Water has no taste, no color, no odor; it cannot be defined, art relished while ever mysterious.
Not necessary to life, but rather life itself. It fills us with a gratification that exceeds the delight of the senses.
Water is a ubiquitous chemical substance that is composed of hydrogen and oxygen and is vital for all known forms of life. In typical usage, water refers only to its liquid form or state, but the substance also has a solid state, ice, and a gaseous state, water vapor or steam. Water covers 71% of the Earth’s surface . On Earth, it is found mostly in oceans and other large water bodies, with 1.6% of water below ground in aquifers and 0.001% in the air as vapor, clouds (formed of solid and liquid water particles suspended in air), and precipitation. Oceans hold 97% of surface water, glaciers and polar ice caps 2.4%, and other land surface water such as rivers, lakes and ponds 0.6%. A very small amount of the Earth’s water is contained within biological bodies and manufactured products. Water on Earth moves continually through a cycle of evaporation or transpiration (evapotranspiration), precipitation, and runoff, usually reaching the sea. Over land, evaporation and transpiration contribute to the precipitation over land. Clean, fresh drinking water is essential to human and other lifeforms. Access to safe drinking water has improved steadily and substantially over the last decades in almost every part of the world. There is a clear correlation between access to safe water and GDP per capita. However, some observers have estimated that by 2025 more than half of the world population will be facing water-based vulnerability.
A recent report (November 2009)suggests that by 2030, in some developing regions of the world, water demand will exceed supply by 50%.Water plays an important role in the world economy, as it functions as a solvent for a wide variety of chemical substances and facilitates industrial cooling and transportation. Approximately 70% of freshwater is consumed by agriculture.
Human uses Agriculture -Irrigation of field crops
The most important use of water in agriculture is for irrigation, which is a key component to produce enough food. Irrigation takes up to 90% of water withdrawn in some developing countriesand significant proportions in more economically developed countries (United States, 30% of freshwater usage is for irrigation).
Water fit for human consumption is called drinking water or potable water. Water that is not potable can be made potable by filtration or distillation (heating it until it becomes water vapor, and then capturing the vapor without any of the impurities it leaves behind), or by other methods (chemical or heat treatment that kills bacteria). Sometimes the term safe water is applied to potable water of a lower quality threshold (i.e., it is used effectively for nutrition in humans that have weak access to water cleaning processes, and does more good than harm). Water that is not fit for drinking but is not harmful for humans when used for swimming or bathing is called by various names other than potable or drinking water, and is sometimes called safe water, or “safe for bathing”. Chlorine is a skin and mucous membrane irritant that is used to make water safe for bathing or drinking. Its use is highly technical and is usually monitored by government regulations (typically 1 part per million (ppm) for drinking water, and 1–2 ppm of chlorine not yet reacted with impurities for bathing water).
This natural resource is becoming scarcer in certain places, and its availability is a major social and economic concern. Currently, about a billion people around the world routinely drink unhealthy water. Most countries accepted the goal of halving by 2015 the number of people worldwide who do not have access to safe water and sanitation during the2003 G8 Evian summit.Even if this difficult goal is met, it will still leave more than an estimated half a billion people without access to safe drinking water and over a billion without access to adequate sanitation. Poor water quality and bad sanitation are deadly; some five million deaths a year are caused by polluted drinking water. The World Health Organization estimates that safe water could prevent 1.4 million child deaths from diarrhea each year.Water, however, is not a finite resource, but rather re-circulated as potable water in precipitation in quantities many degrees of magnitude higher than human consumption. Therefore, it is the relatively small quantity of water in reserve in the earth (about 1% of our drinking water supply, which is replenished in aquifers around every 1 to 10 years), that is a non-renewable resource, and it is, rather, the distribution of potable and irrigation water which is scarce, rather than the actual amount of it that exists on the earth. Water-poor countries use importation of goods as the primary method of importing water (to leave enough for local human consumption), since the manufacturing process uses around 10 to 100 times products’ masses in water.
In the developing world, 90% of all wastewater still goes untreated into local rivers and streams.Some 50 countries, with roughly a third of the world’s population, also suffer from medium or high water stress, and 17 of these extract more water annually than is recharged through their natural water cycles.The strain not only affects surface freshwater bodies like rivers and lakes, but it also degrades groundwater resources.
Your typical human is 66% water and could survive roughly a month without food—but only a week without water.
