Water

Water Scientists say Brace for Impact

October 26, 2011
A cow’s carcass in Northern Kenya, photographed last week, testifies to the reality of what happens when the water runs out. And it is running out. (Photo courtesy CIAT The International Center for Tropical Agriculture/Flickr)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download The burgeoning world population, already grown far beyond the numbers the planet can sustain, is increasing its consumption of water twice as fast as it is growing, according to the World Resources Institute. In a world already profoundly short of clean water, where the number of people is [...]


Report: Trawlers Scraping Last Life from Oceans

September 8, 2011
A new study details how factory trawlers such as the Northern Osprey are stripping the deep oceans of fish that cannot replace themselves. (Photo by Dennis Jarvis/Flickr)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download A perfunctory article deep inside yesterday’s Washington Post paints a horrifying picture of exhausted oceans — described as “more akin to a watery desert” —  being scraped clean of the last traces of marine life by pitiless, gargantuan deep-water trawlers operating beyond the law and beyond sanity.  The story is [...]


Great Lakes Dying: Mussel-Bound Michigan

August 19, 2011
Beautiful, tranquil and nearly dead: Lake Michigan in the moonlight. (Photo by Kevin Dooley/Flickr)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download On Saturday, August 13, the last commercial fishing boat working Lake Michigan out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, passed the harbor breakwater outbound for the last time. Two hundred years of commercial fishing from Milwaukee was over, because Lake Michigan is virtually dead. It is not over-fishing that killed it [...]


Losing the War on Pond Scum

August 8, 2011
A satellite view released by NASA shows a blue-green algae bloom (the green part) taking over western Lake Erie (the blue part). And that's not all.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download A legacy of industrial agriculture, energized by climate change, a continent-sized explosion of toxic algae blooms is besieging the freshwater lakes of North America, sickening people, killing animals and wrecking tourist- and recreation-based local economies. Although each eruption is big news in local papers, the unprecedented extent and [...]


A New Tragedy of the Commons: Water Banks

August 1, 2011
The tragedy of the commons is that herdsmen will overgraze a common pasture unless constrained. The same, it seems, applies to water. (Photo by Srinivasa Krishna/Flickr)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download If you liked what investment bankers and hedge-fund managers did to our economy in recent years, you’re going to love what water banks are doing to our ecosystem. The same, time-tested methods are in play: unleash unrestrained greed on a commodity that everyone needs in order to make [...]


How the World Ends: Not a Bang, a Brown Lawn

July 29, 2011
Lake Ray Hubbard, a reservoir of drinking water for the city of Dallas, Texas. Anybody worried yet? (Photo by Terry Shuck/Flickr)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download According to last Sunday’s Fort Worth, Texas, Star-Telegram, “Lee Weaver knew he was facing a serious problem when he watched his lawn sprinkler dwindle to a meager squirt at his home south of Fort Worth.” This tells us pretty much all we need to know about Mr. Weaver, [...]


Oil in the Yellowstone: Deja Vu All Over Again

July 6, 2011
An oiled bird struggles to stay alive. Like many of the statements made by Exxon this week in Montana, this picture has nothing to do with reality on the Yellowstone River, it’s generic. (Photo by Igor Golubenkov/fotopedia)

Like Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day, we keep moving through the same sequence of events, disaster after disaster, until it really gets kind of annoying. This is the industry’s Standard Operating Procedure. First announcement: “We have a minor problem with ___________.” Fill in the blank: oil in the water, radiation in the water, [...]


Mississippi Rising: Act of God, or of the Corps?

May 12, 2011
A US Army Corps of Engineers map shows the area that will be flooded when the Morganza Spillway is opened, probably tomorrow.

Long before it faced Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Chinese Army in Korea, the North Vietnamese or Saddam Hussein, the US Army Corps of Engineers was at war with Mother Nature — that’s the way the Corps describes it in its publications. No battle has been more expensive, or consumed more of its energy, [...]


Fire and Rain: While Some States Drown, Others Parch

May 9, 2011
While the Mississippi River rises in historic floods a few hundred miles to the east. extreme heat and drought continue to afflict Texas with wildfires that so far have seared a thousand square miles. And there's more to come. (U.S. Air Force Photo/Staff Sgt. Eric Harris)

While the central and southern states are disappearing under floodwaters of historic immensity, a searing, lengthening drought is crisping the prospects of the American West and Southwest. Two recent major reports — one of them from the Department of the Interior — sounded strident alarm bells about the coming Big Thirst, while the loudest voices [...]


Ohio Lake “Dying”: Governor Applies Lipstick

January 31, 2011
Algae scum in the waves of Grand Lake St. Marys, Ohio, last June is the symptom of a fatal illness. Last week, the governor applies a Band-Aid. (Photo by St. Marys Lake Improvement Association)

The government of the great state of Ohio demonstrated last week, with laser-like precision, exactly why we do not have a chance of avoiding the multiple catastrophes bearing down on our supplies of food, energy and water. In unveiling what was universally described as a “plan” to deal with one of the state’s biggest pollution [...]