It seems that more and more Americans are interested in conserving water—but shorter showers only go so far. It’s time to take the next step: Green the plumbing industry!

That’s the approach of GreenPlumbers USA, which is currently featured in our sister publication Natural Home. Adapted from a very successful program in Australia, GreenPlumbers USA trains plumbers in a variety of conservation techniques, “everything from solar hot water to how to conduct a detailed, 50-point water audit on homes and businesses,” says director Megan Lehtonen.

Top to bottom—manufacturers, wholesalers, contractors and plumbers—the entire industry needs to adapt to new technology and conservation procedures. For us, culture change means plumbers stepping up and taking the responsibility to become champions of conservation. America needs to save water, and the plumbing industry needs to be part of the solution.

More than 3,000 plumbers have taken the program’s 32-hour coarseload thus far, and Lehtonen expects to train at least 50,000 more in the next few years. “It’s really inspiring for us when a 50-year-old plumber gets excited about his trade all over again,” she says. “And you know that he will go out and be a representative for change.”

Source: Natural Home

Image by jrob86, licensed under Creative Commons.

Environmentalists fret over an imminent onslaught of international wars over water. As global warming dries up the earth, the idea is that countries will increasingly go to war with each other over the remaining water. The reasoning makes sense, but according to Wendy Barnaby in Conservation, research into water and war doesn’t back up the fear. “Predictions of armed conflict come from the media and from popular, non-peer-reviewed work,” according to Barnaby, and not from reality. 

“People who are short of water do not necessarily fight over it,” Barnaby writes. Her findings are backed up by the research of water negotiator Aaron Wolf, profiled in the July-August issue of Utne Reader. In the war-torn Middle East, there have been plenty of power struggles and politics, but no wars over water. The wars have been more about borders, security, and statehood. Instead there have been continuing negotiations and even cooperation over water resources. And, as Wolf notes, “India and Pakistan have a water treaty that has survived since 1960—through two wars. In the middle of one of the wars, India made payments to Pakistan as part of its treaty obligations.”

Water privatization and resource grabs by multinational corporations continue to be a serious issue. In international relations, however, water may be a more powerful motivator for peace and negotiations than it is for war.

Source:  Conservation  (Article not available online.)

California has drawn a line in the sediment and outlawed suction dredge gold mining, a practice in which frame-mounted, vacuumlike machines suck up the riverbed of mineral-laden mountain streams and spew it out into the water in hopes of capturing a few flecks of gold. The ban is part of a plan to help reverse declining salmon runs on several rivers—but to a bunch of hobbyist gold miners, it’s an affront to personal rights, according to the July 30 Sacramento News and Review.

“The scientific evidence against suction dredging doesn’t pass the laugh test,” James Buchal, attorney for a mining advocacy group called the New 49’ers, tells the newspaper. “This bill will put hundreds of people out of work and destroy the vacation plans of thousands of people for no purpose whatsoever.”

Despite the gold-tinged vacation dreams of the New 49’ers, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the ban into law Aug. 6. Writes the Associated Press: “Small-scale miners still drawn to California to chase dreams of striking it rich will have to find their gold nuggets the old-fashioned way for awhile, with shovels and pans.”

Over at the Nugget Shooter Forum, an amateur prospecting website, compliance with the suction dredge ban doesn’t look promising. And it appears that miners still favor the speech stylings and hotheaded temperament of Yosemite Sam.

 “We are now in a lock and load catch me if'n ya can MF state a siege,” writes a poster calling himself “John Hoser Oates.” “Never been caught before and ain’t a givn’ up now either.”

 “I say screw them,” writes “Matt.” “I will be dredging the remainder of the summer until the end of the season. I will dredge next summer also. If I get into it with an enforcing agency and my equipment gets confiscated, well, it ain’t worth shit anymore anyways.”

“I know nothing about no stinking new law till I receive a letter saying my dredge permit is revoked,” writes “creekhunter.” “My dredge will be back in the water very soon and my sluice will be full of gold.”

Violators will face a fine of up to $1,000 and up to six months in jail.

Source: Sacramento News & Review

Image by K Koski, NOAA Auk Bay Lab, licensed under Creative Commons.

The technology firm AgriHouse has figured out a way to let plants send text messages when they need more water, IEEE Spectrum reports. The tiny sensors clip onto plant leaves and calculate the plants moisture. Then, when the plant gets too dry, the sensors a text the farmers. I envision it probably saying something like this:

OMG, I needs drink, pls.