Meanwhile, UNICEF tells us that one in seven of the world’s children have no access to safe water. It’s not a shortage; there is the same amount of water on Earth today as there was 3 billion years ago. To help quench your thirst for more water knowledge, we took a sip at Planet Green’s “How to Go Green: Water.”
Top Tips for Greening Your Water
Get Out Your Wrench: Did you know that a dripping faucet can waste 20 gallons of water a day and a leaking toilet can use 90,000 gallons of water in a month? Here’s an easy way to apply your DIY skills: maintain all the faucets, etc. in your home.
Roll Out the Barrel: .By installing a couple of rain barrels, you can collect chemical-free rainwater for uses like watering your plants or garden This leaves you needing less tap water for your personal use and thus, less energy required all around.
Say No to Bottles:Americans buy 30 billion single-use water bottles every year with 845 bottles ending up in landfills every second. These water bottles are made from petroleum, and require petroleum to be shipped. If you were to visualize a water bottle one-quarter full with oil, you’d have an idea how much oil was needed to produce the bottle. Seek alternatives.
Did You Know?
The amount of water per person used by the average American citizen is 400 gallons
The amount of money required to provide basic levels of service for drinking and waste water in Africa and Asia is $11.3 billion
The amount of money spent on bottled water in the most developed countries in the world is $35 billion
Universal Pictures sent over a new batch of images for their upcoming horror feature “The Wolf Man”, which howls in theaters February 10, 2010. Check them out below. Inspired by the classic Universal film that launched a legacy of horror, The Wolfman brings the myth of a cursed man back to…
A few days ago Variety reported (you kind of have to mine for it in the article) that veteran editors Mark Goldblatt and Walter Murch were being brought in to recut The Wolfman, even though the release date is only a few months away, on February 12, 2010.
At least that’s the assertion of Eric Yaverbaum, of Tappening, an anti-bottled water enterprise, as outlined in an interview with the excellent Wend magazine: “And if you don’t buy my environmental argument, buy my financial one… financially speaking if you drink 8 glasses a day you will spend $1400 a year buying bottled water. If you drink 8 glasses a day and you get it from your tap you’ll spend 49 cents. This would be a really good year to save your $1400 on a product that not only hurts the environment but it hurts your pocketbook.”
The interviews is peppered with comments that have been expressed many a time on these pages. Like “Go to India, you name the 3rd world country and Look what they need to do to get drinking water and we get it for free in our homes and our apartments and we still buy bottled water, that’s crazy.” And they have the statistics to show just how loony the whole bottled water industry is.
Tappening is a project of Eric Yaverbaum, whose daytime business is the public relations firm, Ericho Communications, and DiMassimo Goldstein, whose company, DIGO, specialises in being ‘brand advocates.’ As you might expect from such backgrounds the guys are rather adept with putting a convincing story together. In this case it is one that TreeHugger has long been vocal on.
And we’re rather impressed with the research Tappening has gathered to add weight to their message. (Although the stats do overlap into the soft drink market also.) Apparently Americans buy 28 billion water bottles annually, which, if we read correctly, uses the equal of 17 million barrels of oil, sufficient to fuel 1 million cars for 12 months worth of driving. With only 23% of discarded PET bottles recycled it costs American cities about $70 million to clean up the discarded bottles yearly.
On the other side of the ledger, most municipal tap water has to be tested for E.coli, fecal coliform bacteria, Cryptosporidium and/or Giardia, whereas the much vaunted bottled water does not. Yet bottled water can “cost as much as $10 per gallon compared to less than a penny per gallon for tap waters.”
As Eric Yaverbaum puts it in the Wend Interview, “Why are we just sitting around to do nothing, waiting for the next generation to rescue us? It’s my generation, I believe, that should be seriously investing itself in that process if we care at all what this planet is like after we’re going.”
Now admittedly, as Brian pointed out when we were first mentioned Tappening, the guys are also selling their own water bottles, albeit theirs are durable and resuable BPA-free plastic and stainless steel versions. But, even with nearly 6 million page views on their website, we doubt the guys got into this gig to sell a few water bottles. Their message does seem genuine.
And may we paraphrase that message thus: Stop buying bottle water, it’s messing with the environment through unwarranted materials extraction and wastage, as well as contributing to climate change. Not only are glaciers shrinking, but so are the volume of readies in your wallet or purse.
Challenges in the definition of child traffickingThere is a tendency for the trafficking debate, and related understanding of the phenomenon, to gravitate into a criminal approach on the one hand, and a human rights or protection approach on the other hand. This creates a false impression of opposing perspectives when, in reality, both dimensions are inherently linked and are essential to prevent and combat trafficking.
