Predicted rise in sea levels could submerge low-lying islands by 2100

Dr. Orin Pilkey of Duke University expects the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets to cause sea levels to rise between 3 and 7 feet by 2100. That would force coastal barrier islands to erect seawalls or abandon their communities, he said.

Pilkey, Duke's director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines, was one of the experts who on Thursday discussed how climate changes would affect coastal communities in a teleconference hosted by the Rockefeller Family Fund's Environment Program.

While some scientists believe global warming is not the result of an increase in greenhouse gas emissions and is part of a natural cycle, Pilkey contends it is driven by escalating carbon dioxide emissions, which cause oceans to heat up and glaciers to melt.

A 3-foot sea level rise would put the most southern and northern tips of Hilton Head under water, along with land adjacent to Broad Creek, according to maps created by Jeremy Weiss, a senior research specialist in Geosciences at the University of Arizona. The maps also show that rising waters would swallow much of the land at the Beaufort and Jasper county line, nearly all of Fripp Island and the edges of Parris Island.

Weiss created global maps by using historic records from interglacial periods and recent trends monitored by the U.S. Geological Survey. The maps can highlight specific areas. They can also show what the land looks like now and how it would change with a sea level rise of between 3 and 21 feet.

"When we get up to 3 feet, the cities will be in trouble - Boston, Washington, D.C., New York, Newark, and particularly Miami, which (are) at very low elevations," Pilkey said.

"When the cities are in trouble, it's very likely that federal money of any kind will go to the cities and the barrier island, recreational properties will have difficulty. It's going to be up to individual towns to respond ... ."

more from the Beaufort Gazette (SC)

Free-flowing for real: Demolition of gravel dam at Milltown marks historic step in watershed transformation

That's all it took for Envirocon excavator operator Dallas Connors to tear through a gravel coffer dam and allow the Clark Fork to re-enter its original channel at the base of University Mountain.

For the past century, it had to pass the spillway of Milltown Dam at that point. For the past year, it's been pushed into a new reach where the dam powerhouse used to be, while the spillway was torn out. For the past couple of months, a thin wall of gravel and concrete was all that kept the Clark Fork away from the path it pursued for millennia.
“This is the sight that warms the soul,” Peter Nielsen said as gray-brown river water poured into a greenish pool at the base of the mountain. Despite the March chill, the Missoula City-County Health Department environmental health supervisor was thrilled to watch the history flow.

“We didn't want there to be a big plunge-pool,” Nielsen said of the eddying colors. Powerful pumps had kept the spillway channel dry for months while workers built a boulder field to keep the river from head-cutting backward into its own floodplain. They were turned off a couple weeks ago. Water soon seeped through the coffer dam and made a pool nearly 15 feet deep.

more from the Missoulian (MT)

Plan to restore San Joaquin River approved

In one of the boldest river restorations in the Western United States, a 63-mile stretch of the San Joaquin River will be transformed from a dusty ditch into a fish-friendly waterway under legislation approved Wednesday that ends a decades-long dispute between farmers and environmentalists.

The $400 million project, approved by Congress as part of a landmark wilderness bill, will increase the amount of water released from the Friant Dam near Fresno into the San Joaquin River. The flows are intended to resurrect the river's salmon fishery, decimated in the years following the dam's construction in 1942.

The 15,000 farms in the region will receive between 15 and 19 percent less water from the reserves stored behind the dam. Funds from the measure will help water districts offset that loss with new storage facilities and repairs to existing canals.

President Obama is expected to sign the legislation, sponsored by California Democratic Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. It seals a settlement reached in 2006 that followed two decades of battles between environmentalists and fishing groups - who filed a lawsuit in 1988 - and agricultural interests.

Both sides praised the bill, which spells out funding for the program and authorizes a timetable for water releases beginning this fall.

"After recent dry years and a collapsing salmon fishery, passage of this bill is good news for fisherman, farmers, and the more than 22 million Californians who rely on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta for their water supply," said Monty Schmitt, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the plaintiffs in the 1980s suit.

The San Joaquin River, California's second-longest behind the Sacramento River, once maintained plentiful runs of spring and fall salmon and fed pristine freshwater into the delta.

more from the SF Chronicle

Living with the Zambezi’s delta force

People living in the vast delta of the Zambezi, Africa's fourth-longest river, know the rich landscape can come at a cost.

When the water is high, it irrigates the fields, delivers nutrients and feeds villages with ample fish supplies.

But if the waters continue to rise, the delta becomes a vast killing field for anyone trapped on the low-lying lands.

Over the past decade, Mozambique has suffered from an unprecedented series of widespread floods.

In recent years, thousands of villagers in the delta have lost their homes, livestock and crops in back-to-back years of flooding.

