WaterWired

Catholic Bishops on Climate Change and Environmental Justice

After John Matthews' great talk today (a post will be forthcoming) doctoral student extraordinaire Kara DiFrancesco inquired if he or I had heard about the Catholic bishops' statement on climate change and environmental justice. Neither of us had, but it comes as no surprise that they have such a statement, And it was no surprise to find Kara's informative email awaiting me when I returned from dinner with John.

This is from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and Catholic Relief Services:

Download Catholic response to climate change

 Here is the UCCSB's Climate Change Justice and Health Initiative. The UCCSB actively lobbies Congress,

And there is a Catholic Climate Covenant as well.

So it's safe to say the Catholics and their bishops are not followers when it comes to climate change and related issues. They have done this before, too; I previously posted about some Catholic bishops' efforts to promote environmental stewardship in the Columbia River Basin. In that post I noted other religious organizations besides Catholics who are proactive with respect to climate change and related issues.

Thanks, Kara.

 "The earth dries up and withers, the world languished and withers, the exalted of the earth languish. The earth lies under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, and broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse consumes the earth; its people must bear their guilt." -- Isaiah 24: 4-6

First Issue! wH2O: The Journal on Gender & Water, Volume 1, No. 1

Just last month I posted about the new online journal being published by the folks at the
University of Pennsylvania, The Journal on Gender & Water. 

Here are the articles you'll read in the inaugural issue (you will be able to download a PDF of most papers when you click on 'Read and Comment'):

The Urban Water Transition: Why We Must Address the New Reality of Urbanization, Women, Water, and Sanitation in Sustainable Development by Eugenie L. Birch, Afaf Meleis, and Susan Wachter  READ AND COMMENT

Geography Matters: the Importance of Land, Water and Space in Sanitation Studies by Kathleen O’Reilly  READ AND COMMENT 

 The Real Fight Against Climate Change: What Would Woman Do? by Aishwarya Nair  READ AND COMMENT

Reproductive Health Reform: A Climate Change Adaptation Strategy by Julia Ryan    READ AND COMMENT 

Watering Their Graves: Breast Milk Substitutes and Supplements in Developing Countries by Jamie Oyugi   READ AND COMMENT  

Technology & Innovations in the Water Sector: Closing the Gender Gap by Dakota Dobyns  READ AND COMMENT 

Sustainable Community-Based Solutions: Source to Tap and Back Again by Amanda Marlin, Kusum Athukorala, Marcia Brewster, Anizan Isahak, Susmita Sinha, and Salmah Zakaria    READ AND COMMENT 

The Women, Water and Sanitation Crisis and the Role of the Transnational Corporation by Caroline D’Angelo    READ AND COMMENT

There is a lot more to read and see in the issue, so be sure to read it all. Just click here.

Great way to start the month of May!
 

Enjoy!
 

Good place for my T-shirt:

 "Child welfare ought really to cover all sorts of topics, such as better water and sanitation and good roads, and clean streets and public parks and playgrounds." - Marjory Stoneman Douglas

Kudos to Penn for Publishing wH2O: The Journal on Gender & Water

The University of Pennsylvania, which some forget is a private, Ivy League university, has recently estbalished wH2O: The Journal on Gender & Water, the first such journal with this focus.

This foresight calls for a shout-out to the Penn folks and their supporters. You're thinking, 'What, another journal?" You've got that right, and it's about time that this issue had its own forum. Why? Read on, my friend.

From the 'About Us' page:

wH2O is an online, open-access academic journal for women and water issues around the world. Our vision is to publish a yearly journal; provide a centralized hub for women, water and sanitation information; and eventually, be able to provide research grants to facilitate more research in this space. Join us on WordPress, Facebook or Twitter.

Our mission is to advance women’s economic and social development by creating a centralized body of interdisciplinary research on water and sanitation issues. The issue is crucially important: Women bear the brunt of gathering water worldwide; in developing countries women walk up to 5km each way and expend up to half their calories on water fetching. Providing water access and sanitation means that women can stay in school longer and are healthier and lose fewer days from sickness in the family. Governments, foreign aid agencies and non-governmental organizations are increasingly paying more attention to the importance of women’s access to water and sanitation.

