World Without Water

Im linking this episode "World without Water" on my college forum that is discussing using up natural resources. I remember when this episode aired a couple of years ago and it stayed with me this long

learning to conserve natural resources is our biggest problem

hmm, so if we use up all the water for agriculture, destroy vegetation that keeps soil from shoring up rivers and pollute indiscriminately dumping our garbage in water sources... they actually dry up? Who could see that coming? Its not like in the last century we went from 1-2 billion to 6-7 billion and took on mass scale industrialized predatory resource exploitation as our main method is it?

I live in Brazil and we are a very peaceful country in general, i dread the day when the US comes for our water...

We are wasteful . This must change .

this is just the beginning of the recognition of a world wide crisis! pass it on!

Yeah there is so much water on our planet. We need to find way's of getting the water and converting it from sea water to fresh water. There are so many oceans and I am sure we have come pretty far in the future to know how to covert water RIGHT???

I love how retarded the title sounds considering like 71% of our planet's surface is covered in water.

For future reference add "Fresh" in the title. lol Good vid tho.

That host is sexy (Asian guy) and so is his voice

China is experiencing what the USA experienced during the turn of the last century and ecology? Who cares about ecology, certainly not big business?

Why wasn't California included in this report?. The central valleys are suffering

I've seen this one a few times and it never gets old. Excellent work, as per usual. Like "I heart global warming," I'm sharing this with some friends today.

As much as I love the reporting that Vangaurd does, I have to point out an error. When this episode aired on television, the Everglades report referred to “port” barrel spending, however, the correct term is “pork” barrel spending.

I thought this was a great topic, but I really would have liked to learn more about how to stop water shortages from happening. It's frustrating to just hear bad news and not be able to do anything to help solve the issue.

where is all that water going???
it has to be some kind of cycle...?

and that barkway, is the crux of the matter and the root cause of our water/food problems... selling out for huge profits on the stock market.... a public company is bound by law to create as big a profit margin as possible for its shareholders... why are our beautiful natural resources disappearing down the rabbit hole so quickly? because a bunch of people sitting behind their computers thinks its a great idea to make a huge profit on the basic and fundamental elements of life - food, water and shelter! you want to make a better world and one that has any beauty and resources left for future generations - stop investing in the stock market which works for the few, and only in the present time, and not the many....

If you're looking to buy and hold any investments for the next few decades that will eventually pay off HUGE....invest in companies related to water;supply, delivery, treatment,etc It won't be that long before water becomes a real commodity, and with some having access to better quality water than others based on income and connections.

Why didn't you ask the lady at Lake Okeechobee why they keep manually lowering the lake level, even when there's a drought BECAUSE the levees are in such bad shape, they fear a break?

And why is Gov Crist being allowed to make public statements with impunity begging more and more people to move here (because our economy depends on more fresh wallets) when it's the crush of development here that is ruining not just the Everglades but everything else too from education to infrastructure to traffic and more? I'll vote for the next Gubanatorial candidate that tries to slow or stop the influx of new residents and developments!

I am concerned because I know that Dean Kamen, inventor of the "Segway" personal transport, has developed a way to purify even the most contaminated water for drinking.

I also personally know another inventor who has a simple, inexpensive way of purifying water.

Both of them have expressed the frustration of presenting their technology to governments around the world but NO government is interested in purchasing and providing this equipment to their citizens.

Water for irrigation and other uses? Yeah, we've got problems everywhere. But if we can't serve the basic need of drinking water, we should be ashamed of ourselves.

Want to distill and purify your own drinking water? See http://solaqua.com. I have a rainmaker 550 and distill all my drinking and cooking water for free with the sun. You can buy theirs or the plans and supplies to build your own!

Damn port barrel spending.

great interview

Deforestation has been a major cause of multiple environmental problems worldwide. How can there still be people that still believe man has not played a significant role in climate change. If we continue at this rate not only will we be fighting for water but breathable air as well (or maybe just oxygen).

Every American should see this video ... even those evangelicals who gather around a dry lake in Georgia and pray for rain. What people do not understand is that global warming causes CLIMATE CHANGE which includes amount of rainfall, frequency of high energy weather events, and weather extremes. Even the FOX 49 arch conservative Rupert Murdoch who is from Australia (which is locked in unrelenting drought) now "believes" in global warming and speaks out against it. China is not the only country that is going to be negatively affected by water shortages.

This is a problem that will not go away soon due to over development of population centers, land waste and soil abuse, but most importantly the limited use of water restrictions where demand of this precious resource outweighs the amount of safe availability to rural and urban areas. In the United States we will see this as a major concern in the years to come because many states see water as their god given right to use as a unlimited resource. I know here in South and Central Texas we are already seeing a strain on the Edwards Aquifer that supplies this area with fresh water. Should be a wake up call for all nations of the world.

this is a great video

Try coming to Ireland, we were almost washed away yesterday no shortage of water in this neck of the woods

sorry but i live in miami and just visited the everglades... its full of water.

i think that this is something that could end up happening here in california

Great job Adam Yamaguchi and team. As always your videos fascinate me. I should show this to my dad to get his take on it, he has a double masters degree (got cheated out of a Ph.D and worked for the State Geological Survey team in Champaign Illinois (U.S). I'd be curious of his opinion, maybe I can convince him to write feedback to you.

Please keep up the good work.

There's no substitute for water. Soda, nope, Kool-Aid, hell no....

