Another excellent piece by the Tyee, my first choice in news. What is really disturbing is how articles like these should be printed in the Vancouver Sun, like news used to be printed. Not a single reporter from Canada's giant meda companies attended this conference. Think how many other events we are not being informed of. Great work Chris.

Think I posted a link here two weeks ago about Britain instituting water use restrictions in response to the continuing shortage there. Last week there was another story in the NYTimes about the retreating ice fields in the Arctic.
And 'our' new Government muzzles 'our' representatives at a conference in Mexico. Why am I not surprised? The same mentality is at work in Ottawa.

Enjoying your first taste of democracy Peewee Rambo style?

Lest we think it is only our trees and minerals that are under threat of falling under US Empire control and shipment south, to feed their great open maw. Nah, whilest Canadians "somnambulate" :-), or proceed about preoccupied with their individually daily focussed pursuits of food, shelter and autos, and paying the US "stolen" tarrifs in the so-called North American Free trade world, for our own softwood lumber, and who can forget those "enterprisers" amongst us preoccupied with the pursuit of their personal "wealth" ambitions, The Empire has designs upon and is moving in on control of our water resources as well. Just as a demonstration how in one's necessary focus on immediate pressing needs, where there is no attention paid to peripheral vision indicators at all, the "big picture" can suddenly close in and bite you AND your individual, and day to day interests, on the ass.

It's a particular place we are in now with our fellow Canadians, trying to get them to see the importance of this issue, along with the other issues of the nations sovereignty and control over its own house, including water and the other great sustaining natural resources within our territory. We are generally, as a state and nation, so preoccupied on the moment of monetary exchange of resources for cash, and with the visions of personal sugar plum wealth dancing in our heads that flow from that, we can't hear the alarm bells sounding even, let even see where and at what The Empire is further looking.

We are still caught ourselves, as bit players, in chasing the dreams of the US Empire.

I believe it was former President Johnson of the US who first predicted, that I am aware of, that future wars in North America could well be fought over water. The presumption from that being, I guess, that we will one day run out of water and have to invade the US for it. :-)

The simple fact is, the US Empire is an economically bloated, overdeveloped and over-populated entity. It is no longer able, at least without powerful resisting pressure coming from outside its own borders, to sustain itself or its current capitalist "endless growth and get rich quick" mission statement, on the basis of its own resources. It has to, and will more so in the future, given current assumptions which need to be made by us, have to be able to access, beg, borrow or steal the rest of the worlds resources. That's what it is really about in the Middle East currently, behind the smokescreen of fighting terror and advancing democracy, and it is what our own current unequal economic, political and military relationship with them is all about.

We need to smarten up and toughen up fast and big time, otherwise suffer the fate of the lamb that mistakenly thinks it can for long lie with the lion.

When what we should really be doing, for starters, is seizing US "assets" in this country, making "public" those great resource sector interests, to recover the "illegal tarrifs" they have been stealing from us as part of the soft wood lumber issue.

But then, if we proceed down that road, as I suggest we are going to have to sooner rather than later, if our intention really is going to be to maintain Canada as a sovereign and independent entity, we might soon start to wish we had those Canadian troops home here, instead of running about and getting killed for the Amerikans in the hills of the countryside around Kabul.

Over 50 years ago, Australia-bound by ship, I recall stopping at Aden - an area of desert and salt water, where the vessel, and others at this busy seaport, took on de-salinated water.

Los Angeles and much of Nevada have had fresh water problems for decades - as shown in the movie Chinatown.

If the U.S. were to give greater priority to producing potable water than to sending its citizens to distant lands to kill people, its own citizens, too, would benefit.

And if one is helping to provide fresh water to dry impoverished areas of the world, I believe it reduces the possibility of its citizens committing voilent acts against the donor nations.

The vast majority of water, today, is not used for legitimate human "consumption", but for automated "economic competition". Not to mention billions of city toilet flushings every day. 1/2 litre of urine washed down with 6 or 13 litres of water.

Some electronic gadgets use hundreds of litres of water to produce. Export based economies, like China, are not really exporting products, but the water it takes to produce them.

Do politicians ever think of this in their economist induced false euphoria to be more "competitive" ?

As far BC is concerned, we're surrounded by lakes, but our water table is sinking. We have grave domestic water shortages here in the Cariboo, with wells dropping and drying up, including ours.

Now, do our clever politicians and economists ever think of what environmental changes the vast diversions of Canadian waters may bring?

They already gave us global warming and dozens of deadly poisons in our blood, cancer and other epidemics in their search for "competitiveness". What else can we accept and give to be more "competitive"?

Ed Deak, Big Lake.

The advent of bottled water as a status symbol in Canada is also troubling. With all our free, potable water, Canadians are increasingly purchasing bottled water, water with much higher processing, packaging and delivery cost. More evidence of our water-bourne conciet. Check out this related article in the Georiga Straight ...
http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=16593.

Great article. Canadians need to become literate on this debate.

Gursk: Yes, bottled water as status symbol is a peculiar development for North Americans. The French got a head start on us (Perrier water having long been the iconic symbol of the Leisure Class). Comedienne Sandra Bernhard has called our new fixation with sucking on designer-label bottled water a "plastic titty obsession." She might be right. But what sublimated anxiety might it putatively be soothing I wonder...?

This is not really a matter of competition. At least not in the economic sense. This is a matter of survival. Water must always be seen so, since the lack of water will kill faster than any other lack besides air.

That's what makes it such a vortex of conflict. The fact that it's a vortex of life and death. It's also why it's so easily politicized.

The only way to avoid this conflict is to solve the shortages. No economic strategy will do that. No dog-in-the-manger hoarding will stop those dying of thirst from coming for water.

