The biophobic meme-plex he founded has been enormously powerful; it ties into other memeplexes synergistically, like longstanding masculine phobias about the messiness of life processes and the icky uncleanliness of females; European fantasies of superiority over “dirty savages”; technomanagerial fantasies of Progress; sky-father religious fantasies of transcending the physical to ascend into a pure and pristine ethereal realm, etc.

We are walking colonies of bacteria. They are not only our ancestors; they are us, we are them. When we declare war on the bacterial kingdom we declare war on ourselves, our own bodies.

See also rainwater harvesting. In the beginning it personally took some convincing on my part as, for whatever reason, it seemed that drinking rainwater might be dangerous – similar to misplaced concerns people have with greywater. When in most cases it is safer than groundwater and without all the chlorine and flouride in municipal water.

The key is that a correctly designed system is safe and can be built with information readily available by just about anyone. The disconnect is that people only seem to trust something that been approved or designed by an “official.”

At the very least its useful for irrigation. Although keep in mind that the permaculture saying goes the cheapest and easiest place to store water is in the soil – which is why deep mulches and landscape shaping is so important. Multiple supporting systems are the key.

Anyways, see here for a great guide on rainwater harvesting (its specific to Texas but can be applied near anywhere)

http://www.twdb.state.tx.us/publications/reports/RainwaterHarvestingManual_3rdedition.pdf

http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article3115537.ece

(Hat tip to Kim Ives for sending this)

There is also a raw milk controversy here, because it’s illegal to sell it for human consumption. All that libertarian value free-choice stuff goes right out the window when one intoduces the terror of the biotic.

I see this in my own family. This intense germophobia. But all one has to do is look at advertising that is aimed at our consumer-identity (which is also apolitical identity) to see how much of it sets us up with fear of organisms, in order to sell us something to kill them. Add to that the long standing social stigma associated with being “unclean,” and you have the perfect recipe for incessant war on microorganisms… and even just organisms.

A lead story in The New York Times of October 16th warns that key regions throughout the deep South are about to run out of water. The Times story by Brenda Goodman, “Drought-Stricken South Facing Tough Choices,” notes that “for the first time in more than 100 years, much of the Southeast has reached the most severe category of droughtcreating an emergency so serious that some cities are just months away from running out of water.”

Most of the worst part of this drought (classified as “exceptional”) is concentrated in six Southeastern States: Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. Extreme drought regions also include southern California and western Arizona. Aside from potential climate changes and the lack of rainfall, a central problem is the demand for water. Michael J. Hayes, head of the National Drought Mitigation Center, explains that the Southeast has become more vulnerable. With a growing population, there has been a both an increased demand and competition for water.

From Water to Guns

What then has been one of the primary engines of the South’s population growth (and resource demands)? The military inspired boom concentrated in these very same states. An economic geographical history of the key Southern states shows that their rise (together with regions like Southern California and Arizona), and part of the North East and Midwest’s relative decline, has been based on the extension of military spending. Ann Markusen and her colleagues chronicled this shift in The Rise of the Gunbelt, a book which also addressed the accompanying rise of political clout in such military dependent regions. [... more ...]

Pakistan and India’s water issues are more precarious than those in the U.S., which is probably no big surprise to your readers. I’ve submitted an abstract to present on water issues in Pakistan (with my requisite Asian religions-specialization spin) at the TREEO Center‘s 2008 Water Institute Symposium here at the University of Florida.

Particularly in the case of South Asian Hindus who revere the rivers as gods and goddesses, one would think that they’d be alarmed by their destruction. Alas, they’ve been slow to respond. And after all, the goddess Saraswati is named for a river. The goddess still exists–she’s as popular as ever–but the river died long ago.

-Mr. Rogers

(Google for ‘rain harvesting’ for much much more).

A good basic overview

note that this interception and harvesting of rainwater runoff is what trees used to do for us, before we cut them all down; and what turf and long grassland used to do for us, before we ploughed it all up and paved it over. overpaving and overbuilding are typical of what Berry calls the human pattern of creating two separate problems, where before there was one seamless cycle. by overpaving and deforestation we create the problem of excessive runoff, violent flow which accelerates erosion; and we create heat islands (google for it) that disturb and intensify local weather patterns. this subjects us to intense shadeless aridity in summer and flooding and water damage in winter, with expensive engineering to contain and control water movement and irrigate dessicated plants to keep them on life support through the Dry.

trees and shrubs and grassland, mangrove swamps and wetlands, do all this conserving and taming of water for us, and provide shade, oxygen, food, and habitat for synergistic biotic communities. when we exterminate them — for convenience or to strip mine their value as carbon or construction material — we inherit the “problem” that they “solved”, which was never a problem until we barged in and smashed the elegant mechanism of the hydro cycle.

some factoids about water

just one tree can reduce rainwater runoff by 4000 gallons each year. the massive runoff that “requires” huge concrete culverts and gadzillions of taxpayer dollars is basically a symptom of Not Enough Trees. the huge costs we pay to design and construct culverts, drains. entire artificial rivers — using methods and tools, I hasten to add, which are fossil- and resource- intensive and thus require killing more soil and more trees — are the costs of the “service” those trees were providing for us, their symbiotes, before we liquidated them.

the career prospects of a flea that figures out how to kill its dog are not encouraging, let’s put it that way.

Last few years I tried to grow a garden on my modest quarter acre, but due to this year’s lack of rain it didn’t seem with the effort.

Neighbors are trapping their bathwater to use for a fig tree and a few favorite plants. I’m thinking about what to do to trap rain water, and looking around to see if there are heirloom varieties of drought-resistant squash, tomatoes, melons and beans I can do next year.