Despite its importance in any approach to the trafficking problem, there is no one single definition of exploitation and there is difficulty in determining the point at which exploitation begins
The Palermo definition is not limited to cross-border trafficking between neighboring States and can be applied to both internal and intercontinental trafficking
There are potential links between trafficking and migration. When people move from place to place – at local, national or international levels – they are likely to become more vulnerable particularly at times of political crisis or in the face of social or economic pressures. Whether driven by desperate situations, or motivated to seek better life opportunities, they may willingly consent to being smuggled across a border. Once transported across the border they may find themselves abducted into a trafficking network, unable to escape and without access to legal advice or protection.
There are two urban myths about leprosy that are both false: The first is that leprosy is incurable. In the last fifty years leprosy has gone from a communicable disease confined to leprosy colonies, to a completely curable disease through Multi Drug Therapy (MDT). The World Health Organization (WHO) provides this to any country that is working to eliminate leprosy. If leprosy is caught in an early enough stage it can be cured, however any nerve or tissue damage cannot re-grow.
The second urban myth about leprosy is that it is extremely contagious. In truth most people are naturally immune to it, and it is estimated that 90% of the world’s population is totally immune to leprosy. For those who are susceptible, close contact to an infected person is not recommended. However, becoming infected does not happen easily as most people expect.
Each year on the last Sunday in January World Leprosy Day is observed by the organisations involved in leprosy.It is estimated that there are between one and two million people visibly and irreversibly disabled due to past …
Year 2007, in that year there were 254,525 new leprosy cases,with 212,802 people already been treated for it.
Leprosy can be easily treated with a 6–12-month course of multidrug therapy. The treatment is highly effective, and has few side-effects and low relapse rates; there is no known drug resistance.
According to official reports received during 2008 from 118 countries and territories, the global registered prevalence of leprosy at the beginning of 2008 stood at 212,802 cases, while the number of new cases detected during 2007 was 254,525 (excluding the small number of cases in Europe).
The number of new cases detected globally has fallen by 11,100 cases (a 4% decrease) during 2007 compared with 2006.
Our vision is a world in which the poorest and most marginalisedhave access to health and an improved quality of life.
In the wake of the devastation following the 7.0 earthquake on January 12, 2010, the world expresses our deepest solidarity with African people in Haiti.
With at least 50o,000 dead, hundreds of thousands injured and more than 3.5 million homeless, the conditions on the island have been described as unimaginable. With relief efforts moving slowly and the threat of mass starvation mounting, U.S. military occupation forces are being sent in, raising the specter of the brutal treatment of African people in New Orleans following the 2005 Hurricane Katrina.
U.S. president Barack Obama has promised a massive U.S. relief effort with a pledge of $100 million to be sent to Haiti as an outpouring of support comes in from throughout the U.S. and around the world. All major media sources have sent reporters to the country’s capital, Port-au-Prince.
We unite with the efforts to send massive resources into Haiti as quickly as possible.
But the disaster hit Haiti 200 years ago and its problem is the colonial devastation that has long subjected this proud and once independent and prosperous African-led country to live on a diet of mud pies and dwell in tin shanty towns.
The American Red Cross is a humanitarian organization, led by volunteers, that provides relief to victims of disaster and helps people prevent, prepare for and respond to emergencies. It does this through services that are consistent with the congressional charter and the fundamental principles of the International Red Cross and the Red Crescent Movement.
For the last several years my family has supported and corresponded regularly with a young boy (now almost a young man) named Dalinksy through Compassion International. If you’re not familiar with Compassion’s sponsorship program, I can’t encourage you too strongly to begin today supporting a child somewhere.
Dalinsky, who’s become dear to my whole family, lives in Haiti, which as the whole world now knows was devastated by an earthquake yesterday. At the moment, we have no idea whether or not he’s safe.
I know I should always be moved by the plight of all those who are suffering everywhere, but I have to admit that I often don’t even think about the kind of suffering and deprivation millions of people in the world experience every day. Having someone in Haiti who’s almost like a member of the family makes the tragedy there seem so much more personal. On one hand, I recognize that probably exposes a serious deficiency in my concern for others; on the other hand, it may be a good reason for me (and perhaps you) to make a significant personal investment in the life of a needy child somewhere.