We have a great deal of technology that can help. It isn't economically profitable nor likely to become so.

But it is possible. We still have sufficient resources in terms of industrial and manpower capacity to at least begin. When the last couple of disasters hit around the world what we sent was our water purification plant. That was well thought of whatever logistical problems we had.

Why could we not offer these plants to those poor places suffering in the article above? We already offer less useful kinds of aid, don't we? We could offer other things as well. We're quite good at pipelines and drilling and such.

Wouldn't it be sensible to offer the aid necessary to prevent catastrophe for a change, rather than waiting for the catastrophe to hit and render the aid too little, too late?

Bailey, there's no cheap & efficient way to de-salinate large quantities of seawater. Otherwise global fresh water scarcity wouldn't be the problem it is today.

I know. There's no money in it now.

But things become more cheap and efficient the larger the effort made to make them so. Maybe that would happen.

At any rate, what alternative could prevent this obvious coming catastrophe?

...people just love their Evian water - but you notice what is says spelled backwards?

Now that greedy china has polluted all of it's water how long til they come here to steal ours?
And you can bet that gordo will be right there to sign the papers.

Bailey, selling catastophe is the oldest game around, and the best way to fuel mass movements. Historically, it's been used to sell everything from Communion wafers to anti-bacterial soap (the latter is immanently more useless). Activists, politicians, university professors and medical researchers all have their scenarios, be it flu pandemic, global tsunamis or unidentified pernicious species-crossing viruses. The threat of judgement & perdition just doesn't do it anymore. Ironically, the only people today now reassuring us that an Apocalypse is not in fact imminent are wearing Roman collars.

Evian is an interesting label, and is a nod to the roots of the phenomenon. You've heard the expression "To take the waters at Evian." The waters of this resort town were reputed to have miraculous healing powers. The spas at Evian have been a tourist destination going right back to Roman times. [sorry for the Trivial Pursuit digression...I couldn't resist].

You're right about catastrophes, nightbloom. Screaming about the sky falling is no more sensible than playing Dr Pangloss. On the other hand, I do think we're in a bit of a tight spot when it comes to water and the environment and we have to start finding ways to change our ways, so to speak. The old mantra that since we apparently have 20% of the world’s fresh water we don’t need to think of that as anything other than an opportunity to make a lot of fast cash sounds pretty off key these days. Does anyone remember Robert Bourassa’s great project of a Grand Canal running from James Bay to the Great Lakes? [speaking of Trivial Pursuit questions.]

Selling catastrophe.

Of course you're right but don't confuse the event with the spin. People are dying. More are likely to in the future.

So far the only thing keeping them from showing up here is that they tend to be poor and weak from hunger. That will not always be true , if predictions about global water supplies come true.

Some interesting notions and solutions, no doubt, but dare I say that the root cause is really in the never ending economic growth, endless population explosion, Holy Roman and Catholic view of the universe that the problem with water and all the other natural systems are rooted. This endless growth in all dimensions view of "God's Plan" has to be rethunk by minds rooted in 2000 year old ideological thinking.

While innovative high tech solutions may indeed help some over the short run, in the end the solution lies in population levels and an economic system matched to the real carrying capacity of the planet and its resources. Along with the de-salination units we may want to export, for example, we just may want to make more widely and freely available other "technological" marvels such as birth control pills and other such solutions and devices, along with encouraging and facilitating safe abortion on demand for women who wish it everywhere.

Leave the solution re this aspect to women instead of priests and other males, and we may actually make some progress on all these fronts.

And I'm not just talking about Africa or other third world areas of the worl, but ourselves and especially the Christofascist dominated USA.

Just a thought to ponder as well. Time to get back to open space, a clean sky and air to breathe, water fit enough to drink right out of a stream, and a better balance of flora to fauna. Oh, and a more balanced relationship between population levels, economic activity, and the actual supporting capacity of the land base.

Now that's reality for you, I suggest.

Wow. Coyote. I love the way you think. And you're very right about the role women could and probably would play if they were allowed to choose rationally how their lives would go.

I just wonder how much time that would take? A generation is what? Twenty years or so? So by the time the women who are liberated today produce fewer daughters and they grow to produce fewer daughters, forty years have passed and the weight of us all is still on the planet.

What worries me is the consequences that weight will have. All the charts and theories predict a big die-off of humans as we exceed the carrying capacity of our pastures. Jane Jacobs thinks a big die-off might lead to a dark age in which we could lose all memory of our culture, it's good and bad bits. Even the memory that we had a culture might be lost forever.

We should of course do as you say, pursue that change that will create stable solutions in the medium and long term. But meantime we really ought to try setting our hands to whatever we can to feed the hungry, educate the ignorant and water the thirsty earth. Make medicine available. Whatever.

Forty years is a long time. It took less than ten to get to the moon. In five years of building liberty ships they doubled the existing tonnage of shipping in the world. Even if they did then blow most of it up, it's pretty impressive. We can do a lot, if we try hard.

Maybe we could even avoid a nice salable catastrophe.

Nightbloom wrote

Oh that was great, now I have to clean my keyboard of coffee. Ah yes, bottled water from France, thanks but no thanks!

OK wasting water, exactly how much water is actually lost? Even when converted to steam it reconverts back into the system. My sympathy for a lot of the world is limited, the amount of waste and polluting of water sources by the locals is stunning. Plus piping or shipping the water from here will create environmental issues here and there (transfer of diseases and local species, etc. A lot of countries have large quantise of water, such as Malaysia (where my brother inlaw just got flooded out) and Bangladesh with 60-200” of rain a year. If you want to help people in these areas, then you need to create conditions where water can collect and be stored to provide a source they can use. Also many of the same areas that suffer lack of water are also suffering from deforestation.

