Deep into the California drought, possibly the worst in 1200 years, water from a property in Los Angeles flows down a residential street. Photo: Sandra Postel Denial, it’s been said, is not just a river in Egypt. It runs,...
The beginning of the Blue Nile near its outlet from Lake Tana in the highlands of Ethiopia. Photo by Ondrej Zvácek/Creative Commons Earlier this month, the foreign ministers of Sudan, Egypt and Ethiopia reached agreement on basic principles for managing what...
It’s getting harder and harder to separate nature’s role in disasters from our own, and the dire water predicament confronting São Paulo, Brazil, is no exception. But as with the ongoing drought in California, there are important lessons from...
We often hear it said that climate change is too abstract to win the support needed to effectively combat it. But the primary way we will experience climate change is through the water cycle – through droughts, floods, depleted...
As Valentine’s Day approaches, no doubt many of us have chocolate on our minds and taste buds. Delicious, dark, tempting chocolate that, eaten in moderation, may even be good for us. As we’ve learned in recent years, the cocoa...
The severe and ongoing depletion of underground water supplies in India poses a growing threat to the nation’s food security. Without serious efforts to stem the mining of groundwater, food production will decline, unleashing painful social and economic consequences...
Imagine if each tap that delivered water from the Colorado River – whether to a farm, a factory, or a home – suddenly went dry for a year. What would happen to the West’s economy? That’s pretty much the...
Post Carbon Fellow Sandra Postel was one of the authors behind a recent article in Solutions on saving water via the ‘Change the Course’ program. From the article: We depend on freshwater ecosystems for clean water, fisheries, food, and...
Seeds of a riverbank willow wait to be released by the wind along the Colorado River. An experimental pulse of water during the spring of 2014 was designed to regenerate habitat in the Colorado Delta. Cheryl Zook/National Geographic Last...
The timing might seem odd, even self-destructive. Last month, in the midst of one of the most severe droughts in California’s historical record, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti issued an executive order calling for his southern California city to...