"Normally, floods occur every 10 years; at least that is what happened for the past 100 years," Higindo Rodrigues, director of a Mozambique government resettlement programme, told the Television Trust for the Environment's (TVE) Earth Report programme.

"But from December and January of 2006, 2007 and 2008, we have floods occurring in the same place in the Zambezi valley - and that's abnormal."

more from the BBC

Range of pharmaceuticals in fish across US

Fish caught near wastewater treatment plants serving five major U.S. cities had residues of pharmaceuticals in them, including medicines used to treat high cholesterol, allergies, high blood pressure, bipolar disorder and depression, researchers reported Wednesday.

Findings from this first nationwide study of human drugs in fish tissue have prompted the Environmental Protection Agency to significantly expand similar ongoing research to more than 150 different locations.

"The average person hopefully will see this type of a study and see the importance of us thinking about water that we use every day, where does it come from, where does it go to? We need to understand this is a limited resource and we need to learn a lot more about our impacts on it," said study co-author Bryan Brooks, a Baylor University researcher and professor who has published more than a dozen studies related to pharmaceuticals in the environment.

A person would have to eat hundreds of thousands of fish dinners to get even a single therapeutic dose, Brooks said. But researchers including Brooks have found that even extremely diluted concentrations of pharmaceutical residues can harm fish, frogs and other aquatic species because of their constant exposure to contaminated water.

The research was published online Wednesday by the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry and also was presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Salt Lake City.

Brooks and his colleague Kevin Chambliss tested fish caught in rivers where wastewater treatment plants release treated sewage in Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix, Philadelphia and Orlando, Fla. For comparison, they also tested fish from New Mexico's pristine Gila River Wilderness Area, an area isolated from human sources of pollution.

more from Newsweek

EPA Weighs in on Mountaintop Removal

By Juliet Eilperin

Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 25, 2009; Page A13

The Environmental Protection Agency put hundreds of mountaintop mining operations on notice that they would be the focus of closer scrutiny yesterday, saying it needs to review their impact on local streams and wetlands before they can move forward.

The announcement, which outraged mining interests and cheered environmentalists, challenged a Bush administration policy and blocked the effect of a federal court decision that had made it easier for mine operators to dispose of the rubble and sludge created when companies blow off the tops of mountains to get to the coal buried underneath.

Late last night, the EPA issued an unusual statement saying that the agency "is not halting, holding or placing a moratorium on any of the mining permit applications." But the statement indicated that the EPA would "take a close look" at applications that had been the focus of recent litigation.

EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson also sent letters to the Army Corps of Engineers objecting to proposed operations in West Virginia and Kentucky, saying the two projects pose a serious threat to "aquatic resources of national importance" and should be halted.

"The two letters reflect EPA's considerable concern regarding the environmental impact these projects would have on fragile habitats and streams," Jackson said in a statement. "I have directed the agency to review other mining permit requests. EPA will use the best science and follow the letter of the law in ensuring we are protecting our environment."

Companies had been hoping to get Corps of Engineers permits for dozens of new and ongoing mountaintop mining operations after a three-judge appeals panel in Richmond ruled last month that the Corps did not have to conduct extensive reviews before issuing the permits. Just before leaving office, the Bush administration finalized rules that eased a 25-year-old prohibition on dumping mine waste within 100 feet of any intermittent or permanent stream, allowing such dumping if it was unavoidable and as long as harm was minimized "to the extent practicable" and was compensated for somewhere else.

Corps spokesman Doug Garman said the agency "will be working with EPA to address any concerns they have related to mountaintop mining permits."

National Mining Association spokeswoman Carol Raulston said some mining companies had been waiting "months, years in some cases" to move ahead and now face the prospect of further delay.

"These are lawful permits," Raulston said. "They meet the requirements of the law and have been affirmed by the courts."

Mining companies and environmental groups have fought over how to interpret the Clean Water Act, which prohibits dumping of mining waste that damages water quality. Courts have issued conflicting opinions, and federal officials estimate that since the mid-1980s 1,600 miles of streams in Appalachia have been wiped out by such "valley fills."

Chuck Nelson, who worked as a coal miner in West Virginia for three decades and is now a community organizer for the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, said the EPA's decision came "just in time." Mountaintop mining requires fewer workers than traditional mining, he said, and its environmental degradation leaves communities with few economic options.

"We're losing our way of life and our culture," Nelson said. "We're paying the price for mountaintop removal. It's big profits for the industry."

But William B. Raney, president of the West Virginia Coal Association, questioned why the new administration would potentially put hundreds of jobs on hold when other land-clearing activities in Appalachia also affect the environment.