As far as Mexico city goes, it is high time that the government there began to depopulate the city, it is unsustainable, but then the Mexican government is adept at avoiding the problem and just needs to blame the US when things get really bad.

Now if you live on a aquifer such as Ed is, then potable water is a huge issue and it has only recently become normal to consider the total draw and ability for water to input back into the aquifer. Building small dams may help in one area but cause further problems downstream, in fact BC has well over 1200 known dams, likely a couple of million if you count the beavers. In Alberta one of big issues is the use of potable water for the extraction of oil or gas (can’t remember which) huge amounts are pumped deep underground, which does effectively removes it from the system for a very long time and causes conflict with cattleranchers.

This thread is getting interesting...

I'd forgotten about Robert Bourrassa's scheme. The Cree must've nixed that one. Good on them.

We've had many die-offs & a handful of dark ages, not to mention full-blown "collapses" Jared Diamond-style. That's when Letters & Culture retreated into the monasteries where they were preserved for the ages (although much was still lost). Everything else went to shit, and cities became ghost towns. It's actually astonishing just how much content has survived given the circumstances. But populations replenish themselves eventually. Institutionally, only the University and the Church emerged intact from the wreckage.

[sidenote: funny how a child's rhyme like Ring Around the Rosy can survive for centuries as a cultural artifact of one of our most severe die-offs. The current generation of kids now in the schoolyard is the first in history not to learn that song, due to the directives of liberal-Left political correctness. First it was altered in small ways (eg. "ashes" became the non-word "husha"). Then it was verbotten. A simple song that leapt trans-continental linguistic & cultural barriers and survived plague, war, revolution, and slaughter is now being erased by the nattering nabobs of "correct" ideological thought - modern day Vandals and Visigoths descending upon the Civitas from the hills, torches in hand.]

Yes, we are in a tight spot again. The problem is we don't know what direction the axe is going to fall from. Pandemic? Flash Ice Age? Malignant interstellar microbes? Science Fiction writers have as much credibility as scientists on this score. I mean really, if you're a policy-maker where do you invest?

That's funny. Where do you think the drive for hunting grounds/pastures, fresh water sources, basic resources, security and living space begins? Men are fulfilling a huge bill of expectations that has its genesis in every mother's expectant gaze. Come back with your shield or on it, the Spartan women told their menfolk. It is women who oblige men to be men. Remember the notorious White Feather Campaign during the First World War, in which women systematically denounced & harassed non-uniformed young unmarried men as "cowards" in public so that their own husbands (i.e. married fathers) would not have to be drafted. It got so militant they had to issue munitions-workers with special armbands just so these insolent wenches would leave them alone.

Birth control alone doesn't do it. You have to educate girls (and boys, of course). Taking a pill once a day is probably the last thing on the mind of a poor itinerant working woman looking for stability in the Developing World. In fact, she might think her ticket to a secure life lies in the other direction: becoming a baby-factory for a then-employed man. Indcidentally, the missionaries are the ones with the deepest penetration into these societies, and are prolific providers of condoms & sex education, even if their hierachies can't acknowledge this publicly. They should be quietly thanked.

As for water, Coyote, there are no de-salination plants for "export".

Hey corporate mouthpiece, the national disgrace newspaper took out a full page "editorial" to viscously attack Noam Chomsky!!!
Ooooooooo who next irrational post?
Santa Claus or Mother Teresa?

p.s. - oh and ofcourse they could hardly contain their delight that harper and emerson wern't more severly chastised by shapiro.
If Izzy wern't in hell he'd be spinning in his grave!!!

Your own Christopher Hitchens already riddled Mother Teresa with bullets in annotated book form, complete with accusations of "crimes against humanity". He also ripped the Queen Mum apart in the pages of The Guardian just after she died.

Don't get me wrong, the Right has its share of ninnies. But you guys go the extra mile.

Chomsky has gotten kid-glove treatment relative to the vitriolic character assassinations which seem to qualify as acceptable discourse on the political Left. Chomsky has usually been treated with wary (though slightly incredulous and/or exasperated) respect by intellectual conservatives. His famous interview with Bill Buckley is a case in point.

Besides, Chomsky can use a good debunking. A lot of his material is pure pie-in-the-sky that is totally unusable for anyone serious about making workably policies and solutions. His iconic status is unmerited, and his canonization as the premier intellectual of age (did I get that right?) says more about the age than it does about the intellect.

nightbloom; Some excellent points. In some other place I'd love to have a conversation on the role of women in the behaviour of men.

One point, though. The Black Plague left more than half of the Europeans alive, some places four fifths.

For a better example I offer one closer to home. Anthroplogists estimate the precolumbian population of North America at around 60 million. By Jamestown and Plymouth Rock less than 6 million. Columbus had brought measles, syphylis, several kinds of poxes and God knows what else.

Whole cultures had become legend only. Trade routes and roads, villages, tribes, wiped out to the point where it took a couple of hundred years to find out they'd even been there. After a hundred years or more of recovery, still only ten percent of former levels.

What could we maintain with say, a couple of hundred million survivors? Would we be able to keep Universities? Communication? Trade? Manufacturing? Engineering? Medicine?

The particular causes of death will hardly matter.

Somebody above wrote that as technology gets larger, the desalination will become "cheaper"

There's no such thing as "cheaper". It is a PR gimmick to mislead people. The lowest cost of any product will always be the lowest energy and resource inputs, regardless what economists claim.

Large scale operations for the production of anything are more and more expensive as they always demand larger and larger energy and resource inputs per unist produced.

These are the real costs, which are then transferred on the other sectors, the ecology and the future. This is why we have climate changes and water shortages now, paying for the "cheaper" products of 50 or 100 years ago.

