WaterWired

UN Human Rights Council: Water Not A Global Human Right, or NAFTA 'Rains' Supreme

Abby Brown posted this item on her Water For The Ages blog, 11 May 2008. Germany and Spain wanted to pass a resolution proposing that water be a global human right. But the USA and Canada - yes Canada (Oh, Canada!), homeland of the indefatigable Maude Barlow - wanted and got the wording changed so as not to interfere with NAFTA, which defines water as a "good and investment".  Or should that be a "good investment"?

Looks like the UN could learn from our friends in South Africa.

"When the people take to reasoning, all is lost." -- Voltaire

Yale Hosts Governors' Climate Change Conference, All Four Show Up

So what would you expect if you saw the following at the top of a press release:

U.S. Governors to Gather at Yale for Climate Change Conference

If you're like me, you'd assume that a bunch of governors were going to meet at Yale to have a climate change conference. So what's a "bunch"? 25? 35? All 50?

Try four. That's right, 8% of all U.S. governors.

Yale would have been better off calling this the "Canadian Provincial Premiers' Conference on Climate Change" since 20% (2 out of 10) premiers (Quebec and Manitoba) were slated to attend.

The 'Fantastic Four' included Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell, who had little more to do than to roll out of bed and drive 40 miles down I-91 from Hartford to New Haven. The Governator himself, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, blew in from California, and Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius also had no hair stylist appointments on 18 April.

New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine was scheduled to attend, but was a last-minute scratch; he probably heard about the palate-cleansing sorbet served in ice-carved bowls at the opening dinner. Can you spell P-R-E-T-E-N-T-I-O-U-S? 

Oh yeah - five states - New Mexico, New York, Maine, Arizona, and Washington - sent representatives.

Eighteen states signed an important declaration (don't get me started on declarations):

Download Gov-Declaration-20080418.pdf

Here's the official WWW site and the rest of the press release:

New Haven, Conn. — On Friday, April 18, U.S. Governors and top environmental officials will meet at Yale University to exchange ideas on how states and the federal government can combat global warming and develop a strategy for future action.

“This is the first time such as prestigious group of state officials have come together to have a serious discussion on climate change,” said Yale University President Richard C. Levin. “We are thrilled to have the opportunity to host such an important event that we hope will represent a significant turning point in how policymakers can work together to address this global challenge.

Governors who plan to attend the event include Arnold Schwarzenegger of California,  Jon Corzine of New Jersey, M. Jodi Rell of Connecticut, Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas and Rod Blagojevich of Illinois.

In addition, Christine Todd Whitman, Quebec Premier Jean Charest, Manitoba Premier Gary Doer and Nobel Laureate Dr. R. K. Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will participate.

Several of the governors will sign a climate change declaration that will highlight the need for “partnership” between the federal and state government.

Yale has affirmed its commitment to sustainability, especially in reducing the university’s carbon footprint with an initiative to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to 10 percent below the 1990 level by 2020. Yale has already taken steps to improve the energy efficiency of its buildings, use renewable fuels, reduce electricity use, and invest in alternative energy.

Friday’s gathering will also celebrate the centennial of President Theodore Roosevelt’s landmark 1908 Conference of Governors, which launched the modern conservation movement, planted the seed for the National Parks System, and inspired significant state efforts to protect land. The event will celebrate 100 years of state leadership on critical environmental issues, confront the present climate challenge, and set out a vision of a federal-state partnership for future action.

“Roosevelt showed remarkable foresight a century ago in engaging the states’ chief executive officers to preserve and protect the nation’s natural resources,” said Levin. “Now, we face a new and critical challenge—global climate change—and leadership in the United States is coming from visionary state governors.”

Top environmental officials? Who? Christine Todd Whitman is a former top official. Yes, there were a few state environmental officials in attendance. And it was probably hard to discuss Federal-state partnerships without any Federal officials present.

Oh, I forgot - Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes was a moderator.

