is about without giving away too much information. The documentarycontinue reading
Do you ever drive by a gas station that’s fenced off and there are workers digging a huge hole in the ground? That’s because tanks that hold the gas have leaked and contaminated the ground under the station. Around the world there are thousands of sites where toxic chemicals have been spilt accidentally or dumped in the past and left. Up until the 1970s it was widely believed that the soil would act like a natural filter and clean thecontinue reading
Seeing as I’ve been writing and posting articles (on facebook) about dams quite a bit lately I figured I’ll talk about someone fighting against dams in this edition of Water Heroes, and that person is Juan Pablo Orrego. Juan has been fighting for over 20 years to protect Chile’s magnificent Patagonia from the destruction of dam projects, and has had a very positive impact. In 1997 he won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize and in 1998 he won the Rightcontinue reading
Today I’m going to be talking about a methodology called PHAST that is used by organizations around the world and is based around the idea that for something to be successful you need to get the people it’s supposed to help involved. PHAST, which stands for Participatory Hygiene and Sanitation Transformation, is a participatory method that engages communities and educates them on hygiene and sanitation as well as encouraging them to take responsibility for the management of water and sanitationcontinue reading