"It's absolutely puzzling to me why you would want to dismantle a state's economy," Raney said. "Does this mean in the steep terrain of eastern America, we're not going to have roads, we're not going to have economic development, we're not going to have Wal-Marts?"

The EPA's action was the latest step reviewing environmental decisions made under President George W. Bush. On Monday, the Fish and Wildlife Service filed a document in U.S. District Court saying it will reconsider a 2006 decision not to protect the Gunnison sage grouse under the Endangered Species Act. Conservationists have sought to win federal protection for it, and the Interior Department's inspector general concluded in December that Bush's appointees ignored federal biologists' advice in not adding the bird and other species to the protected list.

Drink Up: Taking the Salt Out of Seawater

Almost three quarters of Earth's surface is covered with water, but most of it is too salty to drink. And the 2.5 percent that is freshwater is locked up either in soil, remote snowpacks and glaciers or in deep aquifers. That leaves less than 1 percent of all freshwater for humans and animals to drink and for farmers to use to raise crops—and that remnant is shrinking as rising global temperatures trigger more droughts. The upshot: it's becoming increasingly difficult to slake the world's thirst as the population grows and water supplies dwindle. Analysts at the investment bank Goldman Sachs estimate that worldwide water use doubles every 20 years.

So the search for new water sources is on. One proved candidate is desalinization—technologies that extract the salt from brine drawn from the oceans or saline aquifers to create potable water. But the historically high price of desalinization has largely kept it at bay, a situation that's changing as technology improves and growing demand squeezes freshwater supplies .

"The two main desalinization techniques are distillation and reverse osmosis, or RO," says Menachem Elimelech, an environmental engineer at Yale University. "Distillation, in which the raw water is evaporated and then condensed as freshwater, is energy-intensive, so it's mainly used in the Middle East where oil is abundant." Thermal salt-removing processes require high temperatures so they tend to be expensive (more than $1 per cubic meter of freshwater), but the use of rejected "waste" heat from other industrial or power plant operations for co-generation can cut energy expenditure.

More commonly, however, desalinization plants rely on RO, which is based on high-tech polymer membranes that are permeable to water, but reject the passage of dissolved salts, Elimelich says. When a saline solution sits on one side of a semipermeable membrane and a less salty solution is on the other, he explains, water diffuses through the membrane from the less concentrated to the more concentrated side. Scientists call this phenomenon osmosis, which tends to equalize the salinity of the two solutions.

In the 1950s and '60s researchers realized that they could reverse the process by applying pressure to the more concentrated solution, causing water molecules there to traverse the membrane, leaving behind a condensed brine. To counter the osmotic pressure that arises between the solutions and force water back through the membrane, desalinization plants must utilize high pressures of 7,000 to 8,300 kilopascals (71 to 86.5 kilogram-force per square centimeter or 1,000 to 1,200 pounds per square inch), he notes.

Common RO membranes are thin-film composites that combine a mechanically robust support layer made of microporous polysulfone with a micron-thick polyamide "filter" layer through which water molecules can pass but nothing else. The latter substance is "a second cousin to DuPont's Kevlar—the super-strong aramid polymer fiber used in lightweight body armor," says Bill Mickols, senior research scientist at Dow Water Solutions (DWS) of Edina, Minn., the biggest supplier of such products. RO membranes have matured during the past two decades, he says, with marked improvements in water permeability, salt-rejection capability, operating life (now as long as three to five years) and cost.

These advances, in combination with energy-recovery devices that take pressure from the concentrated brine stream and transfer most of it to the incoming water flow, have made desalinization more affordable. Current RO facilities desalinize seawater for 68 to 90 cents per cubic meter. The average delivery price of municipal water in the U.S. is around 60 cents a cubic meter, according to the American Water Works Association.

more from Scientific American

The Ogallala Aquifer: Saving a Vital U.S. Water Source

On America’s high plains, crops in early summer stretch to the horizon: field after verdant field of corn, sorghum, soybeans, wheat and cotton. Framed by immense skies now blue, now scarlet-streaked, this 800-mile expanse of agriculture looks like it could go on forever.

It can’t.

The Ogallala Aquifer, the vast underground reservoir that gives life to these fields, is disappearing. In some places, the groundwater is already gone. This is the breadbasket of America—the region that supplies at least one fifth of the total annual U.S. agricultural harvest. If the aquifer goes dry, more than $20 billion worth of food and fiber will vanish from the world’s markets. And scientists say it will take natural processes 6,000 years to refill the reservoir.

The challenge of the Ogallala is how to manage human demands on the layer of water that sprawls underneath parts of eight states from South Dakota to Texas. As landowners strive to conserve what’s left, they face a tug-of-war between economic growth and declining natural resources. What is happening here—the problems and solutions—is a bellwether for the rest of the planet.