The end of the press release:

The 2008 Conference of Governors is jointly hosted by the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, the Yale Project on Climate Change, the Center for Business and the Environment at Yale, the Yale Office of Sustainability, and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Funding for the conference and its associated outreach materials was generously provided by the Betsy and Jesse Fink Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, the Energy Foundation, the 11th Hour Project, and the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fund.

The money and carbon expended on this conference could have been much better spent. What did this accomplish? It certainly was not a 'Governors' Conference'.

And they should have let the graduate students run the show, like they did for the large dams conference.

This conference was more about Yale than anything else. Nice try, guys. Can you spell D-I-S-I-N-G-E-N-U-O-U-S?

"He who gives himself airs of importance, exhibits the credentials of impotence." -- Johann Lavater

Thirsting for a Solution in Armenia

I was struck by this article by reporter Sara Khojoyan in a recent issue of ArmeniaNow.com. That's a picture of Sara below.

And we think we have problems.

************

On a mid-winter Sunday morning with the temperature at minus 10, it fell my task to gather water. It is often my task. It is the life we live in the village of Hayanist. Carrying 10-liter pails, two at a time, I fetched 80 liters of drinking water from my neighbor, Ano.

The presidential campaign had just begun and I hoped that at least one candidate would come to our village and promise to solve our water problem.

But none came.

But because I am a journalist (in a society where that still, often, means provocateur), my neighbors complain to me, saying that I should be able to do something.

”How can it be that you are a journalist and our street is without drinking and irrigation water,” they ask me.

Ten years ago our street, Sakharov, was happy when we finally got piped-in water.

For two years residents were happy that they had more or less clean drinking water and did not have to drink untreated artesian water.

But in Armenia, especially in a village that lacks attention from the village head, such happiness does not last long. First they started to give water at certain hours, but few or almost no one knew about those hours, or rather knew when they heard water dripping in yards as water was given at random hours.

Then the water pressure became so weak that only those who live at the beginning of the village actually got water.

My father, resourceful as he is, lowered our water line to five centimeters off the ground so that, if only by act of gravity, water began to drip into our yard.

We collected water drip by drip first in a bowl small enough to fit under the tap. We poured bowl after bowl into buckets until, eventually, we had water. Even our neighbors got a share.

We did not complain, except when the village head left the pipes closed for a week or two.

Other anecdotal cases also happened: a few days before collecting the “water money” (about $3-5 a month) we had plenty of water for five or six hours a day for two days, it was so good that we forgot about water problems and stopped storing it in buckets.

Those at the village administration are aware of the problem. Perhaps they don’t remember, the council of our neighbors has already five times “stormed” the village administration building with delegations and returned with promises from village head Gurgen Martirosyan.

I personally typed five applications addressed to different instances of the Republic of Armenia – from the village head administration to the prime minister’s office, asking for this problem to be solved and attaching  signatures of members of 25 families.

Around the time of last May’s parliamentary election we even had visit by a proxy of the parliament deputy of our constituency, then still a candidate, Tigran Stepanyan. He promised to solve the drinking water problem if people voted for his candidate. The people voted. The politician did nothing.

My father hopes: “They said they would install gas and did, and so they will also install water.”

And I don’t disappoint easily.

But when you fetch water in buckets for drinking, washing or bathing from your neighbor’s artesian well, which is about 50 meters away, and when this is winter and subzero temperatures in the morning, you forget about hope.

I warned the residents of my street in advance that parliamentary candidates, according to Armenia’s law, do not have a binding mandate.

I don’t count on the village head either. What hopes should I pin on the village head that has been re-elected already three times, on Election Days that most of the village didn’t even know about? Official records say he was elected on more than 50 percent of the vote. I and my neighbors know better.

Now we watch the debate in the capital over whether votes there were properly tallied, and we hear about people being paid 5,000 drams ($16) for their vote.

Dear President Sargsyan: Keep the bribe money. Just give us water, so that my neighbors will stop asking me to do something.

************

"An honest politician is one who, when bought, stays bought" -- Simon Cameron

What Would Jesus Drink? Spiritual Bottled Water, Of Course!

