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World Water Day: Scientists Took Action Against Polluting Project

March 25, 2025 The Canary. , , , , ,
An international group of scientists have taken action across the world to challenge a major extractivist project that’s set to endanger the health and livelihoods of local communities in southwest Peru. To mark World Water Day 2025 on 22 March, activists from Scientist Rebellion mobilised a range of global actions in solidarity with communities fighting the impending river pollution-disaster, the Tia María copper mine in the agricultural Tambo Valley. Communities have been fighting the controversial Tia María copper mine for over 15 years. Crucially, local Indigenous residents have voiced overwhelming opposition to the project that will pollute rivers and endanger their agricultural subsistence and livelihoods.

Melting Glaciers Threaten Food And Water Supply For Two Billion People

March 23, 2025 Cristen Hemingway-Jaynes, EcoWatch. , , , ,
Melting glaciers threaten the supply of food and water for billions across the globe, the United Nations warned in its 2025 World Water Development Report: Mountains and Glaciers: Water towers. Mountains supply 55 to 60 percent of the planet’s annual freshwater flow, with two billion people reliant on the waters flowing from them. “As the world’s water towers, mountains provide life-sustaining fresh water to billions of people and countless ecosystems; their critical role in sustainable development cannot be ignored,” a press release from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) said.

25 Days Of Debt-Service Payments Could Emancipate African Women From 40 Billion Hours Of Water Harvesting

March 14, 2025 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , , , ,
March is the month of International Working Women’s Day, a day deeply rooted in the socialist movement. Most of the world now only calls 8 March ‘International Women’s Day’, excluding the word ‘working’ from its title. But work is a fundamental part of women’s daily lives. According to UN Women’s annual report Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals: The Gender Snapshot 2024, 63.3% of women worldwide participated in the labour force in 2022. However, due to the appalling state of social protections and labour regimes, by 2024 nearly 10% of women were living in extreme poverty.

Supreme Court Weakens Rules On Discharging Raw Sewage Into Water

March 5, 2025 Cristen Hemingway Jaynes, EcoWatch. , , , , , ,
The United States Supreme Court has voted five to four to weaken rules that govern how much pollution is discharged into the country’s water supply, undermining the 1972 Clean Water Act. The case involved San Francisco suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) after the city was found to have violated the terms of a permit required for the discharge of wastewater pollution into the Pacific Ocean, reported The Washington Post. San Francisco officials argued that the EPA’s authority had been exceeded due to vague permit rules that made it impossible to tell when a line had been crossed.

Ecuador’s Coastal Ecosystems Have Rights, Constitutional Court Rules

January 20, 2025 Paige Bennett, EcoWatch. , , , , ,
The Constitutional Court of Ecuador has determined that coastal marine ecosystems have rights of nature, including the right to “integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes,” per Chapter 7, Articles 71 to 74 in the country’s constitution. This is not the first time that Ecuador has established legal rights for nature. In fact, Ecuador was the first country in the world to establish that nature held legal rights, Earth.org reported. In 2008, Ecuador added rights for Pacha Mama, an ancient goddess similar to the Mother Earth entity, in its constitution.

Meatpacking Plants Pollute Poor, Non-White Communities Disproportionately

January 4, 2025 John McCracken and Monica Cordero, In These Times. , , , , ,
Postville, Iowa — In March, officials in Postville shut down its water treatment facility for two days as city employees worked to prevent polluted water from a meatpacking plant from entering the water supply.  Agri Star Meat and Poultry had discharged more than 250,000 gallons of untreated food processing waste — blood, chemicals and other solid materials — into the city’s wastewater system. Chris Hackman, the city’s wastewater operator for the past 25 years, said it was one of the worst incidents he could remember.  “We’ve never seen anything like that,” he said. 

Can Britain Re-Nationalize Water Services?

December 19, 2024 Ana Vračar, People's Dispatch. , , , ,
Social justice organizations in Britain are urging judges to reject a bailout request from Thames Water, one of the country’s largest water providers, serving some 16 million people in the greater London area. Campaigners argue that approving the bailout of the private utility provider would allow Thames Water to continue its mismanagement while forcing consumers to shoulder the burden—raising annual water bills by £250 (USD 317) per user. “This is daylight robbery. There are two people who can stop it, the judge in court today and Steve Reed, the environment secretary.

Removing Hydropower Dams Can Restore Ecosystems

November 11, 2024 Katie Schmidt, Resilience. , , , , , , , , ,
A free-flowing river supports abundant fish and wildlife, provides drinking water, and other intangible recreational benefits. But humans have sought to block rivers with dams for millennia. While dams have provided benefits like hydroelectricity and water storage, they have also been ecologically disastrous. Besides blocking fish migrations, these human-made structures can destroy seasonal pulses of water that keep ecosystems in balance. Some dams—especially those used for power—can deplete water in streams, leaving entire stretches of river bone dry.