High Plains farmers were blissfully unaware a generation ago that a dilemma was already unfolding. In the early 1950s, when Rodger Funk started farming near Garden City, Kan., everyone believed the water was inexhaustible. “People were drilling wells,” he says. “You could pump all the water you wanted to pump.”

And they did. What changed everything for Funk, now age 81, was a public meeting in the late 1960s at Garden City Community College. State and federal geologists, who had been studying where all that water was coming from, announced grim findings. “They said it’s geologic water. When it’s gone, it’s gone,” Funk says. “I remember coming home and feeling so depressed.”

Today his community in southern Kansas, 180 miles west of Wichita, is one of the High Plains areas hardest hit by the aquifer’s decline. Groundwater level has dropped 150 feet or more, forcing many farmers to abandon their wells. The cause is obvious, says Mark Rude, executive director of the Southwest Kansas Groundwater Management District: overuse.

more from Scientific American

More crop diversity, less nitrate pollution

The changing face of America’s farmland—from smaller farms growing a wide diversity of crops to very large farms growing one crop—is significantly contributing to increased nitrate levels in rivers and lakes, according to new research published online in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment (2009, DOI 10.1890/080085).

Too much nitrate in the water can lead to prolific growth of algae, which use up most of the water’s dissolved oxygen when they die and decompose; this process creates “dead zones” that cannot support life, including most famously the enormous hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

Whitney Broussard of the University of Louisiana Lafayette and R. Eugene Turner of Louisiana State University compared water-quality data from the past 100 years with information from the same time period about farms, including size, crops, and agricultural methods. Next, the researchers studied 56 watersheds that varied in size from the Illinois Cache River basin at 400 square miles to the Mississippi River basin at more than 1 million square miles.

The past century has witnessed major changes in the average U.S. farm, which doubled in size while the number of farms shrank by almost two-thirds. Average nitrate concentrations in the 63 rivers the researchers studied were 3–4 times higher at the end of the 20th century than at the beginning.

The watersheds where farming is most intense seem to have driven the rise in nitrate in the latter half of the century, and there is evidence that commercial fertilizer, mechanical tillage, and intensive drainage dramatically increase nitrate loads, the authors note.

more from EST News

Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta becomes water war's front line

Bumping along a rutted levee road in his pickup, Steve Mello surveys some of the 3,100 acres he and his son farm in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

The sinking sun warms the landscape to shades of gold and pink, and Mello's fingers trace the upward arc of sandhill cranes, geese and egrets abandoning their evening meal in an old corn field.

Mello, 53, took over this land from his father, who started as a field hand.

More than a century before, farmers carved the Delta from a swamp.

They built earthen levees to protect crops from the rivers' rising tides, pushed inward with saltwater from nearby San Francisco Bay.

Little did those early settlers know, California's modern-day struggle for water would zero in on this verdant estuary along Interstate 5, just south of Sacramento.

This triangular slice of land, a checkerboard of green and brown fields dotted with quaint farmhouses and serpentine rivers and sloughs, is the cornerstone of the state's fresh-water system.

Rainfall and snowmelt from the Sierra feed the Sacramento, the San Joaquin and smaller rivers.

That water is channeled through hundreds of miles of canals and pipelines making up the federal Central Valley Project and the State Water Project that ends at Lake Perris.

Two-thirds of the state's water comes from the Delta.

It quenches the thirst of 23 million Southern Californians and supplies farms in the San Joaquin Valley that grow much of the country's grapes, almonds, cotton, tomatoes, apricots and asparagus.

But those supplies are threatened.

Delta exports have been drastically reduced under a court order to protect threatened fish species.

The cutback, paired with ongoing drought, has caused water agencies statewide to dip into reserves and impose rationing, and forced farmers to fallow their fields.

In addition, the Delta's 1,100-mile levee system is vulnerable to failure from rising sea levels and a large-magnitude earthquake.

more from the Riverside (CA) Press-Enterprise

Hazards in the water for Colorado

More than 150,000 people in Colorado drank from water supplies last year that violated public health standards.

Nearly all these problems occurred in small communities and water districts, which have been struggling with new federal rules and aging distribution systems.

In 2008, a salmonella epidemic hit a water supply with decaying infrastructure, squirrels found their way into another drinking-water storage tank and died, and live birds fouled another. In one town, people defiantly drank unfiltered water from a stream despite state orders to boil their water since last spring.

Year by year, the price to fix Colorado's drinking-water infrastructure keeps climbing. Pending requests for state help to improve water systems have ballooned from $800 million to $1.3 billion since 2005. Forty-eight of these projects, totaling $143 million, would treat water supplies posing acute or chronic health hazards.