Todd Jarvis sent me this link to an article by Lisa Miller in the 17 December 2007 issue of Newsweek. It's about yet another bottled-water marketing scam to bamboozle the public. But then again, we had stuff like this when I was a kid. It was called ''holy water".

Miller points out how water has been critical to faith for thousands of years. Water is the medium of baptism in Christianity. Muslims wash before they pray. Now marketers are capitalizing on that fact and selling bottled water to bring out the spirtuality (??) in us all. But not everyone thinks this is a good idea.

The article follows. When you get to the part about Liquid OM you'll swear you're back in Marin County in the 1970s.

Bless This Bottled Water

by Lisa Miller, Newsweek

You need only go back to the first chapter of Genesis to see how elemental water is to the observance of faith: "And the Spirit of God," the Bible says, "moved upon the face of the waters." In the Torah, water is used to ordain priests and to purify the sons of Aaron before they enter the temple. In the New Testament, John baptizes Jesus with water from the Jordan River. Observant Muslims wash hands and feet before they pray, orthodox Jewish women take ritual baths once a month—and every Christian denomination still uses water as part of its sacred rites. Mormons, when they take the weekly sacrament, drink water instead of wine.

Courtesy of Spirtual Water and Newsweek.

The most recent entry in this niche is Spiritual Water. It's purified municipal water, sold with 10 different Christian labels. The Virgin Mary bottle, for example, has the Hail Mary prayer printed on the back in English and Spanish. Spiritual Water helps people to "stay focused, believe in yourself and believe in God," says Elicko Taieb, the Florida-based company's founder who was formerly in the pest-control business. All three companies give a portion of their profits to charity.

So it's not surprising that a few savvy marketers would seize on this universal symbol of purity for financial gain. Inspired, perhaps, by vitamin and energy waters, a number of new companies have begun making more explicit claims: their water doesn't just promote good health, it actually makes you good. Holy Drinking Water, produced by a California-based company called Wayne Enterprises, is blessed in the warehouse by an Anglican or Roman Catholic priest (after a thorough background check). Like a crucifix or a rosary, a bottle of Holy Drinking Water is a daily reminder to be kind to others, says Brian Germann, Wayne's CEO. Another company makes Liquid OM, superpurified bottled water containing vibrations that promote a positive outlook. Invented by Kenny Mazursky, a sound therapist in Chicago, the water purportedly possesses an energy field that Mazursky makes by striking a giant gong and Tibetan bowls in its vicinity. He says the good energy can be felt not just after you drink the water but before, when you're holding the bottle.

This small band of feel-good entrepreneurs may face objections from a surprising quarter. Some religious believers, also convinced of the elemental importance of water, are campaigning against its ubiquitous sale and packaging on the grounds that the practice is neither ethical nor good for the environment. "Water is life," says Sister Mary Zirbes, a nun in the Franciscan Sisters of Little Falls, Minn. "It really should not be a commodity to be bought." The Franciscan Sisters, together with a community of Benedictine nuns nearby, have launched a letter-writing campaign against the largest producers of bottled water and they've designed coasters to encourage people to drink glasses, not bottles, of water from the tap. The Vineyard church in Boise, Idaho, sells slim reusable plastic bottles in its bookstore, and it has placed water stations throughout the church. "In a world where a billion people have no reliable source of drinking water, where 3,000 children die every day of waterborne diseases, let's be clear: bottled water is not a sin, but it sure is a choice," says Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). "Spending $15 billion a year on bottled water is a testimony to our conspicuous consumption, our culture of indulgence." Taieb calmly refutes the implication that his Spiritual Water is bad for the planet. People put fewer of his bottles in the trash, he says, because they don't want to discard images of Jesus or Mary. Instead, they refill them with other beverages. Obviously, even do-gooders can disagree. Some believe that water is life, while others believe that water is their livelihood.

