opportunity // Current TV

Water changes everything

When I started this blog several years ago these were the main areas of concern surrounding lack of access and potability of water in the world. And as with the climate crisis there have been many people out here talking about this and trying to educate people in doing what is necessary to provide this human right to all and warning of the consequences of not doing so. Unfortunately, though we have come some part of the way thanks to education, activism and the work of NGOs like Charity Water and others whose links I will also post here there is a long way to go.

As we are now seeing across the globe privitization is still trying to make more of a headway (even though we have seen initiatives in Germany, Italy and in the US in stopping this insidious move to control our global water supply) and moving to "commoditize" water in a market system sure to deprive the most poor of this basic human right even though it was declared so at the UN.

War is also playing a part. As a result of the tumultuous battles taking place in Libya the Great Manmade River Project started by Gaddafi (and this is not to be a political post so I will refrain from discussing opinions of him) which regardless of politics was and is an engineering marvel (I will post video on that here too) has been bombed and essentially shut down thereby cutting off water to more than half of Tripoli and other regions. Water is then still being used as a weapon of war which I find insidious regardless of who does it.

We are seeing as well increasing pollution levels in rivers, continued toxification of our oceans, acidification of our oceans, plastic garbage patches in our ocean's gyres that stretch for miles and on top of all of this, effects of a changing climate brought on by human activity that now threaten water supplies for billions of people worldwide and the systems that sustain our marinelife.

What are we to make of all of this? Are we finally reaching the point where more people will discover just how crucial water is to all of the systems that sustain us? If not, by the time critical mass is reached will it be beyond saving? For the next couple of weeks I will be writing and reporting on ways that we are affecting water and also ways we can save it. In the world we live in now water access has never been more of an urgent crisis.

That is why supporting organizations like Chartity Water are essential in working to provide equality, access and potability of water to the billions who now go without and that also includes adequate sanitation. It is unfathomable to believe that in the 21st century with all of the technological advances we have achieved that we still cannot provide basic sanitation and potable water for the people who live on this planet, even now as we explore other worlds. I say, let's take better care of the one we have now.

Please watch this video and look at the links to other organizations I will post here and reflect on what you can do to address this crisis locally and globally. Water is the one tie that binds us all. We cannot afford to lose it.

More at the link.When I started this blog several years ago these were the main areas of concern... more

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New NASA Mars mission

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Connect with activists in your town. Make a difference now!

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How Barefoot College is empowering women through peer to peer learning and technology

Sanjit "Bunker" Roy has found a better way to solve poverty: train women as engineers so they can transform their villages.

Early one morning in March 2010, Susanna Adelheid Huis left her home in the village of Uis Tsaurob in the central plateau of Namibia. Her family scratches a living as smallholders, here on the one per cent of her homeland that is forgiving enough to support subsistence agriculture. She took a last look at her house -- one of 12 in the settlement -- and thought of her husband, five children (the youngest of whom was four) and two grandchildren whom she wouldn't see for six months. She would miss the coming cool months, returning in September when it was beginning to get hot and dust would be thick in the air.

As Huis neared the capital, Windhoek, 300km away, she was already missing her family. But she was excited too: "It was the first time I ever flew," the 49-year-old with a ready smile later recalls. Her trip would take her through another three airports -- Johannesburg, Delhi and Jaipur. She was embarking on an adventure she hadn't been entirely convinced about when the idea had been put to her several months before by a tall, distinguished-looking Indian man who had shown up in Uis Tsaurob one day. He had travelled 8,000km with a proposal for the local people: would they like to send some women from the village to his college in India to study for six months? But why, they had asked, should they travel so far? What would they learn there?

The man replied that he would like to teach them to be engineers. The villagers talked among themselves and eventually decided that they would send three women.

One of them was Huis. The tall Indian man was Sanjit "Bunker" Roy, a social activist, educator and the founder of Barefoot College, an organisation based in Tilonia -- a small village two hours' drive west of Jaipur through the arid farmland of Rajasthan -- that aims to help the estimated 41 per cent of the Indian population who live below the international poverty line. Roy's model -- educating local people through peer-to-peer learning -- is transformational in that it relies on the passing on of traditional skills and knowledge rather than an emphasis on outside educators bringing new ideas and influences. Local people are trained as doctors, teachers, engineers, architects, designers, mechanics, communicators and accountants and they use simple technology in innovative and disruptive ways: mobile phones are set to work monitoring water quality through an online dataset, solar-powered cookers are constructed to break dependence on wood or costly kerosene. Some lessons at the college are recorded and uploaded to the internet. There is no hierarchy: everyone eats sitting on the floor and no one receives a salary of more than $150 per month. Importantly, there is financial transparency. Staff bank accounts are published, as are company finances.

"The model has taken into account the pace at which people think, the culture, which is respected, and the capacity -- the infinite capacity -- of the community to adjust to, apply and to disseminate ideas," says Roy, 65, in a calm baritone as he sits cross-legged on a rug beneath a rotating fan in his simple office on the Barefoot campus. He wears a loose red shirt, or kurta, with white pyjama bottoms. His glasses hang from a chain around his neck. "That's what scalability is all about. It's a model that people understand, it's not complicated. It respects the skills that people have rather than discarding them or replacing them."

