Posted July 21st, 2009 by mark
Shaifur Rahman, a vege-table farmer with two acres of land in northern India's agricultural heartland, has watched the water supply sink deeper and deeper underground over the course of his lifetime.
"When I was a child, there was water at 15 feet [5 metres] below," Mr Rahman says. "Today I am 55 years old, and there is so much less rain, and the water table has gone down to 90 feet."
Two years ago Mr Rahman invested Rs100,000 ($2,080, €1,460, £1,260) to build a 220ft bore well because his family's old 70ft well had run dry. Many farmers in Punjab, a big rice-producing area, have dug equally deep as water-intensive cultiv-ation has sapped local -supplies.
Posted May 21st, 2009 by mark
The world needs to become more useless. It needs to cut down on consumption of the planet's resources and quickly if we are to have any chance of leaving it in a livable state for our children and their children, one that has enough food and water for them, that isn't unbearably hot or in a constant state of war as desperate people fight for scarce resources.
This used to be a doomsday scenario but it's starting to look frightening likely. As the population creeps up from 6.77 billion now to nine billion by 2040 and the average temperature rises somewhere 2.0 and 11.6 degrees Farenheit before the end of the century (IPCC projections), sea levels will rise, millions of people will get displaced and whatever natural resources are left by that time will be fought over by governments and warlords. The wars in Sudan and Darfur as primarily the result of people trying to grab or hold onto land that can produce food and water.
Posted March 25th, 2009 by mark
Here’s a great diagram showing how much water we use and how we can cut down. Courtesy of those good folks at Good Magazine.
http://awesome.goodmagazine.com/transparency/web/trans0309walkthisway.html