"There's a sucker born every minute." -- P.T. Barnum

China's Water Boondoggle-In-Waiting

China suffers from what a lot of countries must endure: too much water in the "wrong" (as far as humans are concerned) places. Southern China is relatively water-rich compared to northern China. The North China Plain, whose ground water provides much of the water to 400,000,000 people, is a classic case of ground water overdrafting. There just are too many people sucking on too many straws, all inserted into the same, shrinking "drink".

No fear, the Chinese government is coming to the "rescue". In 2002 it decided to implement a plan suggested by the environmental visionary Mao Zedong over 50 years ago. Recall that Mao was the guy who ordered the extermination of songbirds because they ate seeds and grain, oblivious to the fact that they kept insect pests in check. Mao, ever perceptive, noted that the north didn't have enough water, but the south did, so why not transfer (Mao said "borrow") water from China's great southern river, the Yangtze, to its great northern river, the Yellow (or Huang).  So now the government will hydrologically connect the north and south.

It's interesting to note that Chinese leader Hu Jintao is a hydraulic engineer.

Hey, it's easier to move water than people, right? All the Chinese have to do is build some dams, install some pipes, pump the water over 15,000-foot mountains, and presto! Water!

The great South-to-North Water Transfer Project must have engineers everywhere salivating and environmentalists reeling. It'll cost about $60B, require prodigious amounts of energy, displace millions of people, and devastate ecosystems.

Jim Belshaw, the excellent columnist of the Albuquerque Journal, alerted me to the excellent article by Christina Larson, "The Middle Kingdom's Dilemma", in this month's Washington Monthly.

The accompanying picture, that of the frozen Yangtze River, is from Larson's article.

She describes the water plan and one geologist's attempt to see whether the scheme will work. The fact that the government has not stopped Yong Yang attests to the fact that things have changed somewhat in China.

Here's a copy of the article in case the link is inactive:

Download yangtze_river_article.doc 

In fact, there is a nascent environmental movement in China that has progressed to the point where the government has admitted that poor planning the Three Gorges Dam project had created a potential "environmental catastrophe."

Will the environmentalists be able to stop the project? Time will tell, but my money's on the government.

"Southern water is plentiful; northern water scarce. Borrowing some water would be good." -- Mao Zedong, 1952.

Surfin' USA...in Mesa, Arizona?

If everybody had an ocean

Across the USA

Then everybody'd be surfin'

Like Mesa, USA

My apologies to Brian Wilson and Chuck Berry.

Fellow WaterWonk Elaine Hebard of Albuquerque, NM, alerted me to this story. I thought she was yanking my chain till I clicked on this link.

Mesa, AZ, (outside of Phoenix), which proudly bills itself as the nation's largest suburb (home to 460,000), has decided to help fund the Waveyard, a 125-acre facility that will allow desert dwellers to surf, kayak, and scuba-dive when the thermometer hits #$!* degrees. Voters (65% approval) recently passed a measure to give the developers $35 million in tax incentives. No one apparently mounted much opposition to it.

The Waveyard is expected to generate $1 billion in rvenues and 7,500 jobs. It will require 50 million gallons of water to fill, and lose about 60 to 100 million gallons per year due to seepage and evaporation. It will not use drinking water, but non-potable (elevated arsenic) ground water that will have to be treated because of humans will be immersed in it.

Real-estate developer Richard Mladick, the 'brains" behind this, grew up in Virginia Beach, VA, and has surfed in Morocco, Hawaii, Indonesia, and Brazil.  "I couldn't imagine raising my kids in an environment where they wouldn't have the opportunity to grow up being passionate about the same sports that I grew up being passionate about," he said. "It's about delivering a sport that's not typically available in an urban environment." Say what?

Actually, such sports are available in urban environments. Hey, Richard, try Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange County, etc.  But there is a "catch": the urban environments must be located on sea coasts. What he should have said is "not typically available in an interior continental desert environment."

When I was in graduate school at the UA in Tucson in the 1970s, there was a place in Tempe, AZ, called Big Surf, which tried to recreate the beach environment, replete with waves produced by what was essentially a giant flush toilet. But it could not produce the 12-foot monsters envisioned by Mladick. The Waveyard will also have Class 2 to Class 4 rapids.