Monetary costs mean absolutely nothing, as they're not realities, but temporary perceptions, mostly in the service of ruling classes. Monetary systems are designed to support temporary ideologies, not real economies. Which means that they can also be designed to serve humanity, instead of destroying it.

Ed Deak.

Meanwhile Muslim splinter groups are upset that they want to put up a statue to Mother Teresa in her home town in Albania, luckily the mainstream Muslims told the splinter groups to go pound sand.

Bailey
There are even claims of up to 150 million people living here at first post medieval European contact (can’t forget the Vikings or Chinese, or St Brendan, not to mention rumours of other navigators.

They're not predicting worldwide losses nearly that drastic, although it doesn't look good.

In the literature I've read, scientists estimate losses between 300 and 500 Million resulting from the Super Flu pandemic expected to strike within the next decade. Roughly the population of North America, but distributed globally, with the highest losses in central and south Asia.

It will immediately overload national healthcare infrastructures and other public service delivery apparati. Absenteeism will exaserbate the losses, economies will collapse, and our just-in-time manufacturing & delivery systems will collapse, halting the movement of goods (including food delivery systems). We'd experience the kind of social collapse normally seen in an attrition warfare scenario.

Two-thirds to three-quarters of the population of central Europe (Germany) was annihilated during the Thirty Years War. The Soviet Union lost at least 20% of their population as a result of WWII and Stalin's combined atrocities (proportionally, only Poland's & Lithuania's losses were higher).

Who would think that was a scant half-century ago?

I take it (I won't buy or read the National Post) that Chomsky is being pilloried over his statements (or non-statements as the case may be} about Serbian genocide in Srebrenica. This issue has been burbling away in the background since Emma Brockes Guardian Interview with him last fall. Even led, I think, to Heather Mallick's departure from the Globe.
As for Hitchens, I'm not sure either the left or the right wants to claim common cause with his iconoclastic wit any longer.

Nightbloom, defending Mother Church with more "ancient past" rhetoric on the roles of men and women. Funny how some of them thar religious folk have a little difficulty moving the social clock forward. It keeps getting hung up there in the ancient past.

And a fundamentally hostile view of women, and a forgiving one of "natural" male instinct. Snort! Snort! Hmmm.

Sehr interressant.

And it sure as hell wasn't left wing women or feminists that mounted those white feather campaigns. Left wing women of the period were opposed to WW1, and split in support for WW2. They were more likely of the same school of US Neocon males in the states who cheer the war on from the sidelines-, always a hawk but never a soldier. Leave that to the working class, eh. (See, these subtle differentiations have to be made when discussing women and some women, just as well as males. What sections, sectors and social class of women are we talking here? Women have their complexities and complex, and frequently contradictory social behaviours, no less than..., well certainly me. :-)

But what can one expect from thinking rooted in 2000 year old plus mythology on the origin of species?

That's too funny even for comment. It deserves to stand "mostly" on its own. Freudian slips can be delightful.

Other than to thank the Sisters and Holy Fathers for their fine work in the Native boarding school system. And such more modern manifestations of, "... the missionaries are the one's with the deepest penetration into these societies."

Yeah, no doubt. That's the other part of the problem. For young choir boys too, apparently.

Hmmmm. Doesn't like women. That particularly vindictive tone. Catch it? Hmmmm. Might fit right into the priesthood.

Married women. The U.K. still had a volunteer Army at that point. But enrollment wasn't high enough to feed the canons. Policy makers let it be known that unless enlistment was somehow boosted, general conscription of all able bodied males would be necessary. Married women organized to target young un-uniformed men so that their own husbands could stay home. This is well documented.

Not sure about your other comments. They don't make sense. "Vindictive tone" & "fundamentally hostile" towards women? That's silly. My comments probably wouldn't be well-received over in Womyn's Studies, but your characterization of my comments are out to lunch. On the topic of missionaries, etc. you're not even addressing the subject matter. You seem to have a chip on your shoulder. I'm simply stating well-known facts, not putting forward a revision of the historical record.

LOL -

GWest, I think you're right...

What happens to things like soap and shampoo, toothpaste and other crap we all flush down the drain with little thought or hesitation?
Is any of this stuff actually bio-degradable.
It must be accumulating in the environment.

I don't beleive there is a shortage of water. How do you "use" water? People only make use of water temporarily. The total amount stays basically the same. Unless we start splitting it for hydrogen on a massive scale, I guess. But anyway there is no shortage of water, only a shortage of the infrastructure required to make the water useful. Corporation could make money bidding for government contracts to improve publically owned water infrastructure, but that stuff is small potatoes compared to the money to be made putting the water into tiny little plastic containers and shipping them back and forth accross the globe to get them into the hands of individual consumers. That is unless you can take the publically owned water infrastructure and own it, then you're playing with power. Do you really think another corporation would come along and duplicate the water system infrastructure so that the capatilist "invisible hand" could do its competition thing and keep any kind of control in the hands of the consumer? Bwahahahahaha! Sort of similar if you could take the publically owned communications infrastructure and own it, or the publiclally owned transporation infrastructure and own it, or the publically owned health care infrastructure... or the publically owned education infrastructure... hey wait a minute - is that really just a fantasy anymore? Look out people, the water wars might not be between countries, they could probably be people in general versus corporations. Talk about root for the little guy!! (that would be us)

cool thread,sometimes you are touched by serendipty yanking your sleeve and saying,hey bozo,over here.

from water policies to worldwide pandemics to pre american civilizations to bio degradable products.

i have to put this in my favourites and watch where it goes.