Louise Malouff's 6-year-old son was among the children treated in emergency rooms after a pollutant — salmonella bacteria — invaded Alamosa's water supply.

As they waited for hours, he kept vomiting and passing bloody diarrhea. "He was lying on the floor like a puppy," she said. "He asked me, 'Mom, if I'm losing all my blood, am I going to die?' It just broke my heart."

more from tne Denver Post

Water shortage grips Korean Peninsula

The worst drought in 12 years has a stranglehold on the peninsula and people are starting to get angry.

Residents in heavily affected areas have been protesting what they call the government's failed water management policies.

Provincial entities near a polluted southern river have waged a "war of water" to secure a reliable supply of clean water.

Over the weekend, activists and citizens called for greater efforts to deal with the threat from scarce and contaminated water resources at various events marking the March 22 World Water Day.

Korea has been categorized by the United Nations as a country suffering from a more than moderate level of tension because of its water supply. India and South Africa are also in that group.

The drought that began in July last year has left many parts of the nation -- especially Taebaek and other southern areas of Gangwon Province -- feeling the thirst for more water, with its rivers and streams close to being completely empty.

The Environment Ministry found that 124,917 people in 44 different cities nationwide were suffering from water shortages as of March 16.

Not surprisingly, residents of Gangwon Province took up the greatest portion with 59,121 people, followed by South Jeolla Province and North Gyeongsang Province with 22,566 and 21,957 people, respectively, ministry data showed. People in South Gyeongsang, North Jeolla and South Chungcheong provinces were also suffering limited water supplies.

The current water shortage crisis has led the Taebaek residents to form an emergency committee last week to demand the government offer three specific types of countermeasures by March 30: changing old water pipes, securing mid- and long-term water storage sites and declaring the area as a special disaster zone.

On top of that, Busan Metropolitan City and South Gyeongsang Province are in the middle of a "fight for water." Busan is asking Gyeongsang Province to share some of its water, but Gyeongsang Province is refusing to do so, even bracing for a battle against the central government if it is forced into taking such action.

This comes after Daegu in North Gyeongsang Province almost had to turn off its taps due to a high concentration of dioxane -- a substance possibly carcinogenic to humans -- that had been discovered in the Nakdong River. The river is a main source of water supply for many regions, including Daegu and Busan.

more from the Korea Herald

In Silt, Bangladesh Sees Potential Shield Against Sea Level Rise

The rivers that course down from the Himalayas and into this crowded delta bring an annual tide of gift and curse. They flood low-lying paddies for several months, sometimes years, at a time. And they ferry mountains of silt and sand from far away upstream.

Most of that sediment washes out into the roiling Bay of Bengal. But an accidental discovery by desperate delta folk here may hold clues to how Bangladesh, one of the world’s most vulnerable countries to climate change, could harness some of that dark, rich Himalayan muck to protect itself against sea level rise.

Instead of allowing the silt to settle where it wants, Bangladesh has begun to channel it to where it is needed — to fill in shallow soup bowls of land prone to flooding, or to create new land off its long, exposed coast.

The efforts have been limited to small experimental patches, not uniformly promising, and there is still ample concern that a swelling sea could one day soon swallow parts of Bangladesh. But the emerging evidence suggests that a nation that many see as indefensible to the ravages of human-induced climate change could literally raise itself up and save its people — and do so cheaply and simply, using what the mountains and tides bring.

“You can do a lot with the silt that these rivers bring,” said Bea M. ten Tusscher, the Dutch ambassador to Bangladesh. The Netherlands, itself accustomed to engineering its vulnerable low-lands, helps Bangladesh with water management projects. “Those are like little diamonds,” Ms. ten Tusscher said. “You have to use it.”

Satellite images show that in the natural process of erosion and accretion — in some places speeded up by a series of man-made dams and channels — Bangladesh has actually gained land over the last 35 years.

Skeptics say it is folly to expect silt accretion to save the country. Accretion happens slowly, over centuries, they argue, while human-induced climate change is hurtling fast toward Bangladesh. The new land is too muddy and slushy for people to safely live on, and the force of the Himalayan rivers is so powerful that it can wash away newly gained land in one fluke season.

“If you have time to wait, it will happen,” said Atiq Rahman of the Bangladesh Center for Advanced Studies. His country, he added, does not have time to wait.

The silt-trapping experiment has yielded tentative but visible gains here in Beel Bhaina, a low-lying 600-acre soup bowl of land on the banks of the Hari River, a tributary of the Ganges, about 55 miles upstream from the Bay of Bengal. Even at this distance from the coast, it is among the country’s most susceptible to sea rise. The river swells each day with the tides. Creeping salinity in the water table is a harbinger of future danger.