Considering the roughly 129 billion liters of water consumed every day by commercial agriculture in the United States, AgriHouse believes the sensors could make a dramatic difference in agricultural water consumption.

Source:  IEEE Spectrum  

What’s the thirstiest industry in the United States? If you thought of agriculture, you’re spot on. But coming in second—guzzling 40 percent of U.S. freshwater withdrawals—is a surprisingly different undertaking: electricity.

Environmentally motivated researchers and policymakers are just beginning to grasp the importance of illuminating the complex relationship between water and energy, Sustainable Industries reports. The clock is ticking. By 2025, the United Nations forecasts half the world will meet with freshwater shortages. By 2050, upgrade that pinch to scarcity spanning three-quarters of the planet. And, oh, wouldn’t you know: All forms of energy production require water (and on the flip side, heating, treating, and distributing water requires energy too).

“Increased implementation of renewable power sources is key to securing future water supplies, but when it comes to water use, not all renewables are created equal,” writes Sara Stroud, SI’s Bay Area correspondent.

Wind and solar photovoltics are among the lesser offenders; they require only one gallon of water for each megawatt hour of electricity produced (excluding water used in manufacturing). (A megawatt is one million watts, and one megawatt hour could power 400-900 homes for that hour.) Compare that to corn-derived ethanol, which sucks anywhere from 5 to 2,000 liters of water for each liter of fuel. That higher number comes courtesy of agriculture undertaken in arid states, like California and Colorado.

“Federal incentives happened so quickly without evaluating consequences,” Dulce Fernandes of Network for New Energy Choices told SI. “If we are investing in alternatives, we have to get it right.”

Source: Sustainable Industries

Drug traffickers grow millions of pot plants in national parks, plundering public lands’ rivers and creeks to keep their thirsty crops thriving. Terrain, the eco-news magazine of Berkeley’s Ecology Center, reports that these illegal grows, which started in Southern California, have since infiltrated “every national park on the West Coast” and are rapidly spreading eastward.

We’re not talking about small patches of plants grown by enterprising hippies. Ron Pugh, a U.S. Forest Service agent who investigates these grows, clarifies to Terrain that the problem is with large-scale operations, not the gentle Humboldt County tokers you might be imagining.

He’s come prepared with a list of comparisons between a “hippie”grow and a DTO site—one maintained by a drug trafficking organization. A traditional garden on public lands, Pugh says, has one or two growers and fewer than fifty plants. The gardener, who lives locally, hikes in every other day or so, carrying water for his plants. Firearms are uncommon, and locations are predictable. “They’re within a quarter mile of a road,” Pugh explains, “and they’re rarely uphill. White guys are lazy.”

DTO sites, on the other hand, average 6,600 plants, and growers go to great lengths to keep them watered, using pumps and hoses to divert water from streams and rivers, and sometimes constructing illegal dams.

Source: Terrain

Image by LancerenoK, licensed under Creative Commons.

Drinking water in the United States is contaminated by low levels of chemicals, according to a comprehensive study of tap water by the Southern Nevada Water Authority in Las Vegas and reported in the New Scientist. Atrazine, a nasty organic herbicide that’s banned in Europe, was one of the most common pollutants, as was the mood-stabilizing drug Carbamazepine and the painkiller Naproxen, among other drugs. 

The researchers emphasize that the chemicals don’t pose a public health threat, since they were found at extremely low doses. Governments could filter the water better, but the researchers told the New Scientist that “extreme purification,” would be expensive “in terms of increased energy usage and carbon footprint.”

Bottled water isn’t the solution either, according to the National Resource Defense Council, since “about one fourth of bottled water is bottled tap water (and by some accounts, as much as 40 percent is derived from tap water) -- sometimes with additional treatment, sometimes not.”

Image by Leunix, licensed under Creative Commons.

The world is facing a potentially catastrophic water crisis. More than a billion people currently lack access to clean, safe drinking water. Multinational corporations including Nestlé, Vivendi, and Coca Cola are buying up the world’s fresh water supply and selling it back to people at a profit. A movement is growing, however, opposing the tide of privatization, wrestling control away from the corporations, and working to bring water to everyone.

The documentary FLOW: For Love of Water explores this fight over who owns the world’s water. For this episode of the UtneCast, I spoke with Irena Salina, director of the film, and Maude Barlow, one of the world’s most prominent activists against the privatization of water.