The idea for this initiative came from an early 2011 trip to India and Sri Lanka on behalf of the Master of Environmental Studies program at Penn, the Initiative for Global Environmental Leadership at Wharton and the Philadelphia Global Water Initiative. The trip was made by a man with a safari vest and hat, Professor Stanley Laskowski, and 2 students Dakota Dobyns and Caroline D’Angelo. We spoke with several people in the field from the U.N. and NGOs (many of whom will be a part of this project) who detailed the type of leadership and partnership necessary to advance women’s status through fixing sanitation and water issues.

Interested? Join us! We are always looking for more hands on deck.

Their vision is to publish one issue per year. I suspect they might have to increase the frequency.

Some of the wH2O folks (interview) were at the 6WWF. Wish I had been able to meet them.

If you are going to be in the Philadelphia area on 27 April 2012 and would like to attend the wH2O Launch Party, RSVP here. 

The inaugural issue will be posted shortly. It will be free.

Best of luck to this important initiative.

"In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water along with other resources has become the victim of his indifference." - Rachel Carson

"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people." - Eleanor Roosevelt.

Video: Cynthia Barnett Speaks on 'Blue Revolution' at The Clinton School

In this video author Cynthia Barnett discusses her excellent book, Blue Revolution: Unmaking America's Water Crisis at the Clinton School of Public Service.

Here is the blurb:

Award-winning journalist Cynthia Barnett discusses her book, Blue Revolution:  Unmaking America’s Water Crisis, which describes an illusion of water abundance in America that has encouraged everyone, from homeowners to farmers to utilities, to use more and more. She proposes the most important part of the solution is also the simplest and least expensive – a shared water ethic among citizens, government and major water users.

 

"As Aldo Leopold is to the land ethic, Cynthia Barnett is to the water ethic." — Kathleen Dean Moore, coeditor of Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril.

In 'Blue Revolution' Cynthia Barnett Reacquaints Me with the 'Lords of Yesterday'

It has taken me far too long but I just finished Cynthia Barnett's excellent book, Blue Revolution: Unmaking America's Water Crisis.

I will not provide a review of the book, not because I consider Cynthia a friend but because both my wife Mary Frances and I reviewed drafts of a number of chapters.

However I will encourage you to read the book. What I find especially refreshing is her call for a national water ethic and its emphasis on stewardship and intergenerational equity (Gees, I don't sound like a hydrogeologist anymore, but that's fine).

She also does not shy away from discussions of conflicts of interest when it comes to water issues. I cannot recall reading much about those in other tomes. Amen!

So read her book.  

I confess that Blue Revolution provided a double bonus: not only a great read, but it afforded me the rediscovery of Charles F. Wilkinson's "Lords of Yesterday", a term coined in his book, Crossing the Next Meridian: Land, Water, and the Future of the West. Wilkinson attacks five 'lords' for thwarting water sustainability in the US West.

Barnett calls out the Top Five Lords (p. 112):

1) The Hardrock Mining Law of 1872, which dedicates more than half of all public lands to mining as as the preferred use.

2) Public rangeland practices that devastate western ranges and rivers;

3) Forest policy that promotes logging as the dominant use of our national forests;

4) Mega-dams and other wanter-development practices that provided 'cheap power' at a cost we could not fathom until now.

5) Prior-appropriation doctrine, with its 'first in time, first in right; and 'use it (beneficially) or lose it' tenets that worked fine when we were promoting development and settlement of the West but have now mired us in the anachronistic world of 100 or so years ago.  

I am going to reread Wilkinson's book; it's still on my shelf. You should too, after you read Blue Revolution.

And tomorrow I'll post the Bay-Delta report at 1 PM EDT.

I will leave you with a few choice words from Jared Diamond, the author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, in which he examined why some societies succeeded and some failed (Easter Island, early Norse in Greenland, et al.). At a lecture in Albuquerque a few years ago he was asked if there was some common thread that linked those societies that failed. His reply: 

"There was a failure to reexamine and change their core values in the face of change."