Sorry nightbloom, but you're full of doo do, even on the White Feather Campaigns. It had ruling class respectability and organization to it. It was actually initiated by a military MAN. And though it is unsaid in this article, it was a programme that enjoyed unofficial but evident approval-, where they issued men home on leave a special badge to identify their "honourable" service, so they would be spared any coward's White Feather.

It was part of a carefully considered "recruiting strategy".

Provided in these teacher's notes.

http://www.firstworldwar.com/atoz/whitefeathers.htm

Again nightbloom, with the most sincere respect, you really must check out the complexities of your "facts", so they do not become extravagant and wild claims.

And here is a biography of the "Upper Class" woman who was Mary Ward, who organized the White Feather Campaign in league with Admiral Charles Fitzgerald, to assist recruiting into the British Army. It was just a recruiters ploy sanctioned by the ruling class of England and the First World War British state.http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Wward.htm

Back to water? 8-( 8-D

Coyote-- Back to water? Like you mean, fire water?
White Feather, isn't that Scotch? Coyote.

Water. Excellent topic. Excellent Article. Excellent thread.

My most significant reservation about the article was resolved in the footnote. As I read along, I became increasingly aware that this article was just a review or summary of much more extensive coverage elsewhere. Ah, "his latest book... will appear next year". Now I have another book on my reading list.

NASA Climatetologist James Hansen (the man the white house couldn't muzzle) speaks out on Climate change, the role humanity plays in it, and how the White House doesn't wan't you to know about it:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/17/60minutes/main1415985.shtml

Here is a great site about so called man caused climate change, read it all before commenting.friendsofscience.org

friendsofscience.org

With friends like that, science doesn't need enemies.

Forgive my black humour nightbloom, but I'm thinking I'm a winner either way when the Big Bug (pandemic) hits. Either I'll be dead and I won't give a damn, or I'll live and real estate prices will drop enough that I'll be able to afford a house within biking distance of my job. Luckily I work in the dreaded MSM and we thrive on bad news, so it will be all good as they say!

I think that nuclear weapons are the answer to our (Canada's) upcoming resource problems.

The problem is that we have so much and others have so little. They will want to take it, and deny us the opportunity to give it away.

Their current logic dictates that they can premptively attack to prevent us from saying no. We must be wary.

And since no country with nuclear weapons has successfully been attacked, they are the only option to preserve our sovereignty.

We owe it to our forefathers to protect our inheritance, for the peservation of our country and our species. We must remain strong and free, and armed with nukes.

jwstewart,

Amusing, though I think I hear a somewhat mocking undertone there-, perhaps. :-)

Nonetheless, assuming not, the greatest threat to all our natural national resources, along with what has been our national way of life and all that we had wished to become, remains in order, our own ruling class elites who have a view that favours the easiest and quickest road to "their" riches, enmeshed with and followed by an over populated and bursting at the borders seams US Empire. Though China and Japan as well are showing increasing interest in our closing out resource giveaways.

And The US Empire and China are both nuclear armed. Which suggests to me that if push comes to shove, mutual assured destruction becomes the only real effective way of dealing with such potential enemies, as North Korea and Iran serve to demonstrate. That or submit to nuclear blackmail, which is the strategic situation the US is attempting to arrange in its favour.

I really, really hate the idea myself, but concede that it does have some merit, IF, this country is or ever becomes seriously desirous of securing its own national interests, to husband its own natural resources all, and maintaining and further developing our unique national "differences" and character vis a vis our overbearing and interfering neighbour, who has a big time "imperialist" bent to its current capitalist stage of development.

Though, it is a world that becomes frought with its own risks of miscalculation and error as well, and is one we may want to think long and hard about yet. (Besides, many nations currently challenging The Empire such as Cuba, Argentina, Brazil and some of the other Latin American states currently going through more or less peaceful social revolutions to free them from Empire dependence have not the ability or seen the need for nukes, yet. And they are much further along the road of being their own national entity than we are.)

Still, in my view, it is an issue that should not likely be dismissed out of hand, in the current fraught with risk world of Neocon creation. (I have never pretended to be a pacifist, though I do not dismiss such tactics out of hand either.Indeed, would much prefer them.)

Which creates an interesting dynamic between the left and our own neoconservatives, of course, with their special fondness as US Empire Loyalists for everything "Amerikan", where they become the peace advocates of submission, and we find ourselves speaking up in favour of arming ourselves in defence of the nation.

Never thought I'd find myself in this position.

But then, this is the New World Order these Neocons and their primary loyalty to the US Empire have created, in pursuit of their "corporatist" get rich quick scheming.

I just read this thread and have to say how grateful I am to Coyote for his responses to the misogynistic Nightbloom. From responses re: penetration (haha) to the facts re: the whitefeather campaign, I am pleased that I don't have to take the time to respond to the guy myself. Nightbloom may wish to appear a little less stupid by learning to spell (or at least to spellcheck). exaserbate?????

Fiat lux,

Without being graphic it is not difficult to visualize a residential urinal that would save millions of unnecessary toilet flushing. Those with gardens may also use the urine to advantage.

A friend uses a device I told him he should patent. He said he'd rather "give it to the world". It was simply a plastic funnel to which had been attached 4 or 5 feet of plastic tubing. This tubing had been fed around the bend of the toilet and the removable funnel hung above the toilet tank. In the hottest weather even, the setup had not given offense. Whenever using the toilet for "serious business" he would first simply withdraw the tubing.

I see the major problem in not having kept our sewage separate from our bath and dishwashing water, and sometimes even rainwater, all of which become reusable with simple filtering.

As I observed earlier, it seems much more acceptable on the Left to use ad hominem slurs in place of argument, Coyote & Jsinger.

