Industrial pollution fouls Minnesota's rivers

Report says 1.5 million pounds of toxic chemicals dumped in Minnesota water each year

By Alicia Bayer, Mankato Green Culture Examiner

A report released today reveals that industrial facilities dumped 1,455,361 pounds of toxic chemicals into Minnesota waterways in 2010, including over 47,000 pounds into Mankato's Blue Earth River.

The report was released by Environment Minnesota and co-authored by the Frontier Group.

Wasting Our Waterways: Industrial Toxic Pollution and the Unfulfilled Promise of the Clean Water Act also reports that 226 million pounds of toxic chemicals were discharged into 1,400 waterways across the country.

The report found that  703,019 pounds of toxic chemicals were dumped by industrial facilities into the Mississippi River just in Minnesota.

(Continue reading here. The report is here.)

Water, water everywhere? Yes, but...

10 Must-see water documentaries that provide insight into the future water crisis

by Chris Maxwell-Gaines
The Watercache Blog

Here is a list of ten must-see documentaries that help expose some of the critical issues facing water in the 21st century.

1. FLOW: For the Love Of Water

2. Tapped

3. Blue Gold – World Water Wars

4. The Colorado River: Running Near Empty

5. Thirst

6. Water on the Table

7. The Water Front 

8. Liquid Assets: The Big Business of Water

9. Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water 

10. The Story of Bottled Water

(Descriptions here.)

We'd like to add "Precious Waters: Minnesota's Sulfide Mining Controversy" and "Troubled Waters: A Mississippi River Story" (video) from the Bell Museum of Natural History at the University of Minnesota.

Energy, environment, food, water: Is the glass half full or half empty?

Our demand for resources cannot be sustained

By Gary Gardner

Former World Bank economist Herman Daly has used the term "full world" to describe an increasingly crowded planet whose people demand ever more materials and energy. I like the term because it neatly sums up this stage of our civilization. If the 20th century were an era of resource-intensive expansion and new frontiers, the 21st will be about adapting to greater limits on resource use. Oil, water and arable land are all finite resources, yet human demand for them is on a steady upward trajectory.

Consider oil. The concept of a coming peak in oil production is increasingly accepted even by mainstream organizations. The World Energy Council, for example, recently predicted that the peak of global oil production would arrive within 15 years -- this in a world whose energy demand, says the council, is projected to double by 2050.

Similarly, 47% of the world's population will live in areas of severe water stress by 2030, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Scarcity reveals itself through extreme and costly measures of supply: Desalination capacity globally is up by 45% in the last five years, with similar growth projected through 2012. On a local level, the government of Spain's Catalonia region declared last month that it would import water by boat and train to get through the summer.

(More here. This is the first in a series of articles in the L.A. Times under the heading "The New Scarcity". The series can be found here.)

Pedal power for clean water

Aquaduct is a tricycle that also works as a water filter

NEW YORK, 18 February 2008 (IRIN) - Almost 20 percent of the world does not have access to safe drinking water, which, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), means 1.6 million people die every year of waterborne diseases. A team in California has a potential solution: a tricycle that filters water as one pedals.

Designed by Ideo, based in Palo Alto, California, the Aquaduct has a water tank that uses the energy of cycling to filter the water into a smaller container – providing 8 liters (2.1 gals) of safe drinking water.

(More here.)

Progressive Ponderings: Privatizing Aquifers

by Joe Mayer

As the supply of water decreases – with pollution, waste, extravagant use, channeling runoff for quick retrieval – and the demand increases – with increased population, agricultural and industrial uses – privatizing water is becoming part of the international trade and loan agreements. Lakes, streams and aquifers have already been "on the table." Atlanta, GA, experimented with privatizing its water system in 1999. After four years of poor quality, infrastructure neglect, demands for more city money and consumer complaints, the city rescinded the agreement in 2003.

In developing countries especially, tremendous pressure is being used to privatize water as well as other natural resources. This pressure usually comes from organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which act in accord with corporatized First World governments. As water replaces oil as the world's most sought after commodity, expect future wars over this necessity. If profits through privatization are added to this increasing demand, international violent conflicts will be multiplied.

The corporatized free market has professed that government (people working together for the good of all) is inefficient compared with business acting strictly with a profit motive. Numerous experiences have debunked this claim, but it continues to be made. Besides Atlanta, other cities and even countries of the world have experienced disaster with privatized water systems.

Water is only one example of this corporate trend towards privatization. Privatizing nature's gifts and life's necessities creates a monopoly — controlling who lives well, who lives in hardship and who dies. Can a way be found to monopolize air? In one way it is already happening; by using air as a sink for pollution, corporatized government grants pollution "credits." Doesn't this imply some right of ownership?

For a long time, intellectual property has justly claimed a right to the fruits (patents and copyrights) of one's labor and artistic creation. Often, disputes over this involve the duration of the right and what might be a legitimate competitor.

Today is different. Today creation is being successfully claimed as intellectual property. Examples:

• Agriculture is being reshaped as seeds are altered so that the fruit will not regenerate itself. Thus, farmers cannot save and use part of their crop for reseeding the following year. The effect on small and subsistence farming is devastating.

• Pharmaceutical companies are attempting to patent, or slightly alter and patent, the genetic makeup of plants and claim all property rights to the use of these naturally occurring healing remedies. The U.S. patent office is approving what previous cultures often used as medicine.

Order #39 by Paul Bremer of the Coalition Provisional Authority recommended and approved the privatizing of nearly everything in Iraq.

Slavery is the privatizing of humans. It continues to this day in the form of child labor, long workdays, inadequate pay, people regarded as commodities in a corporate system.

While privatizing property has led to many improvements in human subsistence and comfort it has also caused much human suffering, violence, and death. Selling off everything on this planet to the "owners of the world" is not the answer to human survival or the world's problems. Privatizing and monopolizing is another "free market" myth that progressives need to recognize and bring to citizens' attention. Contrary to privatization, holding water and other resources for the good of all by the whole community – managing resources for the governed by the governed – is the way to peace and justice.