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abundant skies: 8 principles for successful rainwater harvesting

Jul 6th, 2008
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8 principles, by Brad Lancaster on Oil Drum: Local.

Principle #1: Begin with long and thoughtful observation.
Principle #2: Start harvesting rain at the top of your watershed, then work your way down.
Principle #3: Always plan an overflow route, and manage overflow as a resource.
Principle #4. Start with small and simple strategies that harvest the rain as close as possible to where it falls.
Principle #5. Spread, slow and infiltrate the flow of water into the soil.
Principle #6. Maximize living and organic groundcover.
Principle #7. Maximize beneficial relationships and efficiency by “stacking functions.”
Principle #8. Continually reassess your system and improve it.

My advice to anyone who wants to get started living more sustainably is to start with rainwater-harvesting. Start at the top. Start small. But above all—start!

Brad’s website, with useful books for sale is www.harvestingrainwater.com/.

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is a big hunk of steak worth almost 2,000 gallons of water?

Jul 3rd, 2008
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asks Colin Dunn on Alternet.

Summer is heating up, and all the pools, barbeques, lawn-watering and the like that put our water use under the microscope, even more than it is the rest of the year. But did you know that we all have a “water-footprint”?

Quite similar in concept to the carbon footprint, our water footprints are defined as “the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the goods and services consumed by the individual, business or nation,” by Waterfootprint.org. People use lots of water for drinking, cooking and washing, but even more for producing things such as food, paper, cotton clothes, etc. The numbers are staggering.

In the US, our water footprint is 2,500 cubic meters per capita, which translates roughly to 660,430 U.S. gallons per person per year. Compare that to 700 cubic meters per year per capita (184,920 gallons) in China and 1150 cubic meters per year per capita (303,798 gallons) in Japan. That’s a lot of water down the drain at our hands.

This is apropos to Graham’s discussion earlier about knowing what it takes to “make” meat, and learning where it comes from; when you consider that it takes about 1,916 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef, it helps contextualize the impact of your meat-eating choices.

Sure, we can all use less, buy less and consume less, which is easy to say and hard to do, but breaking it down and considering these numbers makes one simple food choice — to eat less meat — have much more gravity. I’m not in to guilt-tripping anyone into a greener lifestyle, but I encourage you to ask yourself this: Is having a big hunk of steak really worth almost 2,000 gallons of water?

Reducing our water consumption isn’t just about sharing a bath, or putting a brick in the toilet cistern. Some more interesting facts from waterfootprint.com:

  1. The production of one kilogram of beef requires 16 thousand litres of water.
  2. To produce one cup of coffee we need 140 litres of water.
  3. The water footprint of China is about 700 cubic meter per year per capita. Only about 7% of the Chinese water footprint falls outside China.
  4. Japan with a footprint of 1150 cubic meter per year per capita, has about 65% of its total water footprint outside the borders of the country.
  5. The USA water footprint is 2500 cubic meter per year per capita.

You can roughly work out your water footprint here. Or find out what your country’s average is here, and compare yours with your country’s. Global average is 1243 m3 per capita, and surprisingly the database tells us that UK average is roughly global average, but with 70% coming from outside of the UK, while the USA average is almost twice the global (but only 19% comes from outside the US borders).

The product gallery is interesting, but unfortunately does not take into account different methods of raising food crops and animals. Small scale organic raised beds presumably need less water than huge monocultures in bare soil, for instance. And locally produced foods require less infrastructure and transportation, that itself uses water.

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dead zones grow in the gulf of mexico

Jun 10th, 2008
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How U.S. farming policy leads to ‘dead zones,’ huge marine areas where nothing can grow, by Kent Garber.

Each spring, the cycle of death begins anew. Nitrogen and phosphorus, leached from fertilizer, pass from farmland into streams, from streams into rivers—the Mississippi, the Potomac, the Susquehanna—and then, finally, into some of the country’s great bodies of water: the Gulf of Mexico, the Chesapeake Bay. There the chemicals collect each summer, spawning the growth of algae, which deplete the water of oxygen and lead to ghostly aquatic wastelands. Marine life, if mobile enough, will swim away; the rest will suffocate and die.