Jsinger, you're post above is obnoxious. Opinions on gender dynamics that happen to disagree with your own are not "misogynistic". Grow up. Was my assertion that a key solution is that girls in the developing world need to be educated alongside boys "misogynistic"? You're a very selective reader, Jsinger. I defy you to demonstrate my alleged misogyny.

Male expendability in wartime is a real phenomenon, and there are all sorts of mechanisms that come into play to reinforce it. The White Feather Campaign was one of many. I never said it was this class or that class, Coyote. That's your straw man. It was predominantly urban married women from the middle & upper-middle classes. And of course it was sanctioned by recruiting authorities, silly. That was the whole point. Woman can be co-opted by "the patriarchy" just as easily as men. I was countering Coyote's utopian assertion that all our problems would disappear if women ran things.

Let's get back to water.

I don't recall comments about education of girls in this thread. Perhaps I missed something. In any case, in my view a man has to do more than agree to education for girls to be considered fair to and respectful of women. The first of your comments that led to my post was, "It is women who oblige men to be men." Your other arguments followed that statement. Your comments make me very curious to know how you think men would behave in the absence of women.

I have noticed that misogyny usually does not recognize itself and that misogynists usually manage to hold women responsible in some way for the behaviour of men. I hope you are correct in your assertion that you are not a misogynist, because we have too many of them in the world already.

Coyote did not say, as you stated he did, that all our problems would disappear if women ran things. Here is what he actually wrote.

"And it sure as hell wasn't left wing women or feminists that mounted those white feather campaigns. Left wing women of the period were opposed to WW1, and split in support for WW2. They were more likely of the same school of US Neocon males in the states who cheer the war on from the sidelines-, always a hawk but never a soldier. Leave that to the working class, eh. (See, these subtle differentiations have to be made when discussing women and some women, just as well as males. What sections, sectors and social class of women are we talking here? Women have their complexities and complex, and frequently contradictory social behaviours, no less than..., well certainly me. :-)"

Women are human, and subject to all manner of strengths, weaknesses, beautiful achievements and stupid actions, just like men.

ps: I guess it was a bit below the belt to insult your spelling. Sorry about that part.

Well, much as I love and respect the ladies, I certainly never, ever said that. 8-D Nor would I. (Speaking of ad hominem) I don't even know any women, save for one or two in the ancient mists of my past time, the most naive and given to mysandry I have come upon, who would lay such a claim either.

I am well aware that men and women have a complex and "inter-effecting" relationship, and struggle with each other all the time at many levels, and an ancient history which still lives in many ways through both of us and our behaviours and attitudes towards each other-, many aspects of which many of us are working to overcome the most harmful to both. (And think of an exception or an extreme on either side of the gender line, and such probably exists. Of which yourself is one, nightbloom old friend.)

But really nightbloom, I do insist on truth as best one can discern it, and in a proper context that does not feed into either mysogony or mysandry. And you got it wrong on the complexities at back of this White Feather issue, with which you attempted to tar women and make them feel guilty generally, when in fact, it was the further manifestation and manipulations of especially "male" ruling class interests, but also female ruling class interests, in the background of this phenomena. You didn't say that. You dumped the blame all off on women.

And your analysis was also in part shallow and incomplete for reasons, I grant, of your refusal to weigh in the "class issues" as well as gender complexities. It's that old Christian, give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and unto God that which is God's teaching thing working through you again, I suggest.

To what extent I have a "utopian" vision however, only future time will yet tell. But certainly you have a backward looking, even to an ancient biblical context view of the potential of human society, and the ever evolving and being negotiated and renegotiated relationship betwen men and women, which you similarly tend to see, I think, as something more incorrectly static and fixed, again as in an ancient biblical context.

Now back to water. 8-D

And how Utopian is the notion of life after death and heaven, old friend?

Jsinger - Yes, I certainly did say girls in the developing world have to be educated if we're going to get anywhere with the big issues. That was in response to the suggestion that we simply need to throw birth control pills at them. Without education, options, and hope for these women, we're just salving our own consciences (although I'm also for providing contraceptive options for them too, of course).

I think we need to take it easy with labels like "misogynist" when we think we read or hear something new or unfamiliar. The example I gave was a valid one, illustrating a valid gender dynamic that emerges in time of threat/stress/danger. It has many milder everyday variations that are generally taken for granted. The gender coin has two sides. Recognizing that doesn't invalidate one side of the coin or the other. It simply acknowledges that they are components of a whole. I'm simply proposing a more inclusive & holistic approach when I depart from the standard feminist party line of women=good men=bad.

nightbloom - Nothing I have heard you say is new or unfamiliar.

I don't think there is such a thing as a standard feminist party line.

nightbloom
I think you'd probably acknowledge, if you had to write that last sentence again, that the so-called 'feminist party line' is just a trifle more nuanced than that. From everything I've read in feminist theory lately it has largely shattered, or at least cunningly subdivided itself, into such a myriad of groups and ideologies that it would be difficult indeed to conclude that your suggested dichotomy has much meaning anymore.

Might I be so bold as to suggest that you're fighting a battle - or at least commenting on it - that is more of an internecine guerilla war than an actual campaign these days. From my viewing, many Feminists these days are spending much of their time slugging it out with their own troops and ignoring the real work that still needs doing in terms of women's role in western society at least.

Cheers. I'm heading over to the other Wood story to see if I can get a drink!

Using Nukes to protect our sovereignty and resource wouldn’t really work for us, they could nuke Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal and then take the resources without worry. Ottawa and Toronto I could live without, but Montreal is just to much of a fun town to lose.

Separation of grey water and black water can help out small sewage systems, however if using grey water for irrigation you need to break down or limit the phosphates from soaps if I remember correctly.

