Princeton Water Watch

water makes…

…world takes (and kids are cute)

This week, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times featured charity:water, an organization started by a self-proclaimed narcissist who woke up one morning and decided he wanted to “make a difference.” Kristof’s article, Clean, Sexy Water, features charity:water’s founder, Scott Harrison, who ventured to western Africa to photograph Mercy Works, a Christian aid group, and ultimately realized that what people really needed was basic, clean water. 

Mr. Harrison’s history is a truthful, inspiring story of how an average person can use his or her skills and motivationto make a charitable program successful. Take a look at his website and you’ll see what we mean. 

Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farm spoke today about the practicalities, as a business owner, of sustainability. At the end of the lecture, he mentioned the WWF  questioning of “How much water is [actually] in a latte?” Most people will say 12 oz, but the total water costs are much greater. 

Several Water Watch members have brought this up in group discussions about water conservation on campus, and how we should increase awareness of total production costs on campus

Ken Salazar, secretary of the interior, has revisited the mountaintop removal issues. The administration is calling the Bush administration’s legislation defective and, essentially, useless for protecting waterways from the devastation caused by mountaintop removal. 

As reported in the NY Times, “The so-called stream buffer zone rule simply doesn’t pass muster with respect to adequately protecting water quality and stream habitat that communities rely on in coal country,” Mr. Salazar said. 

NY Times Article

FRONTLINE Presents
POISONED WATERS
Tuesday, April 21, 2009, from 9 to 11 P.M. ET on PBS

More than three decades after the Clean Water Act, iconic American waterways like the Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound are in perilous condition and facing new sources of contamination.

With polluted runoff still flowing in from industry, agriculture and massive suburban development, scientists note that many new pollutants and toxins from modern everyday life are already being found in the drinking water of millions of people across the country and pose a threat to fish, wildlife and, potentially, human health.

In FRONTLINE’s Poisoned Waters, airing Tuesday, April 21, 2009, from 9 to 11 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hedrick Smith examines the growing hazards to human health and the ecosystem.

“Adding school water fountains, distributing water bottles in classrooms and teaching kids about the health benefits of water can lower a child’s risk for becoming overweight, a new study shows.”

-“School Water Fountains to Prevent Obesity”

New York Times Mar. 30, 2009

Students at schools in Germany were given water bottles that they could fill up at the beginning of each day. By the end of the year, students who attended schools that encouraged water drinking were 30 percent less likely to be overweight.

Activists cloaked in Colonial attire dumped bottled water from boats in the Boston Harbor to raise awareness of the wastefulness of bottled water. Their message was political: “When bottled water companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising to convince us that we can’t trust our tap water, they’re undermining the political will to maintain this crucial public resource.” 

You can check out the article at The Boston Globe. :

Similar protests were scene in Chicago in 2007 and were known as the Chicago Tea Party. Check out their video on You Tube.

In a false alarm that excited many environmentalists, the E.P.A. was thought to have frozen all (200 or so) permits surrounding mountaintop removal mining. Unfortunately, Lisa Jackson had simply sent out two letters of concern to the Army Corps of Engineers regarding the practice’s negative environmental impact. The Huffington Post reported the freeze, which was exchanged on listserves and by word of mouth, and would have been cause for celebration, had it not been quickly clarified.

For those of you who don’t know, mountaintop removal is a way of mining coal that does just that, chops a thousand feet off the top of the mountain and throws it in the river. This has serious, long-term impacts on the community and environment, from drastically harming the biodiversity of the waterways and mountain to millions of gallons of sludge that remain. Proponents of this method talk about the high-paying jobs and tax dollars it brings, which usually overpower voices of concern about the mine’s impact on the health of their town and the environment. 

Princeton University received a “D” on the Green Report Card for endowment transparency. There has been recent concern about workers rights at HEI Hotels and Resorts (not to mention Russell Athletics) and its link to mining operations has been questioned by some students. With so much support for creating a sustainable campus, we should make sure we don’t have any sludge on our hands.

For more information about the E.P.A.’s letters to the Army Corps of Engineers, visit:

www.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/science/earth/25mining.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=mountain%20top&st=cse

To see Princeton’s grade on the “Green Report Card”, visit:

www.greenreportcard.org/report-card-2009/schools/princeton-university

Here are two interesting articles from this week. The first is about corporate greening, the second about problems with water privatization in Chile. 
Saving Every Last Drop
http://www.greenbiz.com/feature/2009/03/16/saving-every-last-drop?page=0%2C0

Chilean Town Withers in Free Market for Water
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/world/americas/15chile.html?_r=1&hp