It's nice to know we've advanced so far in 30 years, and that visionaries still walk amongst us.

As for my customary quote at the bottom, I can think of only one:

"It's a desert, stupid."

Oregon DEQ's Dirty Little Secrets

The following is Oregonian columnist Steve Duin's continuation of the article about DEQ hydrogeologist Marcy Kirk's attempts to do her job in the face opposition from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality; click here to read my first post and Duin's 4 October 2007 column.

This column was published on 7 October 2007. The link is here; I have pasted the column below since the link will expire. [Disclosure notice: Marcy and her husband Steve Kirk are friends whom I have known for almost 25 years. Steve was my Master's student at the University of Nevada-Reno].

*************

The Dirty Little Secrets at Oregon DEQ

by Steve Duin, Oregonian, 7 October 2007

W hat I've learned -- and shared -- in the past six weeks is that the Department of Environmental Quality is one of the dirty little secrets of Oregon politics, a particularly brutal irony given the state's unreasonable pride in its environmental credentials.

Almost two-thirds of DEQ's funding comes from the industries it regulates, almost guaranteeing the agency's meek compliance when political -- or pollution -- conflicts arise. That timidity is just dandy with the Legislature, Republicans and Democrats alike, who willfully underfund the agency so that it is often powerless to enforce the law.

The governor, as usual, is no help.

If the calls I've received in recent weeks are any indication, most DEQ employees are incensed by the agency's impotence. "Almost everyone," hydrogeologist Marcy Kirk said, "is afraid to speak up."

Kirk, fortunately, is not.

As I reported Thursday, Kirk was twice removed from the DEQ team monitoring the hazardous waste landfills at Arlington, a site managed by Chemical Waste Management. While lobbying DEQ Director Stephanie Hallock to remove Kirk for a second time, Chem Waste said it had "communication" and "trust" issues with the whistle-blower.

Kirk understands why: "I enforced the regulations, most of which were federal. My decisions were too stringent. It would have cost them (Chem Waste) a lot of money."

Through an agency spokeswoman, Hallock refused further comment on DEQ's handling of a case. That's probably a wise move, given her testimony in the unfair labor practices' complaint that Kirk and her union filed against the agency.

Furious that there'd been a "meltdown" between her staff and a company that pumps almost $2 million annually into the DEQ budget, Hallock ordered her deputies to fix the problem. She never spoke to Kirk for her side of the story. Pressed nine months later by union lawyers, she could not name a single issue in the dispute between her field workers and Chem Waste's consultants.

Asked if the crucial work of monitoring the hazardous waste dump continued after Kirk and her team were removed, Hallock said, "As far as I know. I don't know. I mean, I really wasn't involved."

Ignorance is bliss. Once Chem Waste was mollified, apparently, the issue ceased to matter to the director of DEQ.

Kirk wasn't quite so fortunate. Oregon's Environmental Quality Commission, remember, had approved a new permit for the site when Chem Waste officials lobbied Hallock to end Kirk and her team's interference in their operation.

"DEQ plays to special interests, and Chem Waste is a special interest," Kirk said. "She (Hallock) doesn't have much respect for staff. Sacrificing a few staff is no big deal to her. They sacrificed not only staff members but the science that went into the decision."

In 232 pages of depositions over DEQ's dealings with Kirk, the precious science of environmental quality -- the groundwater readings, the leaks in the landfill liners, the safety of the Columbia aquifers -- barely rates a mention.

Is it any wonder, then, that 125 DEQ technicians have signed a union petition that argues "when Management actions suggest that the Agency values the good will of a regulated corporation more than the professional fulfillment of its employees or environmental protection, we are all harmed."

Oregon's Employment Relations Board, by the way, found in Kirk's favor last month, arguing the agency did not follow its guidelines in removing Kirk at Chem West's behest.

Oregon's Department of Justice is appealing that decision.