You can listen to the interview below, or to subscribe to the UtneCast for free through iTunes, click here.

My leg shook slightly as I stepped up to the microphone in front of the Senate District 60 Democratic convention in Minneapolis on Saturday. The mayor of Minneapolis was in the room, and congressman Keith Ellison and Senate candidate Al Franken had recently finished speaking. Now it was the hoi polloi’s chance to make their voices heard by starting small constituencies of support for candidates and issues. One person said confidently, “Supporting Al Franken, clean energy.” I stood up nervously and said, “Bennett Gordon, uncommitted on candidates. No-Flush Toilets.”

The crowd burst into laughter.

The issue of no-flush toilets is meant to be funny: It’s a little toilet humor in politics to bring up a serious issue. The U.N. Development Programme reports that more than “1 billion people lack access to water and over 2.4-billion lack access to basic sanitation.” Some Americans, however, continue to flush up to seven gallons of potable water away with use of the toilet. That’s no joke.

When I floated the idea of supporting no-flush toilets at my local caucus a few weeks ago, a spirited discussion ensued. Initially, one man spoke up and yelled, “Not in my house!” Another person tried to fight the resolution by saying that water usage in Minnesota had nothing to do with the rest of the world. I disagreed, and others came to my defense. In the end the resolution passed nearly unanimously, with one abstention.

From that discussion, the resolution was put up for a vote at the Senate District convention. You can see the ballot at right.

I believe that change toward no-flush toilets can take place gradually. Retrofitting every house in America with waterless toilets would be costly and politically unfeasible. When building new government facilities, however, water-conserving toilets are entirely possible. In the long run, investing in environmentally responsible toilets would save the government money on water bills, increase funding for sustainable technologies, and pave the way toward a no-flush future.

Part of the problem is that people don’t want to talk about what happens in the bathroom. Bathrooms are “the last frontier of the taboo—where sexuality studies was forty years ago,” Professor Harvey Moltoch told the New Yorker. And Molotch should know. He teaches a course for the New York University Department of Social and Cultural Analysis called “The Urban Toilet.”

If progress is to be made on serious environmental issues, uncomfortable subjects and accepted social norms must be addressed, or else all the hard work on water conservation might as well be flushed down the toilet.

At the convention, various people thanked me for raising the issue, but few joined my cause. To send a delegate to the next political level (the state convention), a caucus must have 29 supporters at the event. The No-Flush Toilets subcaucus garnered three people, including me. Eventually, we joined with other environment subcaucuses and collectively were able to send a single delegate to the state convention. The tallies have not yet been counted on the resolution in support of no-flush toilets, but we should know by next week.

—Bennett Gordon

Like your salary and your voting history, there are some things you just don’t share with friends, coworkers, and complete strangers. For example, your score on H₂Oconserve’s helpful and fun H₂O calculator. Too high a score, and you’ll be labeled a water-hogging ecoterrorist. Too low, and people at work may wonder if that smell in the break room is coming from Mr. or Ms. Stinky McNeverbathes. So check out the calculator, follow the simple steps, and figure out your water footprint. Just don’t post it on Facebook.

—Morgan Winters

Five cents a bottle doesn’t seem like much, but the bottled water tax that hit Chicago at the beginning of the new year has left the bottled water industry feeling all wet, reports Sustainablog’s Jason Phillip.

Bottled water is an environmentalist’s worst nightmare, ballooning landfills with plastic—less than 20 percent of plastic bottles are ever recycled—and encouraging waste, all for a product that we can easily get by picking up a glass and walking to the nearest sink. Bottled water could even be the first barrage in the unsettling privatization of public water supplies, Leif Utne has suggested in Utne Reader.

But we’re not in clear water yet. The Chicago tax, the first such levy in the nation, is being challenged in court by industry trade groups that argue it’s unfair because it doesn’t apply to other noncarbonated beverages such as sports drinks, coffee, or chocolate milk. Of course, Chicago does not provide inexpensive chocolate milk from the taps, otherwise I would move there, so taxing bottled water seems reasonable. But in the end it’s up for the courts to decide.

The poor bottled water manufacturers have a point, though: One bottled beverage has the same grim environmental footprint as any other. So why should water be singled out for shaming? Maybe because bottled water has become a symbol of Americans’ wanton wastefulness. We are paying for something we can get for free and destroying the earth in the process. Taken liken that, a five-cent tax doesn’t seem too hefty.

—Brendan Mackie