Green is Blue is Green

Left, Rainwater HOG, installation view; right, a Rainwater HOG (Courtesy of Rainwater HOG)

Alison Arieff writes about water in today's NYT. The article offers an urgent message about water and also offers solutions for the retention and capture of the essential blue gold. Though 70% of the earth is covered with water, only 3% is fit for consumption.

Because water is cheap (at least for now) and seemingly in infinite supply, efforts to improve its use — or deter its overuse — have been inadequate. And it’s not just water itself that’s being wasted: there’s the energy required to transport and deliver it (particularly in such cases as Atlanta’s bizarre arrangement to get its water from Alabama and Florida, or any of us buying bottled water from Fiji). But there are innovations, large and small, now available that would provide for systematic management and optimization of our nation’s water.

Accompanying the article are some good photos of green roofs and greywater solutions. You can follow the link in Arieff's article or this link to Greywater Guerrillas. Greywater Guerrillas is a collaborative of educators, designers, builders and artists who educate and empower people to build sustainable water culture and infrastructure. Arieff provides an effective overview of the challenges and emerging solutions to water issues.

Don't miss the comment section following the article---informative and always entertaining.

Troubled Waters.

The documentary "Flow: For Love of Water" by Irena Salina, premiered in New York, September 4. The ideas it presents are startling. Consider this from Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing:

Global water profiteering is at the center of a global healthcare crisis that kills more people than AIDS or malaria. The film shows the grim reality of water in Asia, Africa, South and Central America, and the USA. The mortality is awful, and not just from bad water or no water -- also from police forces in states like Bolivia who go to war against people whose water supply has been sold to foreign multinationals who are reaping windfall profits while they die.

In the US and Europe, the bottled water industry pulls in billions to sell products that are more contaminated and toxic than what comes out of the tap. The result is a gigantic mountain of empty plastic bottles that toxify the environment -- and three times more money spent on bottled water than it would take to solve the world's real water crisis. The companies like Nestle that pump out our aquifers use private investigators to harass people who sign petitions to stop them from pumping.

But it's not all doom and gloom -- low-cost, sustainable purification technologies like ultraviolet water-health run by village cooperatives can make dramatic development differences for the poorest, most vulnerable people in the world, who are able to maintain their own systems without foreign involvement. Local activists all over the world and fighting back and winning public, non-profit ownership of their waterworks.

Only a few companies control the destiny of our planet's water. How can this happen? "Flow" film promoters ask us to support Article 31 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This Article declares that no one should be deprived of access to water, no matter what their financial circumstances. Amazing that we need resolutions to assure the right to this life sustaining element.

Keep an eye out for this important film.