Steve Duin: 503-221-8597; 1320 S.W. Broadway, Portland, OR 97201 steveduin@news.oregonian.com http://blog.oregonlive.com/steveduin

*************

Note added on 17 October 2007: Stephanie Hallock, DEQ Director, announced yesterday that she will be retiring on 1 January 2008 instead of 1 May 2008. I guess she "wants to spend more time with her family" - actually, her husband and her dog.

"The incompetent with nothing to do can still make a mess of it." -- Laurence J. Peter

Wasting a True Believer at Oregon DEQ

[Disclosure notice: Marcy Kirk and her husband Steve (who also works for DEQ) are friends; I have known both for about 25 years, beginning with their student days at the University of Nevada-Reno. Steve was my Master's student.]

Steve Duin's column appeared in the 4 October 2007 issue of the Portland Oregonian. I have pasted it below in case the link expires.

**********

Wasting a True Believer at DEQ

Steve Duin, Oregonian, Thursday, October 04, 2007

Marcy Kirk has a passion for the land and the groundwaters that curl through its veins. I need to make that clear at the start because by the end of this tale, you might wonder if anyone else places much value on that, including Kirk's employers at Oregon's Department of Environmental Quality.

Kirk was in college when Love Canal was in the news, and it sparked her interest in how contaminants move through the ground beneath our feet. She had a master's degree in hydrogeology and 12 years' experience in the field when the DEQ hired her in 1999 to monitor the hazardous waste landfill at Arlington.

When Kirk arrived on site, she quickly realized the science of groundwater samples had changed dramatically since the last permit process and Chemical Waste Management was way behind the curve.

There were, Kirk said, 65 wells -- each 200-250 feet deep -- around the toxic landfills, which allowed Chem Waste to monitor if toxins were leaking into the underground aquifers. Kirk was soon questioning Chem Waste's sampling methods.

"They were purging the wells dry, which makes these volatile chemicals, the contaminants of concern, basically disappear," Kirk said. "When they would collect the samples, the results were lower."

What's more, Kirk added, at least 20 of the wells were defective and Chem Waste showed little interest in spending the huge sums necessary to repair or remove them.

Chem Waste, Kirk and other agency employees say, argued that Arlington was too remote to worry about any of this and that little if any toxins were leaking into the great Columbia Basalt aquifer. I'm forced to paraphrase that argument because no one representing Chem Waste would comment or return my calls.

While the company isn't talking to me, it was complaining to Kirk's bosses at the DEQ. Since 2000, Waste Management, Chem Waste's parent, has paid the DEQ just under $15 million in fees to operate the hazardous waste facility.

Those fees are vital to the DEQ's budget. They also give Chem Waste reason to believe they always have the ear of agency director Stephanie Hallock and DEQ management.

As early as 2002, according to the state's Employment Relations Board, Chem Waste managers were complaining about "communication" issues with Kirk and her "hidden agenda."

That was enough, apparently, for the agency to boot Kirk off the hydrogeology team in June 2003. Her union, AFSCME Local 3336, filed a grievance and, after 19 months of negotiations, DEQ management agreed Kirk could return to the new team charged with expediting the renewal of Chem Waste's hazardous waste permit.

Everyone agrees that process was contentious. Chem Waste grew increasingly frustrated with the demands made by the hydro team and the Environmental Protection Agency. After enlisting the DEQ's help in convincing the EPA to table its objections -- and after its permit was renewed -- Chem Waste attorney Don Haagensen met with Hallock in August 2006 to complain about "trust" issues with agency staff.

Haagensen "used to play on the DEQ basketball team," Hallock later testified, "and . . . we've always had a good working relationship."

Just how good? Without talking to her staff on that toxic ground in Arlington -- why "trust" input from them when she had Chem Waste's counsel? -- Hallock ordered her deputy to solve the problem.

Three weeks later, Kirk and the entire team were removed from the Chem Waste project. I'll return Sunday to explain just how much that decision reveals about the DEQ's priorities and its morale problems.

Steve Duin: 503-221-8597; 1320 S.W. Broadway, Portland, OR 97201 steveduin@news.oregonian.com       http://blog.oregonlive.com/steveduin

************

Duin will continue this sorry saga on 7 October 2007. I'll post that one as well.