Scientists have monitored the growth of these so-called dead zones since the late 1970s. They have tried to promote policies to reduce their size, without much success. Last summer, the dead zone along the Gulf of Mexico coast spanned nearly 8,000 square miles— its third-largest occurrence on record and roughly the size of Massachusetts.

Farmers are effectively killing the ocean, by spraying poisons on the land. And the problem is getting worse thanks to biofuels.

Spurred by recent ethanol mandates and, to a lesser extent, high commodity prices, U.S. farmers are planting record-size crops. From 2006 to 2007, corn acres rose by about 15 million, mostly in the Mississippi River basin. Mid-Atlantic farmers are expected to plant 500,000 more acres of corn, soybeans, and wheat this year than they did in 2006, a 7 percent jump.

To grow more crops, particularly corn, farmers usually have to use more fertilizer. Fertilizer runoff is the primary contributor to dead zone formation, the source of three quarters of the nitrogen and more than half of the phosphorous in the water. In a recent study, researchers at the University of British Columbia and the University of Wisconsin found that the U.S. government’s goal to produce 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022, with a maximum of 15 billion from corn, would most likely increase the nitrogen flow to the Gulf by 10 to 20 percent.

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life, liberty, water

Jun 9th, 2008
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More about water, an article in YES! magazine, by Maude Barlow.

Clearly, the powers that be in the United States have decided that water is not a public good but a private resource that must be secured by whatever means.

But there are alternatives.

North Americans must learn to live within our means, by conserving water in agriculture and in the home. We could learn from the many examples here and beyond our borders—from the New Mexican “Acequia” system that uses an ancient natural ditch irrigation tradition to distribute water in arid lands to the International Rainwater Harvesting Alliance in Geneva, that works globally to promote sustainable rainwater harvesting programs.

Conservation strategies would undermine the massive investment now going into corporate technological and infrastructure solutions, such as desalination, wastewater reuse, and water transfer projects. And conservation would be many times cheaper, a boon to the public but not to the corporate interests that are currently driving international water agreements.

We all need water to live, but we also all need to learn to live without wasting this most valuable of resources. Industrial agriculture requires huge amounts of water, while small scale subsistence farmers make do with much less. Humus-rich farmland retains rainwater far better than chermically-farmed land, and mulching slows down the rate at which that soil moisture evaporates.
Compost toilets use no water, while flush toilets turn the valuable humanure into a waste product. Many of the habits, it seems, of the western lifestyle are far more wasteful of water than traditional peasant practises.

The U.S. and Canada are the only two countries actively blocking international attempts to recognize water as a human right. But movements in both countries are working to change that. A large network of human rights, faith-based, labor, and environmental groups in Canada has formed Canadian Friends of the Right to Water to get the Canadian government to support a U.N. right-to-water covenant. And a network in the United States led by Food and Water Watch is calling for a national water trust to ensure safekeeping of the nation’s water assets and a change of government policy on the right to water.

Such campaigns may have a fight ahead of them, but the vision is within reach: a United Nations covenant that recognizes the right of the Earth and other species to clean water, pledges to protect and conserve the world’s water supplies, and forms an agreement between those countries who have water and those who don’t to work toward local—not corporate—control of water. We must acknowledge water as a fundamental human right for all.

No one should have the right to pollute water. All life relies on it, and it is not reasonable to contaminate water for the sake of more ‘stuff’ or profits for shareholders.

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vandana shiva: why we face both food and water crises

May 30th, 2008
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Interview with Vandana Shiva on Alternet.

Vandana Shiva: One aspect of the inconsistency is between the principles of Gaia, the principles of soil, the ecology, renewability, how the atmosphere cleans itself and the laws of the global marketplace. The global marketplace is driven by the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the illogic of so-called “free trade,” which is totally not free. [The result of this incompatibility] is the current food crisis: The more agriculture is “liberalized,” the greater the food scarcity, the higher the food prices and the more people will go hungry.

Never has there been this rate of escalation in food prices worldwide as we witness now with the global integration of the food economies under the coercive and bullying force of the WTO.

The so called ‘free market’ only offers the ‘freedom’ for corporations and the western privileged elites to influence governments and markets for their own gain.