Corporations Plunder US West’s Water Amid Worst Drought In 1,200 Years

September 23, 2024 Katie Rose Quandt, Truthout. , , , ,
Rural La Paz County, Arizona, positioned on the Colorado River across from California, is at the center of a growing fight over water in the American Southwest. At the heart of the battle is a question: Should water be treated as a human right, to be allocated by governments with the priority of sustaining life? Or is it a commodity to be bought, sold and invested in for the greatest profits? As the West suffers its worst megadrought in 1,200 years, investors have increasingly eyed water as a valuable asset and a resource to be exploited. For years, investment firms have bought up farmland throughout the Southwest, drilling to new depths for their water-hungry crops and causing nearby wells to run dry.

Honolulu City Council Passes Resolution To Protect Water From Navy Pollution

September 6, 2024 Sierra Club of Hawai‘i, Popular Resistance. , , , , ,
The Sierra Club of Hawaiʻi is deeply grateful to the Honolulu City Council for Wednesday's passage of Resolution 24-216, FD1, urging the Navy to heed the calls of the Honolulu Board of Water Supply and the Red Hill Community Representation Initiative for data needed to help keep our drinking water system safe from potentially catastrophic contamination. To be clear: the City Councilʻs no-nonsense call for more frequent and reliable data gathering and sharing by the U.S. Navy will be absolutely critical to tracking a contamination plume of approximately 200,000 to 2 million gallons of fuel, forever chemicals, and other hazardous substances that the Red Hill Facility has released since World War II.

Global Water-Related Conflicts Reached A Record High In 2023

August 24, 2024 Paige Bennett, EcoWatch. , , , , ,
According to a new report from the nonprofit Pacific Institute, violent conflicts over water increased sharply in 2023. The report found there were nearly 350 water-related conflicts globally last year, a record high. The latest update to Pacific Institute’s Water Conflict Chronology has revealed a huge increase in the number of water-related conflicts in 2023 compared to just 2022, with around a 150% rise. In 2022, there were 231 recorded conflicts over water, compared to the 347 recorded for 2023. In comparing to recent decades, the contrast is even more stark. In 2000, there were just 22 water-related conflicts worldwide, Pacific Institute reported.

BLM To Protect North Dakota Drinking Water

August 21, 2024 Sharon Kelly, DeSmog. , , ,
Last week, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) announced the results of its most recent oil and gas sale on public lands in North Dakota and Montana. The majority of the proceeds for this round come from a $15.1 million winning bid for a 273-acre parcel located entirely underneath the Missouri River, which serves as a major source of drinking water for millions of Americans. That relatively small lease is a big reminder of the ways shale extraction continues in and around places where people get their drinking water. The sale was made amid continuing battles over just how much public land will be made available to oil and gas drillers, and how much protection will be extended for public lands.

Making Our Communities What They Need To Be

July 15, 2024 Steve Early, Resilience. , , , , ,
The symbols of public-sector infrastructure are often associated with urban areas: major highways and subway systems, for instance; bridges and tunnels; large ports and airports; billions of gallons of fresh water to deliver and hundreds of tons of solid waste to cart away every day. Yet public works departments are no less important in rural areas, where municipal employees and their families, whether members of the National Education Association, the Firefighters union, or the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Workers (AFSCME), are dependent on the same community services they provide. In Middlebury, Vermont, the largest town in rural Addison County, 46-year-old Jeremy Rathbun is one of those public servants.

Red Hill Whistleblower Details How Her Warnings Were Ignored

June 25, 2024 Christina Jedra, Honolulu Civil Beat. , , , , , ,
As the new director for the U.S. military’s largest fuel depot in May 2020, she realized almost immediately that something was wrong. The fire suppression system for the massive Honolulu storage system, which was holding 100 million gallons of fuel, was essentially turned off. Firefighting foam necessary to put out a potential fuel fire had been removed by officials who feared a leak could contaminate the drinking water aquifer below, she said. As a result, those working in the facility’s underground tunnels, and those residing in surrounding neighborhoods, were at risk of facing an out-of-control blaze, she said. So Bencs did what the Navy itself had trained her to do: She said something.

Around The Mountain Valley Pipeline, Farmers Losing Access To Clean Water

June 24, 2024 Eve Andrews, Ambrook. , , , , ,
There are some who say the water of Monroe County, West Virginia, is the purest and best-tasting in the world — or at least it was in the 1990s. The springs on Peters Mountain, which straddles the border with Virginia, won first prize at the Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting four times in that decade, beating out — as farmer Maury Johnson will tell you — the renowned municipal water of New York City. Johnson’s family has owned over 200 acres of farmland in Monroe County for 130 years, in the verdant Hans Creek Valley. Coming around the bend of a two-lane road into the valley, you behold a patchwork of dandelion-dotted pastures where small farmers raise sheep, cattle, pigs, and even a paddock of wide-eyed, statue-still deer. Underneath that farmland is a geological formation called karst, which is found throughout the greater Appalachian region.
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