There are many heart-breaking stories coming out of the region now. I read one report earlier today about a family who was in the process of adopting from Haiti. They had already met the child and were going to leave this week to get her; instead, they just found out that she was killed in the earthquake.
1)Digging for survivors in Haiti
Rescue crews and ordinary Haitians work to save those trapped in the quake rubble. CNN’s Ivan Watson reports.
2)Update: pulled from the rubble
An 11-year-old girl rescued after a day-long effort dies from her injuries. Ivan Watson has been following the story.
3)Haitians sing, chant, march
Amidst the destruction and devastation, Haitians come together for a peaceful march.
4)Demonstration in Haiti
Hundreds of earthquake survivors march through the streets of Port-au-Prince.
1)Baby found alive After 68 hours from an outbreak of the Haiti Earthquake under the rubble a baby girl is pulled out alive.
2)Baby’s rescuer speaks CNN’s Anderson Cooper talks with Deiby Celestino who helped rescue a baby that was trapped in rubble.
In severe condition people are heaping up the hope gradually but surely.
1)Desperation in Haiti
Desperation for food and water is growing in Haiti. CNN’s Anderson Cooper reports.
2)Injured boy helped from scene
A boy is injured during looting in Haiti’s streets. A CNN crew with Anderson Cooper was nearby as it unfolded.
3) Dr. Gupta lends a hand CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta discusses the surgery he lead on a 12-year-old Haitian girl.
4)Haiti mom’s miracle ITN’s Geraint Vincent reports on a little girl being reunited with her mom after she’s pulled from her school’s rubble.
The American Red Cross
The American Red Cross is a humanitarian organization led by volunteers to provide relief to victims of disaster and help people prevent, prepare for, and respond to emergencies.
On January 12, 2010, a massive earthquake struck the nation of Haiti, causing catastrophic damage inside and around the capital city of Port-au-Prince. President Obama has promised the people of Haiti that “you will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten.” The United States Government has mobilized resources and manpower to aid in the relief effort. Here are some ways that you can get involved.
The Federal Response
Check out the links below to find out how each federal department and agency is responding to the earthquake in Haiti.
With Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Joanna Going. The story centers around a family with … about The Tree of Life (2010)
Tree of Life is a period piece centered around three boys in the 1950s. The eldest son (Hunter McCracken none SAG) of two characters (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) witnesses the loss of innocence.
We trace the evolution of an eleven-year-old boy in the Midwest, Jack, one of three brothers. At first all seems marvelous to the child. He sees as his mother does, with the eyes of his soul. She represents the way of love and mercy, where the father tries to teach his son the world’s way, of putting oneself first. Each parent contends for his allegiance, and Jack must reconcile their claims. The picture darkens as he has his first glimpses of sickness, suffering and death. The world, once a thing of glory, becomes a labyrinth.
Framing this story is that of adult Jack, a lost soul in a modern world, seeking to discover amid the changing scenes of time that which does not change: the eternal scheme of which we are a part. When he sees all that has gone into our world’s preparation, each thing appears a miracle precious, incomparable. Jack, with his new understanding, is able to forgive his father and take his first steps on the path of life.
The story ends in hope, acknowledging the beauty and joy in all things, in the everyday and above all in the family , our first school, the only place that most of us learn the truth about the world and ourselves, or discover life’s single most important lesson.
From The New World released four years ago, we looked forward to the new Terrence Malick film, Tree of Life.
Good news finally arrived on the project to the output constantly rejected: it should be presented in preview at the 63rd Cannes Film Festival, which runs from May 12 to 23, 2010. If selected, Tree of Life will undoubtedly be one of the highlights of the festival in 2010. With a premium cast (Brad Pitt, Sean Penn …), the film tells the story of humankind from prehistory to the First World War, following various characters in search of the “Tree of life, supposed to give immortality, fertility and many other fantastic powers …
Scenes of November 27, 2008:
The Tree of Life Film | Movies Shot in Utah | Goblin Valley State Park Films
Sean Penn Film | Brad Pitt Film | Terrence Malick Film | Utah Desert
A scene from the Terrence Malick film “The Tree of Life” has been filmed in Utah’s scenic Goblin Valley State Park. Those near the area said they expected Sean Penn to perform in the scene.
Brad Pitt is also reportedly affiliated with the film, but he was not expected to participate in the Goblin Valley scene. According to the film’s entry in Wikipedia, Colin Farrell and Heath Ledger had been involved in casting discussions early in the process, but those actors apparently are not involved with the film.
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