VS: That’s because the media orchestrates every analysis and interpretation. They would like this crisis to look like a success of globalization, and they would like to offer more globalization as a solution. In fact, the World Bank has said there should be more liberalized trade. Before the WTO was formed, we had protests with 500,000 farmers on the streets of Bangalore in 1993 to say that this is a recipe for starvation, for destroying agriculture, self-reliance and food security. And the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs — before the WTO was born — had a press conference to say that globalization will make food affordable for all.

They forget that food ultimately is not produced in the speculation and commodity exchanges controlled by Cargill in Chicago. It is produced by hard working women and men working with the soil and sun. And if you destroy the capacity of the people to work the land and the capacity of soil to produce, you’re going to have hunger. The tragedy is that the hunger of today and the rise of food [prices] is the result of globalization policies, and it is being implemented on a global scale. Unless we bring local food sovereignty and “food democracy” back into the picture, we will not have a solution to this.

The poor of the world need to be allowed to grow for their own needs, in preference to trade and cash crops. Local food security has little value in terms of conventional economics, but prioritising the cash economy over subsistence agriculture creates dependence and insecurity.

VS: Water scarcity [is] being created by non-sustainable systems of production for both food and textile. Every industrial activity has huge water demands. Industrial agriculture requires ten times more water to produce the same amount of food than ecological farming does. And the “green revolution” was not so green because it created demand for large dams and mining of groundwater.

Industrial agriculture has depleted water resources. In addition, as water has become polluted and depleted, a handful of industry saw water as a way of making super-profits by privatizing it. They are privatizing it in two ways. The first is through buying up entire civic, municipal distribution. The big players in this are Bechtel, Suez and Vivendi.

And interestingly, wherever they go, they face protests. Bechtel was thrown out of Bolivia. Suez wanted to take Delhi’s water supply, but we had a movement for water democracy and did not allow them to take over. But there’s a second kind of privatization, which is more insidious — and that is the plastic water bottle. Coca-Cola and Pepsi are leading in this privatization. But in India where Coca-Cola was stealing water, I worked with a small group of village women, and they shut their plant down. Across India, these giant corporations are taking between 1.5 to 2 million liters of water a day and leaving behind a water famine.

The reality is that huge corporations and their worldview, activities etc are actually creating the problems. Small is indeed beautiful.

VS: I try to articulate an alternative vision in terms of a democracy. Global market economy makes the first citizen the corporation. The rest of us are slaves, second class citizens. Secondly, it creates an identity for the human species as consumers in a global supermarket. We are no longer creators and producers. We are just consumers of goods that corporations bring to us from the place where they can manufacture them — at the highest cost to the environment and workers.

What we need is a reclaiming of who we are as human beings. We are first and foremost citizens of this beautiful planet. Our first duty is to protect this planet. And out of that flows the rights to the earth, air, water and food that the earth gives us. Those gifts are common resources, not commodities, private property or intellectual property. They are the commons of the earth and all of us have equal access to it. Nobody can interfere in the access of a person to their share of water, land and air. That interference is a violation of the rules of Gaia and the rules of democracy.

But the polluting industry has privatized even the air by first putting their pollutants into it and then by the carbon trade. They’re basically are saying that because we polluted the atmosphere, we own it. So we can pollute as much as we want and then buy up clean credits from someone else who is not polluting. The commons and the recovery of commons is vital to earth democracy. It’s at the heart of sustainability of the earth and democratic functioning of society.

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one of history’s great atrocities: the corporate theft of the public’s natural right to water

May 4th, 2008
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The current 1.1 billion people worldwide without access to potable water only opens one of the smaller windows on the injustices and the multiple casualties being wrought by private water-related industries. In fact, many are clueless to the magnitude of the victims — present and projected — of the growing water crisis as well as to the inhumane implications of the role of the private sector in regards to treating water as a commodity that can be owned and sold for profit. As of now, 2.6 billion people are at high risk for not having access to potable and an additional 1.8 million children die each year from water-related diseases.In the mix of chaos, despair, and confusion, which most affects the poorer elements of society, it is important to note the private corporations’ role, which some critics have identified as being among the major culprits in causing the crisis. Within recent decades, water privatization firms such as Suez, Vivendi, and RWE have bought control of a number of communities’ municipal water services, and then drastically increased the price of water; with some of them failing to effectively purify the water resources they had come to monopolize.