Here, misery made way for a discovery. A devastating flood 10 years ago left this soup bowl — a “beel” in Bengali — inundated with water that reached above Abdul Lateef’s head. No paddy could grow, recalled Mr. Lateef, now 56. Houses went under. The river was so heavily silted it hardly moved. Many families were reduced to penury.

One night, desperate to drain the water, Mr. Lateef and his neighbors punched a hole through the mud embankment that encircled the soup bowl. They watched as the water rushed out. Then the high tide began to haul in sediment, and the soup bowl swiftly filled with silt.

more from the NY Times

Eco-Bills Come Due at Bay's Beaches

While the nation debates the cost of climate change -- whether the price of electricity and gasoline should increase because of their greenhouse gas emissions -- the problem already has a price tag on the Chesapeake Bay.

Sea levels are rising almost twice as fast in the Chesapeake region as in most of the world, and waterside communities are spending millions to keep the water from eroding yards, marshes and sandy beaches.

The area's beaches are dealing with the same bad luck: The land is dropping, climate change is altering currents and the oceans are inching up. The impact is slow, but it's real. Beachgoers won't notice it at major ocean resorts. But for small beaches on the bay, the result is often death by bulkhead.

At the Calvert County shore resort of North Beach, the beach created the town. Now, as the waters of the bay rise an eighth of an inch every year, it's the other way around.

"This is it. This is what we're trying to preserve," said Mayor Michael Bojokles. He was looking at a beach three blocks long and so skinny that a Frisbee could be thrown clear over it -- the remains of the wide sandy strip that first drew vacationers in the 1890s.

more from the Washington Post

Who owns Colorado's rainwater?

Every time it rains here, Kris Holstrom knowingly breaks the law.

Holstrom's violation is the fancifully painted 55-gallon buckets underneath the gutters of her farmhouse on a mesa 15 miles from the resort town of Telluride. The barrels catch rain and snowmelt, which Holstrom uses to irrigate the small vegetable garden she and her husband maintain.

But according to the state of Colorado, the rain that falls on Holstrom's property is not hers to keep. It should be allowed to fall to the ground and flow unimpeded into surrounding creeks and streams, the law states, to become the property of farmers, ranchers, developers and water agencies that have bought the rights to those waterways.

What Holstrom does is called rainwater harvesting. It's a practice that dates back to the dawn of civilization, and is increasingly in vogue among environmentalists and others who pursue sustainable lifestyles. They collect varying amounts of water, depending on the rainfall and the vessels they collect it in. The only risk involved is losing it to evaporation. Or running afoul of Western states' water laws.

Those laws, some of them more than a century old, have governed the development of the region since pioneer days.

"If you try to collect rainwater, well, that water really belongs to someone else," said Doug Kemper, executive director of the Colorado Water Congress. "We get into a very detailed accounting on every little drop."

Frank Jaeger of the Parker Water and Sanitation District, on the arid foothills south of Denver, sees water harvesting as an insidious attempt to take water from entities that have paid dearly for the resource.

"Every drop of water that comes down keeps the ground wet and helps the flow of the river," Jaeger said. He scoffs at arguments that harvesters like Holstrom only take a few drops from rivers. "Everything always starts with one little bite at a time."

Increasingly, however, states are trying to make the practice more welcome. Bills in Colorado and Utah, two states that have limited harvesting over the years, would adjust their laws to allow it in certain scenarios, over the protest of people like Jaeger.

more from the LA Times

Chilean Town Withers in Free Market for Water

During the past four decades here in Quillagua, a town in the record books as the driest place on earth, residents have sometimes seen glimpses of raindrops above the foothills in the distance. They never reach the ground, evaporating like a mirage while still in the air.

What the town did have was a river, feeding an oasis in the Atacama desert. But mining companies have polluted and bought up so much of the water, residents say, that for months each year the river is little more than a trickle — and an unusable one at that.

Quillagua is among many small towns that are being swallowed up in the country’s intensifying water wars. Nowhere is the system for buying and selling water more permissive than here in Chile, experts say, where water rights are private property, not a public resource, and can be traded like commodities with little government oversight or safeguards for the environment.

Private ownership is so concentrated in some areas that a single electricity company from Spain, Endesa, has bought up 80 percent of the water rights in a huge region in the south, causing an uproar. In the north, agricultural producers are competing with mining companies to siphon off rivers and tap scarce water supplies, leaving towns like this one bone dry and withering.

“Everything, it seems, is against us,” said Bartolomé Vicentelo, 79, who once grew crops and fished for shrimp in the Loa River that fed Quillagua.

