The nation has a right to expect clean water, but the reality is that increasingly its tolerating poisoned waters, contaminated with chemicals from agricultural runoff, prescription medicines, cosmetics, industrial pollutants, and more. Some of these contaminants, such as steroids, cannot be filtered out.

One of the benefits of living off-grid is that your water has not been through the system. Whether its from rain, or spring, or even bottled drinking water, its likely to be less contaminated than tap.

“The irony is that everybody looks at that [picturesque] scene and thinks that it’s great; everything is right with the world in Elliott Bay,” says scuba diver Mike Racine in the Chesapeake Bay in tonight’s PBS episode. “But in point of fact, not 100 feet away from where they are drinking a nice glass of wine off their white linen, there is this unbelievable gunk coming out of the end of this pipe.”
>>Keep reading “PBS Frontline on water pollution”

The Hopi declaration of water states, “What we do to our water, we do to ourselves”.  A scary reality in the West, where aquifer levels steadily decline, arsenic continues to poison city water, and new development is threatened with an inadequate assured water supply.  

In the face of such monumental water shortage challenges, rainwater harvesting offers a solution.  

High Desert Rain Catchment of Prescott, Arizona is hosting workshops geared towards do-it-yourself types who want to learn about installing their own rainwater harvesting systems.
>>Keep reading “Rainwater workshop”

Do we need it? The era of cheap water is nearly over says a report by the Pacific Institute in California. A swelling global population, changing diets and mankind’s expanding “water footprint”  have led ecologists to forecast “peak ecological water” — the point where, like the concept of “peak oil”, the world has to confront a natural limit on something once considered virtually infinite.

Off-gridders have to look at their water supply, and ask “is it really secure?”

The world is in danger of running out of “sustainably managed water”, according to Peter Gleick, Pacific Institute president and a leading authority on global freshwater resources.

A key element to tackling the crisis, say experts, is to
>>Keep reading “Peak water”

DIY Water activists The Greywater Guerillas have a book out. Its called Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground and its damn good.

One section deals with the practicalities of the composting loo in an urban area - risks include the “post traumatic neighbor” who reports the author to the authorities for creating insanitary conditions. But undeterred she says “I love my composting loo,” and she is never going back.
>>Keep reading “I love my composting loo”

Enjoy it while it lasts Here are the precise facts of the coming water shortage as far as they are currently known or surmised.

Areas of the world already facing intense competition and growing demand for scarce water supplies will face steadily worsening water supply in the future. Everywhere, climate change will raise new obstacles to water resource planning and policy development, because the climatic and hydrologie patterns of the past will no longer provide a reliable guide to the future.
>>Keep reading “Water shortage and climate change - full details”