Being a Futurama fan, I've always wanted to say this but could not find the propitious moment. Writing about water scarcity & food shortages is taxing and angers me at times particularly when I come across disheartening news caused by blatant greed and callous disregard for our planet.

However, a huge dose of human ingenuity, human creativity and human toil will right the wrongs. I have great faith in humanity and this diary is dedicated to the good folks out there bursting their synapses coming up with novel ways of making the world less dependent on fossil fuels, working out solutions to feed the planet and generally trying to make this earth a better place (if you look at the human brain from say, 150,000 years ago, you will not see much difference when compared with today's brains. Yet the drive to learn, as well as our ability to communicate and work collectively, has lifted our human potential to unimaginable levels.)

Water is Life, yet over 1 billion people have no access to safe drinking water and over 2 billion lack basic sanitation. As you know, due to increasingly lower availability of water in many parts of the world, water has more and more become a political commodity.

A recent Gallup Poll showed that Americans perceived polluted drinking water as more of a threat than climate change, with 53% saying that they worried "a great deal" about it and 37% expressing the same level of concern over global warming. Gallup noted that pollution of drinking water has been a major concern since 1990.

There was an interesting piece in the Fashion section of the NYTimes this Sunday that is a little weird but it gets into some pretty fun stuff. The piece follows a kid from Brooklyn who is hell bent on becoming an organic farmer. Trucker hats, Carhartts, and Pabst were the fashion but now some are putting the heart behind the fashion and finding the funk in farming.

Privatizing water has taken the world by storm. How many people would rather pay for cases of bottled water than take it from their tap? How many communities are deprived of water because a corporation moves in to contain and sell their water? The situations are similar to what happens here in the US and what is happening across Africa. The greatest new commodity essential to life in the world is a bottle of water. This is no more evident in the US where we are so caught up in the corporate farce that we prefer the tastes of different waters - or so we think. Here is also comes with the idea that it is safer, cleaner, and healthier to drink bottled water as opposed to tap water. ABC news presented a special on the myths of bottled water. The leading expert, used by the bottled water companies, said that there was no reason to say either tap or bottled water was better than the other. The also conducted a taste test with NYC tap water and five other bottled waters, including the top selling, french Evian. Tap water ranked fairly high at #3 with a bottled water and Evian ranked at the very bottom as the least good tasting water sample.

After 18 months of drought, a dim environmental awareness is dawning over the Republican states of the Old South. You can see it in a few sad headlines here and there: No plan if water runs out. But the heroic virtues of big business are also celebrated: Business big in fighting water crisis. Coca-Cola has turned off the fountain in front of its Atlanta headquarters!

First a few facts: Water in numbers.

1% is the amount of the world's water currently fit for human consumption.
97% is the percentage of Earth's water that is saltwater.
6% is the amount of world's freshwater that will be processed in desalination facilities by 2015, (which is roughly double of the current amount)
2 billion is the number of people the UN estimates will lack sufficient water by 2050.

On May 27, 2007, many citizens around the world will be celebrating the centennial birthday of environmental heroine Rachel Carson. The right-wing has now begun ratcheting up their attacks on Carson due to their hatred of her strength as an effective environmental activist. And in the last couple days, media outlets have also been reporting that Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) is effectively blocking two bills in the Senate that are aimed at honoring Carson.

Cross-posted from Ecotality Blog.

China’s Yellow River, commonly referred to as the Cradle of Chinese Civilization is the 2^nd longest river in China and the 7^th longest in the world. It’s also an industrial dumping ground and is fast turning into an environmental nightmare. Here’s a photo taken on November 21, 2006 of a section of the Yellow River in Lanzhou, the capitol of northwest China’s Gansu Province.