The population is about a fifth what it was less than two decades ago; so many people have left that he is one of only 120 people still here.

Some economists have hailed Chile’s water rights trading system, which was established in 1981 during the military dictatorship, as a model of free-market efficiency that allocates water to its highest economic use.

But other academics and environmentalists argue that Chile’s system is unsustainable because it promotes speculation, endangers the environment and allows smaller interests to be muscled out by powerful forces, like Chile’s mining industry.

more from the NY Times

U.S. high-tech water future hinges on cost, politics

Anyone who has visited Disneyland recently and taken a sip from a drinking fountain there may have unknowingly sampled a taste of the future -- a small quantity of water that once flowed through a sewer.

Orange County Water District officials say that's a good thing -- the result of a successful, year-old project to purify wastewater and pump it into the ground to help restore depleted aquifers that provide most of the local water supply.

The $481 million recycling plant, the world's largest of its kind, uses microfiltration, reverse osmosis, ultraviolet light and hydrogen peroxide disinfection to treat 70 million gallons (265 million liters) of sewer water a day, enough to meet the drinking needs of 500,000 people.

Just don't call it "toilet-to-tap."

County officials prefer the term "Groundwater Replenishment System," a name chosen after similar projects in Los Angeles and San Diego fell prey to public misconceptions, also known as the "yuck" factor," and local election-year politics.

Their experience underscores one of the great lessons facing municipal officials across the U.S. West as they seek to bring purification and recycling technologies to bear against drought cycles expected to worsen with climate change.

Scientists, policymakers and investors agree ample know-how exists to solve the water crisis; the difficulties lie in energy constraints, economics and politics.

"We can solve most, if not all, of the world's biggest water problems with technology that exists today," said Stephan Dolezalek, who leads the clean-energy practice of Silicon Valley venture capital firm VantagePoint Venture Partners. "What we may not have is the willpower."

more from Reuters

Fast-growing Western US cities face water crisis

Desert golf course superintendent Bill Rohret is doing something that 20 years ago would have seemed unthinkable -- ripping up bright, green turf by the acre and replacing it with rocks.

Back then "they came in with bulldozers and dynamite, and they took the desert and turned it into a green oasis," Rohret said, surveying a rock-lined fairway within sight of the Las Vegas strip. "Now ... it's just the reverse."

The Angel Park Golf Club has torn out 65 acres (26 hectares) of off-course grass in the last five years, and 15 (6 hectares) more will be removed by 2011, to help conserve local supplies of one of the most precious commodities in the parched American West -- fresh water.

But Rohret's efforts have their limits. His and many other golf courses still pride themselves on their pristine greens and fairways and sparkling fountains, requiring huge daily expenditures of water.

Aiming to cut per capita use by about a third in the face of withering drought expected to worsen with global warming, water authorities in the United States' driest major city are paying customers $1.50 per square foot to replace grass lawns with desert landscaping.

Built in the Mojave Desert, Las Vegas leads Western U.S. cities scrambling to slash water consumption, increase recycling and squeeze more from underground aquifers as long-reliable surface water sources dry up.

From handing out fines for leaky sprinklers to charging homeowners high rates for high use, water officials in the U.S. West are chasing down squandered water one gallon at a time.

Nowhere is the sense of crisis more visible than on the outskirts of Las Vegas at Lake Mead, the nation's largest manmade reservoir, fed by the once-mighty Colorado River. A principal source of water for Nevada and Southern California, the lake has dipped to below half its capacity, leaving an ominous, white "bathtub ring" that grows thicker each year.

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Iraq's Marshlands Face A Second Death By Drought

In Iraq, drought is threatening one of the country's natural wonders, the vast southern marshland between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

After the 1991 Gulf War, former Iraq President Saddam Hussein drained the wetlands so that his troops could hunt down Shiite rebels who were hiding there.

Projects to revive the marshes were launched after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, with the aim of restoring a vibrant culture that's based on fishing, reed gathering and tending water buffalo.

Local people say all that could now be lost.

The natural slope of the land near the confluence of the country's two great rivers allowed water from the Tigris to flow across a vast plain of reeds, like the Florida Everglades, to emerge into the Euphrates. For centuries, it supported a unique Arab culture — people who lived in reed houses on islands in the marsh.





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Climate change accelerates water hunt in U.S. West

It's hard to visualize a water crisis while driving the lush boulevards of Los Angeles, golfing Arizona's green fairways or watching dancing Las Vegas fountains leap more than 20 stories high.

So look Down Under. A decade into its worst drought in a hundred years Australia is a lesson of what the American West could become.

Bush fires are killing people and obliterating towns. Rice exports collapsed last year and the wheat crop was halved two years running. Water rationing is part of daily life.

