Water

Today is Blog Action day, and the topic is water. It's the UN topic for a global effort directed at providing clean water to people all over the globe, largely in impoverished countries. But it's also about preventing pollution, cleaning up waterways and restoring them so that they perform their natural functions in ecosystems that have been degraded by urban development. That greatest store of our water on the planet, the oceans, have become the dumping ground of toxins that will disintegrate the chain of life if this activity proceeds unchecked.

I've written extensively on this blog about the state of water supply in California, particularly as it extends to the plumbing approach taken by the State Water Projects and the primitive engineering of the Bay Delta, as well as emerging watershed management and regenerative land planning approaches that preserve natural systems. Here's the list of my posts involving water and its vital importance to life and all of its processes. Just about every sustainable land use and building practice involves completing the circle of the water cycle.

I can only hope that we can learn to live within our environmental means before we go the way of the Anasazi.