Roy has disrupted the model that many NGOs and well-endowed foundations promote in the developing world, namely a top-down approach led by outside, often governmental, institutions. Critics argue that this methodology doesn't offer long-term sustainable growth and isn't scalable. Roy is among them.

"You have a graveyard of successful failures everywhere in the world with this top-down solution that has not worked. With foreign expertise... they don't know the culture and they don't know what's happening in the countries." His voice intensifies. "There is a growing anger We have to look for alternatives. It has to be bottom-up, it has to be indigenous, it has to develop solutions from the ground up, and it has to be both community based and community managed."

There are now 24 colleges inspired by the Barefoot model in India. Since 2004, Roy has brought women from 15 African nations as well as Bhutan, Afghanistan and Bolivia to train at the camp as solar engineers. He hopes soon to bring women from Palestine. The college says it has trained 15,000 women in skills including solar engineering, healthcare, water testing and social activism, and that as a result, around 500,000 people have been provided with basic services such as healthcare, drinking water and education. On the Barefoot campus you can meet women who, only six months earlier, were day labourers and are now practising dentistry, women who formed a collective to manufacture solar ovens, illiterate farmers now overseeing engineering projects, and girls who attend Barefoot night school because they work in the fields during the day when state schools are open. Roy estimates that, in India, the Barefoot solar-electrification programme saves two million litres of kerosene every year.

contSanjit "Bunker" Roy has found a better way to solve poverty: train women as... more

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Solar power for the poor: facts and figures

Increasing access to energy is critical to ensuring socioeconomic development in the world's poorest countries.

An estimated 1.5 billion people in developing countries have no access to electricity, with more than 80 per cent of these living in sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia. [1]

The problem is most acute in remote areas: 89 per cent of people in rural sub-Saharan Africa live without electricity, which is more than twice the proportion (46 per cent) in urban areas. [1]

For these people, even access to a small amount of electricity could lead to life-saving improvements in agricultural productivity, health, education, communications and access to clean water.

Options for expanding access to electricity in developing countries tend to focus on increasing centralised energy from fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal, by expanding grid electricity. But this approach has little benefit for the rural poor. Grid extension in these areas is either impractical or too expensive.

Neither does this strategy help tackle climate change. Power already accounts for 26 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and while most of this comes from the developed world, by 2030 developing countries are predicted to use 70 per cent more total annual energy than developed nations.[2]

There is therefore a clear need for pro-poor, low-carbon ways to improve access to electricity in the developing world — solar power could be one such solution.

Place in the sun

The Earth receives more solar energy in one hour than the world population consumes in an entire year.

Almost all developing countries have enormous solar power potential — most of Africa, for example, has around 325 days of strong sunlight a year, delivering, on average, more than 6 kWh energy per square metre a day (see Figure 1).

The Desertec Foundation, a joint German and Jordanian company, estimates that covering just one per cent of global deserts in solar panels could power the whole world. [3]

continued at link:
By David J. Grimshaw and Sian LewisIncreasing access to energy is critical to ensuring socioeconomic development in the... more

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The Mayan prophecy of 2012: we have a choice

There is much being said about December 21, 2012 as the time when the world will end. I do not agree with this summation. I choose to believe it will be a time of great change bringing us to a new age. An age when materialism and the years we lost our way in our relationship with the natural world will give way to a more natural life. A time when we use the wisdom of those that came before us with the science of today to bring forth an age when humanity returns to its roots. As we see now events worldwide are leading up to that change. And it was not only the Mayans who foretold of these impending catastrophes leading up to a new awakening.

Nostradamus wrote many quatrains about what he envisioned for humans in these times. Regardless of what you may or may not believe about him or his predictions, for me they hold this warning as do the Mayan predictions: we as a civilization are now at a crossroads in a transformational period of consciousness. We are at the road that forks in two directions. We have two choices. We either can continue on the path we are on and face self destruction of our civilization as so many before us that did not heed the signs; or we heed the past, make preparations, change our ways, and see that new age of reformation.

Nothing about the future is written in stone. We as humans have always had a choice in our destiny. It is the choices we have made that have brought us to this point. I believe the years now leading up to 2012 will be ones of great turmoil and perhaps even darkness but how we take that, learn from it, and prepare for the future will determine either our ascension into saving ourselves, or our descension into the abyss. This is a unique time to live in and we are now the defining generation of a new age.

And while we cannot control natural occurences, we can limit our impact on this planet in order to help maintain its balance. Respect for this planet has never been more needed than it is now. It is that respect or lack of it that will ultimately decide our fate.

So what do you believe? Doomsday coming, or a chance to redeem mankind? The choice is ours.There is much being said about December 21, 2012 as the time when the world will end.... more

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Prenatal Immigration

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