"Think of that as California's future," said Heather Cooley of California water think tank the Pacific Institute.

Water raised leafy green Los Angeles from the desert and filled arid valleys with the nation's largest fruit and vegetable crop. Each time more water was needed, another megaproject was built, from dams of the major rivers to a canal stretching much of the length of the state.

But those methods are near their end. There is very little water left untapped and global warming, the gradual increase of temperature as carbon dioxide and other gases retain more of the sun's heat, has created new uncertainties.

Global warming pushes extremes. It prolongs drought while sometimes bringing deluges the parched earth cannot absorb. California Department of Water Resources Director Lester Snow says two things keep him up at night: drought and flood.

"It isn't that drought is the new norm," said Snow. "Climate change is bringing us higher highs and lower lows in terms of water supplies."

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Gandhi of the Ganges

Every day for almost 70 years, Veer Bhadra Mishra rose before daybreak and descended the 60-odd steep stone steps that lead from his airy but simple white house to the slow-flowing, agate-green water of the Ganges River.

As the sun came up over the opposite bank, he gazed at the river with reverence, stepped into it, cupped his hands and raised the contents to his lips: This is how he, how any devout Hindu, must give praise to Ganga Ma - the mother goddess brought to earth.

He owes her devotion. He also knows her water may kill him. "Typhoid, polio, jaundice. I drink it and I have suffered. But I am living - what to do?"

Indeed. For nearly 30 years, he has been a fierce, tireless and woefully unsuccessful champion of his goddess, the river.

Here in the holy city of Varanasi, people bend to touch his feet and call him Mahantji, in deference to his status as the spiritual leader of a huge sect of Hinduism. People also call him Dr. Mishra. He is a professor emeritus of civil engineering at the huge Banaras Hindu University, an authority on hydraulic systems. He has, he says with a grin that crinkles his cheeks, the rational mind of a scientist, balanced by the passionate heart of a devotee.

And although the river has grown steadily more polluted through his years of work, he is convinced that he and his band of loyal Ganges champions are now poised on the edge of a breakthrough, when a combination of spiritual and scientific wisdom will finally restore the purity of the river.

And if they do, their victory may reinvigorate a tired environmental movement in a nation where water-borne illnesses are the leading cause of child death - and a world in which unsafe water and sanitation are the source of 85 per cent of all disease.

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The Amazon's most ardent protector

Father Edilberto Sena has added preservation of the Amazon to his already heavy pastoral load.

The Brazilian Roman Catholic priest founded the Amazon Defence Front to protect the forest against government plans which he believes put commercial development ahead of environmental concerns.

Father Sena created the Front because he feels the Brazilian government has betrayed the Amazon and the commitments it made to the people of Brazil to protect it.

In 2002, he voted for President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva, after dreaming for more than 20 years that there would be a change to the way Brazil was governed.

Father Sena had hoped social issues would take priority over the economy.

But he told the BBC World Service that "'social issues have only been a drop in the ocean" during President Lula's five years in office.

A long-standing campaigner against the destruction of the Amazon, Father Sena has fought together with Greenpeace against large multinationals, including the American company Cargill.

In 2006 the firm was building a new port in Santarem, halfway between the Atlantic coast and the city of Manaus.

In 2007, the Brazilian government forced Cargill to close the port down.

Sense of duty

For nine years, Father Sena has run a Catholic rural radio station in his home town of Santarem which reaches at least 500,000 people in the Amazon. He uses his station to highlight many of his campaigns.

"I am a human being and see what is happening there, and I am a native Amazonian, so I can't cross my arms and close my eyes," he says.

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Sacramento sewage agency looks at selling wastewater

Californians have grown accustomed to digesting odd ideas that routinely flow out of Sacramento, many of them not so palatable.

But are they ready for this one?

Last week, amid a third year of a statewide drought, the Sacramento Regional County Sanitation District adopted a strategy to sell treated sewage as drinking water. The buyer would hypothetically partner with the district to recycle wastewater from the capital-area's 1.4 million people into a new municipal water source.

The idea is not so far-fetched. Orange County last year opened the world's largest wastewater recycling plant and is now serving treated effluent as high-quality drinking water to 2.3 million residents.

The technology is simpler and cheaper than desalinating seawater. State regulators are working to adjust policies to encourage more such projects.

What's different about Sacramento's plan is that local leaders want somebody else to buy treated sewage and pay to make it drinkable.

"It's kind of like taking lemons and creating lemonade," said Mike McGowan, a Yolo County supervisor and sanitation district board member.

At the heart of the issue is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The estuary is suffering a puzzling ecosystem collapse that threatens extinction of several fish species.

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