This article by Ashley Powdar highlights the role that privatisation and corporate ownership is playing in a global catastrophe.

The World Bank and IMF are among the principle factors behind the implementation of water privatization. The commodification of water began in earnest in the 1990’s in various developing regions of the world in an effort to address a number of water-related issues varying from its scarcity to a woeful mismanagement of the resource. To begin, the World Bank and IMF, along with multinational enterprises, argued that by placing a value on water, the general public was less likely to abuse, waste, and indiscriminately consume large amounts of the increasingly scant product. It has been found by a vast array of non-profit organizations that the average European uses 200 liters of water every day whereas North Americans use 400 liters of water a day. This can be compared to the average person in the developing world who uses 10 liters of water every day for drinking, washing, and cooking purposes. Independent environmental journalist Carmelo Ruiz Marrero explains the role played by pro-privatization international lending agencies by stating that “water is wasted because people get it for free or for artificially low prices. Therefore, if its price reflected its true ecological and economic cost, people would avoid its abuse and overuse.”

Yeh, right! In the UK the greatest waste of water is due to outdated and leaking infrastructure, with water companies unwilling to invest in improvements. Its ridiculous to say that people waste water because it is free, when the figures show differently. ‘Rich’ countries waste far more water, and even use drinking quality water to flush away their waste. UK statistics show that households only use 20% of water used. 300 million gallons a day are used to produce newspapers in the USA.  40,000 gallons to make a car. 400 gallons to grow a chicken. 150 gallons to grow the ingredients to make a loaf of bread! 120 gallons for one egg and 4 gallons for a tomato! (Water Trivia Facts). Obviously the more resources a society consumes, and the more industrial that society, the more water is used. Peasant farmers know how to conserve their water supplies because they have to – while civilised people simply turn on a tap, with no awareness of how precious that water really is.

The next time a consumer purchases a bottle of water, think of its true cost. There are several patterns of water privatization, but none are as offensive as the bottling of water. In fact, most people are unaware of the veritable scandals existing behind the bottled water industry. Characteristically, these multinational water companies go into less industrialized countries, where they monopolize water reservoirs (most often, these public reservoirs are the only available water resources that a given community might have), and sell the water back to the community at a price that invariably is far too expensive for its residents to pay. Water commodification is a global movement. In Africa, where privatization and lack of access to water is most prevalent, over half of the population earns less than one dollar a day; one can imagine the burden of trying to afford a bottle of water that is often priced a little higher than a dollar. Furthermore, women and female children are most affected, as they are forced to travel an average of five miles a day to fetch available water — often times this water is not even potable. The time-consuming task of searching for water impedes women from obtaining jobs to help feed their families and hinders female children from attending school on a regular basis. It is stated that 40 billion working hours are spent carrying water each year and 26 percent of women’s time around the world is spent on physically obtaining the water. In addition, it is estimated that 443 million school days are lost each year due to water privatization and the consequences it has on individual lives.

Not that we are going to promote centralised schooling. Education and schooling are not necessarily the same thing – as shown by the dumbing down of America, and the huge home-schooling movement there. (Thats a subject for a future post). But people should not be forced into spending their time walking miles to find water, while local sources are owned and controlled by companies bottling it for sale to western consumers.

Once the attendant injustices of water privatization became evident to the international community, activists, environmentalists, and average citizens alike have been arguing for a greater local presence in the decision-making process affecting water use. Also, advocates have been urging the World Bank, IMF, WTO, as well as national governments to discard their privatization scenarios, as, due to their high cost, they more often than not cause dissension among communities. There are alternatives. Advocates for democratizing water, Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, assert that there are three essentials the public must control in order to secure their water from any conglomerate monopolization. First, they stress the need for conservation. The population is predicted to exponentially increase while the ecosystem’s water supply is likely to decrease by at least 30 percent. Therefore, preservation is a vital measure to take in order to safeguard this precious resource. Second, they emphasize the importance of equity in regards to water allocation.