I used to think Oregon was progressive in managing and protecting its resources.  I'm not so sure any longer.

Note added on 17 October 2007: Stephanie Hallock, DEQ Director, announced yesterday that she will be retiring on 1 January 2008 instead of 1 May 2008. I guess she "wants to spend more time with her family" - actually, her husband and her dog.

"No good deed goes unpunished." -- Clare Boothe Luce

Finding Water the Ol' Timey Way: Dowsing/Water Witching Presentation

My colleague Todd Jarvis, who did the excellent presentation on Bottled Water and the Environment, which I posted on 17 May 2007 (click here), has outdone himself. He's developed an even-handed presentation on "dowsing" or "water witching", Finding Water the Ol' Timey Way.

 

Here is the presentation:

Download dowsing_24sept2007.pdf

Here is a copy of a brief article on Oregon dowsing by Todd:

Download osbge_dowsing_article.pdf

Again - the dual-category classification simply indicates the some people consider dowsing bulls**t and some consider it amazing. You decide for yourself.

“One only needs two tools in life: WD-40 to make things go, and duct tape to make them stop.” -- G. Weilacher

Dowsing For Water

The 3 August 2007 Murdoch...ooops...Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has an article on water witching or dowsing, that age-old technique used to find ground water and locate wells.

Give it a read and see what you think. The link may not remain active for too long (7 days), so after that you may have to pay. The link below may also work:

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB118610491124086840-lMyQjAxMDE3ODA2MzEwMDM0Wj.html

Note: the "dual classification" for this post simply reflects the fact that some think dowsing is amazing, others think it's bulls**t. You be the judge.

"In the long run, everything's just a toaster." -- Anonymous

Bottled Ocean Drinking Water: Next Big Thing?

Just when I thought we might be making the world safe from overuse of bottled water, along comes something else that stretches the bounds of common sense: bottled deep (>200m) ocean water - for drinking water. Two recent articles in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the China Post discussed operations either planned or underway in Hawaii or Taiwan.

As drinking water, deep ocean water's "cachet" is its presumed isolation from atmospheric and near-surface pollutants, rendering it free from "bad stuff" while containing a variety of minerals.

Four companies already operate on Hawaii's Big Island. The water is used in beauty products, food, and for drinking water (desalted, of course). Deep Ocean Hawaii (shown - courtesy of the Star-Bulletin) recently began operating a vessel that will pump ocean water from a depth of about 600m and desalt about 80,000 gallons per day with the ability to expand to 500,000 gallons per day.

Koyo USA, Hawaii's top producer, sells its MaHaLo Hawaii Deep Sea water for about $67.50 (retail) for a 15-bottle case of 1.5 liter bottles. That's about $11.35 per gallon. They produce about 900,000 bottles per day, with 200,000 of those going to Japan.

In Taiwan, the government issued its first deep ocean water certificate to the Tungruen Company, which will sell it as drinking water. It will sell 0.5 liter bottles for about 75 cents each, or about $5.70 per gallon. Tungruen will pump water from a depth of about 710m.

View the articles at:

starbulletin.com/2007/04/30/business/story02.html

www.chinapost.com.tw/archive/detail.asp?ID=107016&GRP=&onNews=

Go figure....

But some reason prevails. ABC News recently reported about the "return" of tap water.

"No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public." -- H.L. Mencken

Penn and Teller Dis Bottled Water

Katie commented on my recent post Bottled Water and the Environment Presentation. She was kind enough to mention that Penn and Teller's three-part bottled water bash from their show Bullshit! is on YouTube:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=IkUbW15ty70&mode=related&search=

http://youtube.com/watch?v=1J-01hkGOHo&mode=related&search=

http://youtube.com/watch?v=AcZjhW2Zwbo&mode=related&search=

Enjoy (but some of the language is strong)!

"Bozone: the invisible layer that surrounds stupid people and won't allow smart ideas to penetrate." -- Firesign Theater Newsgroup