I always felt selling bottled water should be outlawed. It is a sign of things to come, unfortunately....

When one thinks about the number of people in Asia whose staple is rice, and about how much water is needed in rice paddies, the future looks extremely bleak.

Thanks for an excellent and most informative pod.

Crises like this far supercede any single government/ country/ political party in existence. There is no debating this, and no two ways to look at it.

Another crisis we HAVE to face now. At what point will it all become to overwhelming, beyond the point of repair? Lets not even think about it and fix it now while we still have the chance.

Excellent reporting!

very good piece. Its scary to see such huges ares that clearly used to have water and now are dry plots of land.

I've yet to find part two on the Florida Everglades online.
Can anyone be of assistance with a helpful link?
Thanks.

This was a great story.For all of us we can share stories of what things looked when growing up and how things have change through time. They are correct as there is no substitution for clean fresh water. The climate is changing and each day there are stories of drought and what the average person must do. Hopefully one day the people who have created the problems will follow the same rules as the average person must.

Okay first of all, I live in Florida so when i was watching and saw the full danger and severity of the drought it really scared me and pretty much convinved me to go out and buy a low-flow shower head. also, this story was really intresting and i think more people need to know about the water crisis so we can find ways to find a solution. . thank you vanguard . i just wish more people could see this.

Stand up! you know who you are....your bold journalism is appreciated.What ever you do...keep raising the bar.
Thank you!

I'm glad there are people out there doing something about this! But more people need to! Water is decreasing everywhere so please, people, be conscious of what you are wasting!

I don't think we will go to war over water. i just think it will become more expensive. If all of the surface and ground freshwater sources dry up, then there remains two alternatives. artificial desalinization, removing the salt from seawater to create fresh water, or cisterns, big tanks that are used to capture and store rain and snow runoff from the local area.

We could, of course, just stop global warming and avoid all of the trouble of desalinization and climate change in general.

cisterns are, however, a cheap and environmentally thing to use.

Thank you so much for creating and posting this video!
This is a wake up call to all people about the globe. Our current administration along with its corporate sponsors, seem to wish this upon us too! The Chinese people are trying to do a lot more than we realize - I know this because I was part of a team of delegates that was called upon to assist and created a mutually beneficial relationship to exchange ideas! The Western world also has some part in this tragic mess - want cheap products made with cheap labor? This is where many of our factories and jobs went to. As our mainstream media does to us, so it does to anything that is positive news - nixes it as not newsworthy - hence our collective ignorance on what good is being done there. No different than how other countries currently perceive Americans - and yet there are millions of people here that work diligently to "change the course" of destruction we are on trying to improve our world for future generations. One way to assist is to stop supporting corporations that have no care for the environment! Those junk piles we see in this video are our junk piles, and I'm not speaking of boats!

the nex world war will be over water not oil...

What about the airplane carriers and big cruise ships dumping waste in the oceans. Trash and human waste is thrown out every night. Talk about terrorism.

FIx = Make a Sea Water vehicle/car.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiKa4nOkHLw

PROMOTE THIS, MAKE IT HAPPEN!

Reality is that it will make Sea Water evaporate, creating rain therefore abundance of Fresh Water.

What are you waiting?

Water is the new gold. Only kindness - trust, friendship, sharing, care and consideration for others - will reduce the suffering.

I'm speechless.

I am thrilled to see the Chinese taking steps in the Green direction every little bit helps. I live in Colorado and I know how water scarcity works. My husband does landscaping and many clients of his out here are switching to xeriscapes in order to reduce the water needed for thier lawns. People in the mid-west don't realize this because the great lakes out there are just such a great resource. They are freshwater oceans. This is a great pod and you do great work.

How can you do a report on water scarcity in China without mentioning three gorge dam? I wonder which dam is shown here in the report, but my guess would be that the changing water tables in the dam shown in the report has been impacted by the three gorge mega-dam project.

There are many precedents of how large scale dam projects re-map the natural ecosystems of surrounding areas. Tennesse Valley Authority, Itaipu in brazil.

If anyone has seen the comedy Idiocracy or the Pixar movie Wall-E, those massive hills of trash should strike an eerie similarity to the huge piles of trash as signs of human stagnancy. It's obviously not the same as these extreme examples, but all of these are symbols of societal priorities only concerned with urban sprawl rather than long-term negative effects.

I can't thank you all enough for doing this! Rivers worldwide as well are shrinking as are the Great Lakes.This is truly a worldwide crisis and conservation is key as well as working to keep freshwater resources from corporatization while also bringing education regarding sustainable irrigation practices to developing areas of the world as 70% of all water used is wasted through irrigation.

Drought in Southern China now causes people to have to sell their sheep and livestock in order to get enough money to buy their water rations, and in Africa they cannot dig deep enough to get to water as their livestock dies as Lakes like Victoria and Chad are disappearing. Australia has all but said goodbye to the Murray-Darling River, and the Southwest US as well as Florida and other areas are also feeling the effects of persistant pervasive drought which now covers at least 40- 45 % of this planet touching all continents but Antarctica. And in the area of the Himalayas where millions depend on the quickly melting glaciers for their water, time is running out.

This is truly the moral environmental issue of this century. We can live without oil, but not without water. Thank you so much again for covering this crucial crisis. Mismanagement, waste, pollution, political upheaval, pritivitization, irrigation, overpopulation, climate change... all moral issues we must confront to save this planet and its water for future generations.