Although some nations are blessed with abundant access to fresh water, others are burdened with an egregious lack of this fundamental source of life. Third, in order to institutionalize conservation and equity, water democracy must be obtained at all costs. Water management, its proponents maintain, should be in the hands of the people, not under control of corporations whose principle desire is to generate revenue. It is also notable that accountability, transparency, and consensus are vital in the management of water. Water is for life, not for profit. If the commodification of water continues — thus possibly undermining the basic right to life, it is not absurd to conclude that other vital resources might only become available on a for-pay basis. The coming water crisis must be dealt within a transparent, democratic process or else the globe will fall victim to a series of potentially violent and life threatening consequences. Barlow and Clark state that “In the 21st century, our water is becoming a commodity. Some want to profit from it and others are ready to go to war over it, but every form of life must have it.” The overarching question will be, “who will control this source of life?”

It is indeed absurd to give control of water sources to for-profit companies.

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peak clothing and peak water

Apr 26th, 2008
by admin.
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A BBC article warning that consumers should prepare for the price of clothing to increase.

“It all comes down to energy,” explains Bradley George, head of commodities and resources at Investec Asset Management. “We are basically short of power in the world right now.”

Hence, it is not only a question of whether land should be used to grow crops for food or cotton. It is also a question of how much energy should be used to produce clothes in factories.

Fertiliser costs are also soaring, adding to raw material costs, and the credit crunch is adding to the squeeze as low-margin clothes manufacturers are finding it harder to raise finance.

More worrying, an article in Wired explains how aquifers and rivers are running dry.

That the news is familiar makes it no less alarming: 1.1 billion people, about one-sixth of the world’s population, lack access to safe drinking water. Aquifers under Beijing, Delhi, Bangkok, and dozens of other rapidly growing urban areas are drying up. The rivers Ganges, Jordan, Nile, and Yangtze — all dwindle to a trickle for much of the year. In the former Soviet Union, the Aral Sea has shrunk to a quarter of its former size, leaving behind a salt-crusted waste.

Water has been a serious issue in the developing world for so long that dire reports of shortages in Cairo or Karachi barely register. But the scarcity of freshwater is no longer a problem restricted to poor countries. Shortages are reaching crisis proportions in even the most highly developed regions, and they’re quickly becoming commonplace in our own backyard, from the bleached-white bathtub ring around the Southwest’s half-empty Lake Mead to the parched state of Georgia, where the governor prays for rain. Crops are collapsing, groundwater is disappearing, rivers are failing to reach the sea. Call it peak water, the point at which the renewable supply is forever outstripped by unquenchable demand.

This is not to say the world is running out of water. The same amount exists on Earth today as millions of years ago — roughly 360 quintillion gallons. It evaporates, coalesces in clouds, falls as rain, seeps into the earth, and emerges in springs to feed rivers and lakes, an endless hydrologic cycle ordained by immutable laws of chemistry. But 97 percent of it is in the oceans, where it’s useless unless the salt can be removed — a process that consumes enormous quantities of energy. Water fit for drinking, irrigation, husbandry, and other human uses can’t always be found where people need it, and it’s heavy and expensive to transport. Like oil, water is not equitably distributed or respectful of political boundaries; about 50 percent of the world’s freshwater lies in a half-dozen lucky countries.

And of course, water supplies require energy. As peak oil hits harder, peak water is an inevitable consequence, along with peak everything else. And climate change adds to the problem.

Australia has always been dry. It’s the most arid continent after Antarctica. Covering an area roughly the size of the lower 48 states, it supports less than one-tenth the US population, and even that is an enormous strain on water supplies. The country was founded during the second-worst drought in its history, but the worst dry spell is unfolding right now. Rainfall, which has declined to 25 percent of the long-term average, is projected to plummet another 40 percent by 2050.

Three factors are working to desiccate the landscape. One is simple overexploitation of existing resources. More water is withdrawn to support agriculture, industry, and cities than the system can handle. Another is El Niño, a weather pattern that periodically alters rainfall, further drying the continent. The third is climate change. Australia is growing hotter, which compounds the other two problems by boosting both consumption and evaporation.

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