Where Ed lives is a in a bit of a rain shadow and also needs a fair bit of water to support the cattle ranching. Cattle can be really hard on streams and turn a potable water source into a filthy cesspool overnight. Worked with a habitat restoration biologist who told me that if you can keep the cattle from going to far into the creek, they won’t piss or dump into the water. They are also create a lot of erosion problems. I can imagine how much problem cattle rising creates in less developed countries.

A woman's pull to water is equal to that of the moon and the tides, so Coyote and jsinger are not off the mark at all. Ask any woman the part water plays in their life. And even though the next quote is about the developing world, metaphorically, it relates to women here as well:

http://www.whrnet.org/docs/issue-water.html

Those distances are getting longer for women in developing countries because of industrialization/privatization of water and the destruction of vital eco-sytems that result.

Women are becoming just as disconnected and distanced from that life source here...so the education of women better be an education that supports life and not an education in how to become part of a corporate system that is killing us all.

Women have a real power to change things but it does not exist within the corporate power structure... nor with women politicians like Carole Taylor who are the Mary Poppins of Neo-Con politics...a lethal spoon full of sugar to help the corporate medicine go down. They are the real betrayers of women, men and children...because the only hope lies in a complete reversal of the course this world is set on....that must take place outside of the politics of greed and the relentless privatization that is now threatening all that gives life on this planet.

So women are a natural in the management of water...but first they got to give up all hope that there is any kind of answer to be found in the death march of neo-conservatism...they gotta break the faith, as one of the women I most admire in this world, Arundhati Roy, says in this case about the privatization of rivers in India:

"It's a sad thing to have to say, but as long as we have faith, we have no hope. To hope we have to break the faith. We have to fight specific wars in specific ways and we have to fight to win."

You gotta break the faith with systems... political, educational of otherwise that support the relentless privatization of the natural world...you gotta break the faith with them all... before they breaks us.

or otherwise

GWest - You're probably right about that. Times have changed.

Jsinger - But you didn't catch what I was trying to say, apparently. Do you at least see it now? I'm I still a "misogynist" based on what I've said here?

Coyote - I re-read what you actually wrote, and it's possible I misinterpreted. Relative to the paragraph immediately before, it can be interpreted in two ways. I guess you were only referring to leaving contraceptive/abortion decisions to women instead of men (as opposed to all the other broader issues discussed earlier). In that case, we agree.

I certainly was being semi-sarcastic, and semi-realistic as well.

If we are to protect our sovereignty (or anything else) against potential threats, we would have to meet the threat with an equal response, no ?

Futher, if the water resource problems of the majority of the planet are related to population that exceeds the natural carrying capacity of the environment, shouldn't their attention be on their own carrying capacity excesses ? Is not the water shortage merely a symption of population excess ?

Is focusing on Canada's liquid gluttony going to help them ?

Seems to me there are some simple solutons:
1. Import millions of people to Canada
2. Export billions of tonnes of water
3. Export beaucoup comdoms

Therefore, we will have to start exporting condoms.

Whew! We just saved billions on nuclear weapons.

nightbloom - I'm sorry I described you as misogynistic (because I keep feeling obliged to respond when I really don't have time to do so). I don't think many of us (men or women) could pretend to have escaped some bits of misogyny, given the extent to which our history, religions, and culture, even our race, is steeped in it. So yeah, you're probably misogynistic, but how deeply only you can really know. It's a lot like racism. None of us can claim to have personally conquered it, but at times it is difficult to see it in ourselves.

LOL - Some retraction, Jsinger! I guess I'm still "stupid" too, since I must have absorbed the ambient stupidity inwhich our history, culture, etc. is steeped as well.

No worries - sticks & stones, yada-yada...

Anywaze -

Jwstewart - cute breakdown. To bad we aren't ready to colonize Mars yet, because we've certainly got the people to do it.

Okay, space cadets =)

Planet/Lunar colonization?
http://www.marssociety.org/

OR

Orbital colonization
http://www.belmont.k12.ca.us/ralston/programs/itech/SpaceSettlement/Basics/wwwwh.html

Okay, that piece is my chuckle for the day. And not a bad comment either, actually. :-)

A good day brother.

I've been baking Scottish Baps all morning, with the mysandrous Mrs. Coyote cracking the whip over me, so now I'm off for a little explore to see how far I can get before I run into still impassable muck and snow. Then some more work on my bow. (Which is still coming along. I haven't managed to ruin it yet, though I'm at that final "tillering" stage where it could be quickly done. No tokes and no whiskey, eh woody? 8-D

It wasn't meant to be a retraction as much as an explanation.

Jsinger, are you aware that you haven't contributed anything original to the actual subject matter under discussion?

Instead your slur has obliged me to waste space clarifying something you hadn't even bothered to read all the way through (ref. my comments on girls' education)...and now you post a flimsy sop of an explanation. Puhleeeze.

Your impulsive characterization of my opinions as "misogynistic" and "stupid" is directly analogous to those male neanderthals who used to toss the label "man-hater" and "bimbo" at any woman/feminist who articulated legitimate and valid views/opinions on gender which happened to be different from their own.

My main point is that even I, being a woman myself, could not pretend to be completely non misogynistic, and I suspect that I have tried a lot harder than you have to be so. I haven't noticed you even considering the possiblity that you might have displayed a little misogyny, though I have tried to soften the blow of my initial comment. As to the stupid part, I was referring to how one comes across to some people when using poor spelling, which you unquestionably did ("immanently" for emminently being another example from this thread. I didn't want to be too mean in pointing out all errors at first, and I know we're all capable of making them). I try to stay open to the possibility that poor spelling doesn't necessarily imply stupidity, but sometimes it is difficult (for the same reasons that racism and misogyny exist and that I can't pretend not to be infected by judgementalism). I'm pointing out my failings in the hope that you might humble yourself as well.

