17 Years After Reisner's Cadillac Desert

This article, published today in the New York Times, is just one of the now realized predictions Reisner made in his revised edition of Cadillac Desert. 

Privatization, Public Property and Greed

The more I read about water the more I realize the debate is not about how best to get water to people but rather who can best get water to people.  On principal many argue that privatization of water should be illegal.  Others argue that private industry is more motivated to get water to more people in order to turn a profit.  I agree in principal but have no problem with profit.  I do, however, take issue with greed. 

In the privatization debate we tend to focus on which economic policy is better for a particular country or even for a global market.  But we do not have to choose between socialism and capitalism, they work differently in different cultures, but we do have to consider greed and corruption in any economic or governmental system.   The question should not be, should a private company be able to make a profit providing water to poor people, these systems are already in place.  We should be asking how much of a profit should these companies be able to make.  I am no expert in economics but it seems to me that, for example, that if oil companies only turned half of the profit they currently turn, they would still be very comfortable.  The same could be said for water companies and energy companies. 

It should not be absurd for these companies to self regulate in a way that allows them to assist developing countries (instead of exploiting them) and still turn a better than modest profit.  But it is absurd, in the business model that currently exists, to expect this.   Regulation then must come from government.  There is a middle ground between a completely free market and nationalization of industry.  A balance between the two would be the most benificial for people in need. 

This article on peanut paste demonstrates some of these ideas.  Is it good business or is it greed to keep secret a revolutionary recipe that can keep starving children from dying in developing countries? 

SODIS

I think I will be using lots of information from the SODIS foundation while working on my thesis.  I think a holistic program like this could be really useful in Mesolandia.  Check out the video!

And this one!

Arroyos of Barranquilla

When building Barranquilla, colonist and engineers forgot one key aspect of city planning, water infrastructure.  There are pipes that deliver water to my home and take the waste-water away.  There is also a well established water company in the city.  However, the streets are made mostly made of impermeable material and there are no storm drains.  Barranqilla is a pore-less city.  It is also built on a slight incline so that the northern part of the city is higher than the southern part of the city.  This means that each time it rains for more than a few minutes, several of the streets turn into impassable arroyos.

In addition, there are problems with trash disposal in Barranquilla, or  rather, people do not know how to dispose of their trash appropriately.  This is one of my main problems with living on the coast of Colombia.  I can not go a day without watching someone throw their trash on the ground.  I would argue that in Barranquilla, no matter your level of education or socio-economic status, that you are likely to liter regularly (people use all types of excuses; there are not enough trash cans on the street, people are hired by the city to pick up my trash so I am helping with unemployment, ect.) The trash builds up, primarily in the part of the city where people don't have other people cleaning up after them, and when it rains all of this trash is washed into the arroyos, in to the river and finally the ocean. 

Yesterday I drove from the city to the beach and saw Arroyo Leon for the first time.

There is so much trash in this particular arroyo that you might confuse it for a landfill.  Occasionally the city brings in construction equipment to clean it out (although it looks like they clear the waterway and dump the trash about 100 meters away).  However, this type of contamination of water ways is not unusual.  When I arrived back in Barranquilla at the beginning of August, it had been raining significant amounts every day.  In the taxi from the airport to my home, I saw at least 6 lot sized piles of wet, rotting trash, that the city had pulled out of the arroyos to unclog them and had left on the side of the road.

When problems are this complicated and a solution must be multifaceted where do you start?  How did the U.S government and non-profit organizations change American's mentalities to think that littering is wrong, bad, tasteless or irresponsible.  I am not arguing that all Americans don't liter but rather that American ideas about trash are much different than Colombians.  The result is that Americans are more likely to put their trash in an official trash can where they know it will be collected and stored by the city in the local landfill.  Besides making the city more porous there must be a public service and education campaign to change ideas on trash disposal.

Summer Reading Analysis and Kindle Citation Issues

I have finished most of my summer reading list and I am ready to merge the notes I made in my little book with a chicken on the cover (thus named my chicken book) and the highlights I made in my Kindle reader into something comprehensible.  However, I am clueless as how to cite the works I have read using my kindle.  This is what I found...

When Electricity is Expensive Use the Wind and Sun

The island of Taquile in Lake Titicaca was also surprising. We learned about the very traditional customs related to dress and salutations. You can spot the single people by the men´s hats and women´s shawl. Although these people have changed very little about their culture in hundreds of years, they have too started using solar panels, wind turbines and rain water harvesting. If they can do it, why can´t we?

One of the conclusions reached by Pearce in When the Rivers Run Dry was that simple things like rain water harvesting might be a key solution for places facing water crisis like Los Angeles. L.A could meet half of their water needs with rain water harvesting instead of buying water from hundreds of miles away. One home we saw on the island used sheet metal to create a gutter system, a sawed off coke bottle as a funnel and a garden hose to siphon water into a holding tank. It was so simple but very effective.

Floating Islands with Solar Panels

Uros is a group of floating islands just a few kilometers from Puno on Lake Titicaca (spelled titikaka in Spanish). We visited one, the floating heart, that is home to about 3 families. These islands have been maintained for thousands of years. When the Uros people were threatened by the expanding Inca empire, the began to hid in the reeds in their boats. Because the lake gets cold at night, the Uros people began building homes in their reed boats. Reeds rot rather quickly and this process is expedited when the reed boats sit in the water. However, rotting reeds create a kind of floating material. The Uros people began harvesting this material as they added more reeds to their boats. Eventually the shape of the boat changed into what are now floating islands.

The Uros people that live on the islands fish and hunt for their food. Women also travel to the mainland once a week to trade for potatoes, grains and other goods. Tourism and artisan crafts also help bring in money to the community. We were lucky enough to be invited into the home of one family on the island. Just like the boats and the island, the house is built of reeds. What was most surprising was walking into the house and finding a boom box and a television. The Uros people use reeds for most things, including food, but they have started using solar panels to run their modern technology.  Very cool!