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Tag Archives: water

Water Woes, Rules, and Resistance

Today, another article in the New York Times remarkable series on the U.S. water supply. Charles Duhigg writes: “The 35-year-old federal law regulating tap water is so out of date that the water Americans drink can pose what scientists say are serious health risks — and still be legal. Only 91 contaminants are regulated by […]

Water: The Wake-Up Call Goes Unanswered

Last year, I wrote an article for Inc. magazine on entrepreneurs who are addressing some of the big issues around water supply, which for the sake of simplicity can really be boiled down to two: increasing scarcity and decreasing quality. Since then, I’ve blogged occasionally on the EPA’s extreme lethargy in acting on a long […]

Hogwash in Duplin County

It would take giant space robots with grappling hooks to pull me away from pork eating. As a matter of fact, I’m putting in my order now for a pasture-raised pig share from Farmer’s Table in Vergennes, VT. Making sure to order enough this year so that I won’t, in a moment of weakness, resort […]

Is Water a Basic Human Right?

Canadian water-rights activist Maude Barlow thinks so, and explains why in this editorial from the San Francisco Chronicle. Barlow also figures prominently in the eye-opening and infuriating documentary Flow, which was released last year and is now available on DVD. She was recently named to be senior adviser on water to the president of the […]

EPA Now Wants a Second Opinion on Perchlorate

As the AP reported earlier this week, the EPA has changed rather dramatically, announcing that it will not make a final determination on regulating perchlorate in drinking water until the National Academies of Science have had a chance to review the data. From the article: “The decision on perchlorate has been pending for years, as […]

Surprise! Bush’s EPA Ignores Good Science, Fails to Regulate

On January 1, Felicity Barringer reported in the New York Times that the EPA’s own inspector general has concluded that the agency failed to follow its own guidelines and made a basic error in evaluating how perchlorate, a rocket-fuel ingredient that has contaminated surface and groundwater supplies throughout the U.S., harms human health. Good studies […]

Fixing a Very Big Leak

I almost missed this pretty amazing article in the Sunday NY Times, buried (no pun intended) in the National/New York section of my New England edition. It describes, among other things, the work being done by a team of commercial deep-sea divers to repair and evaluate damage on a section of the Rondout-West Branch tunnel, […]

Blue Is the New Green

The November issue of Inc. magazine contains a long piece I wrote on U.S. entrepreneurs who are using innovative technologies to change the way we get, treat, use, and reuse fresh water. When things start to settle down after the election and we start muddling our way through — and eventually out of — this […]