Jeez!
I stopped at the other 'Wood' site for a drink and stumbled back here to interrupt what is obviously a therapy session. My apologies boys and girls, I'm outta here, smiling of course!

That's another weak and disingenuous sop.

I'm feeling more and more justified in my initial comments. You asked me to demonstrate your misogyny. You have demonstrated it yourself by not even considering that you may have any of it within yourself and by being at least equally insulting to me as I have been to you. Simply saying that girls deserve an education (all that you basically said or clarified) does not exempt you from sharing misogynistic traits with the rest of us, or make you a superiour human. That an education for both genders is required of any equitable human society obviously goes without saying.

oops. superior. irony

This is a waste of time. You haven't demonstrated my alleged "misogyny" by any stretch of the imagination. I stand by everything I've said. If words like misogyny are to have any meaning or relevance, then they shouldn't be applied so recklessness and nonsensically. Your ongoing justifications are just plain flimsy.

And some spelling mistakes and typos are okay on a blog, silly goose, so get off your high horse. They're an inevitably by-product of a medium that is meant to be kinetic & spontaneous.

You can keep prating about me if you want, but I'm thru. I feel like I owe the author & other bloggers an apology for dragging out this nonsense, but I felt compelled to make the point about tolerating valid non-feminist viewpoints on gender issues without opportunistically pathologizing those views as somehow inherently hateful or "misogynistic" of women. That's so '1980s' anyway. I mean, really.

I too have felt the need to apologize to the author and other commenters for having had half the responsibility for the straying. Sorry to all of you. Cool clear water is what it's all about. Funny how intertwined and complex our human/environmental/social/psychological issues are. Ah, the webs we weave.

Thanks, by the way, for illustrating what you meant by ad hominem slurs in the place of argument, nightbloom.

Ah, what's to apologize. We're free to take the conversation out of the straight-jacket, as the conversation leads.

Hang loose. :-)

Nighty night, nightbloom. You're such a preppie dip. :-)

It's too bad you two chose to hijack this thread with your name-calling. What happened to W-A-T-E-R...?

what happened to W-A-T-E-R...?

it E-V-A-P-O-R-A-T-E-D...!

I LOVE THESE THREADS...

It reminds me of when the kids were small and taking them to the movies.

you know how it goes...dad,theres this movie we REALLY,REALLY wanna see...

so cancel everything,pop em in the car,drive downtown ,weekend traffic,get in the theatre,get a ton of popcorn and goodies,enough pop to launch the titanic,make sure everbodys gone to the washroom,oh yes finally sitting down.

the show starts,and guess what,the kids are gone,they are gabbing to some friend somewhere about who knows what,and if they aint being teased by a sibling ,you wonder where that kid is.

in short,you never know what to expect when you start these threads...some are a real giggle

i usually land up with a tummy ache cause i aint gonna throw out a gallon of pop and a ton of popcorn...

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.

Too bad tho - we were touching on some interesting things, like when Bailey introduced Jane Jacobs' ideas, and the whole notion of a die-off (and the history of previous mass die-offs as a result of war & plague). There are localized historical antecedents to the scenarios some are now predicting. What happened in those societies? How did communities cope? That's what I was trying to get at. It's all happened before.

But unfortunately you have people that can't resist doing this kind of thing when people are articulating their opinions:

or this:

You've gotta take the good with the bad I guess. Quality control on a medium like this is left to the individual participants.

It's never too late to write about water, and I apologized to the writer and other commenters by the way, unlike you.

yes water!

myself ,i was wondering if anybody was going to get to ATLANTIS and the land of MU ?

now,anybody up to it?

how about the AMAZONS,those misandric babes who used turkey basters...just kidding(about the turkey basters i mean)

Addendum:

The visit of Canadian Environment Minister Rona Ambrose to the World Water Forum, it appears, was more than rumour.

According to a call I just got from the Minister's office, Ambrose was indeed in Mexico for an overnight visit. While there she met with representatives from Britain, France and the United States among others, to discuss responses to climate change. She also made a presentation to a round table on the subjects of "aboriginal water standards on reserves" and "local solutions to cleaning up water."

The caller offered no detail on the discussions with other governments. The presentation lasted three minutes.

The aide also expressed surprise that officials I met in Mexico had told me they were under orders not to talk to the press without first clearing the interview with the Prime Minister's Office.

No such gag order existed, the aide said. Then he asked for the name of the official who had told me.

I declined to provide it.

Wow. Politics is so complex and frightening. It's hard to understand what makes the human world go around.

My final words re: the ugly thing with nightbloom above (Sorry to have to have any) are that in case anyone cares or is interested I definitely did not enjoy it at all.

Chris, thanks for sharing that tidbit about muzzled officials. I hope this doesn't become a recurrent pattern of public life under the Harper Regime (these were Canadian civil servants, right?). It seems bizarre that they should have to clear it not with their own Public Affairs offices, not with their own Minister's office...but with PMO itself.

This is ironic given Harpers recent praise of a professional, educated and competent civil service that thinks for itself.

[jsinger, don't worry about it. Considering the downright nasty hissy-fits that have occurred on other threads on this website, we should be beatified for our saintly conduct on this one. It wasn't that bad...but do let's stop talking about it now].

Hmm! A fairly high discomfort level. I'm surprised you're surprised, nightbloom - I thought you were a pretty worldly fellow. You expected honesty and consistency from this guy? Welcome to the monkey house?

No such gag order existed, the aide said. Then he asked for the name of the official who had told me.

A simple google search will turn up numerous credible references to support the existence of the PMO gag order. It has been in effect since at least March 17