Run for Water
Enviado por jgeeslin, 10 dezembro, 2009 - 15:51
According to a new report from the New York Times, more than 20% of the nation's water treatment systems have violated key provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act over the last five years.
The Act requires communities to deliver safe tap water to local residents. But apparently since 2004, the water provided to more than 49 million people has contained illegal concentrations of chemicals like arsenic or radioactive substances like uranium, as well as dangerous bacteria often found in sewage!
Enviado por jgeeslin, 9 dezembro, 2009 - 05:00
The massive lack of clean drinking water around the world affects nearly one billion people.
Enviado por Live Earth, 8 dezembro, 2009 - 07:30
Do you like chlorine? I do. Although I might not particularly like the taste of it, it is by far the easiest and cheapest way to disinfect water and make it drinkable, and it probably helped to save more lives than any other single chemical substance on Earth. Using simple techniques, it can be produced and sold locally in developing countries.
In the USA, chlorine began to be widely used as a disinfectant in the early 1900s, and it is credited with playing a key role in increasing Americans' life expectancy from 45 in the early 1900s to about 76 years at present, an increase of 50%. No more cholera, typhoid fever, and dysentery. Today, 98% of all drinking water purification in the USA uses chlorine. Very useful stuff to have around. So what about its use in developing countries?
Enviado por Andy Sternberg, 7 dezembro, 2009 - 14:35
Every Monday we profile a Dow Live Earth Run for Water partner organization that works toward providing solutions to the nearly 1 billion people who lack access to clean, safe water. To donate to one of these projects, visit liveearth.org/give.
Blue Legacy International was founded in late 2008 by Alexandra Cousteau to “tell the story of our Water Planet and shape society’s dialogue to include water as one of the defining issues of our century by illustrating the interconnectedness of all water issues.” A non-profit organization Blue Legacy develops and distributes traditional and new media projects that inspire people to take action on critical water issues in meaningful ways.
Enviado por Andy Sternberg, 2 dezembro, 2009 - 15:44
click to watch!Welcome to Live Earth TV! Find out how you can make a difference and participate in Live Earth's 2010 Global Event. This is the first of several Live Earth TV webisodes leading up to the Run for Water on April 18th, 2010. Episode 1 features video from partners Global Water Challenge and Blue Legacy, with music by Paul Dateh & Ken Belcher and introduces Live Earth TV host Shira Lazar.
Watch and pass it along!
Enviado por Live Earth, 30 novembro, 2009 - 12:36
Say you are a poor farmer in a rural area in a developing country. Then your best bet out of poverty is to make more money. From where? From the field. You need to grow stuff. And because growing things need water, you need access to water. Water is money.
One options is to wait for the rain. It is a stressful option, because the rain might come too late, it might not come at all, or it might come all at once, all of which are bad. The other options is to take control over the water you need. That means getting a pump. What kind of pump? One that is affordable, available, and repairable. Ergonomic, and easy to operate.
Enviado por jgeeslin, 26 novembro, 2009 - 07:35
Alexandra Cousteau, the founder of Blue Legacy, a nonprofit dedicated to our beautiful water-based planet, and Live Earth Run for Water spokesperson, recently sat down with the folks at EcoStiletto to chat. Cousteau spent her days growing up on grand oceanic expeditions with her famous grandfather Jacques-Yves and father Philippe, and learned to scuba dive at the tender age of seven.
Enviado por Live Earth, 25 novembro, 2009 - 07:00
David Kuria wants to transform the way Kenyans think about toilets. His company, Ecotact, is building bright, beautiful structures in dense urban centers and slums, where Kenyans can pay a small fee to use a hygienic toilet. A seemingly simple intervention but with potential for enormous impact in urban areas where defecating into a plastic bag is a common practice (e.g., the infamous "flying toilets" in the Kibera slum).
Enviado por Live Earth, 23 novembro, 2009 - 10:40
Every Monday we profile a Dow Live Earth Run for Water partner organization that works toward providing solutions to the nearly 1 billion people who lack access to clean, safe water. To donate to one of these projects, visit liveearth.org/give.
Wasrag (the Water & Sanitation Rotarian Action Group) is a group of Rotarians who are dedicated to one of the aspirations of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals: to halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.
Enviado por jgeeslin, 21 novembro, 2009 - 09:00
We should be much more aware that we may be using water at an extremely unsustainable pace. An astronomical amount of water is used for consumer products and food consumption known as your Water Footprint. This is the amount of water a person, company or nation uses to produce the commodities, goods and services consumed.
Water footprints can be hard to calculate, depending on how far up the chain of production you investigate, since everything you eat and buy used some water to produce. For example: to feed cows for beef, or to use in the factory that made your cell phone, or even the mass amount of water it took to make that plastic bottle of water - that you should have stopped using!
GOOD magazine has done a wonderful job of creating this sheet to help put things in perspective. Please check this out and really think about how your daily actions effect your water footprint.
