Summary for Wednesday March 31

Below is a summary of today's lecture provided by Annie K with a few italicized additions and hyperlinks from Prof. Low...

The first topic today was a recap of the reading assignment “Global Water Shortage Looms in New Century.” From here we moved back into Blue Covenant, focusing primarily on chapter 5.

Throughout her book, Barlow argues that water is becoming a growing source of conflict. Some examples given are the Colorado River in the U.S., cloud seeding in China, violent defense of water in Java, domestic violence in Kenya, air strikes on rebels trying to divert water in Sri Lanka, capital punishment for those who contaminate water in Malaysia, and many deaths in Nepal, Bangladesh, Sudan and elsewhere. There are also many conflicts between countries over water resources.
Another issue we looked at was water refugees. BY 2050, 1.7 billion people will live in dire “water poverty” and be forced to relocate. Water is becoming a security issue. Homeland Security is now responsible for protecting our water from terrorism at a price of $548 million a year. Further exacerbating water conflict is the issue of water privatization.
There are three major crises affecting access to water in the world today:

1. Dwindling freshwater supplies

2.Inequitable access to water

3. Corporate control of water is worsening these issues

Barlow does not believe that technology will solve these problems and that we shouldn’t place ourselves too far ahead of nature. She has a great disdain for unrestrained growth. Her three purposed solutions are:

1. Water conservation: a pact between the people and government guaranteeing the right to clean water and implementing practices that will ensure this.

a. This is an alternative to the dwindling water supply

b. We have plenty of workable examples to build from, but we lack the political motivation.

c. Existence of water depends on sustainable management of water

d. We must implement watershed restoration and proper land use

e. Development of green conservation zones in urban development (i.e. Central Park)

f. We need to mitigate chemical farming, the use of pesticides, etc. This will take grass roots, localized movements – keep food local

Here we looked briefly at the results from our water footprint homework: Students are slightly below the national average. This could be because we do not own lawns, wash our cars, etc. The second and third solutions were then presented:

2. Water Justice: a pact between governments of the global north and global south to work on solidarity and equal access to water.

3. Addresses inequitable access to water

-62 countries are heavily burdened by debt and this is hindering their development

-There needs to be substantial allowances for debts, forgiving debt and increasing foreign aid. According to Barlow, the level of aid should be .7% of GDP of giving country – the U.S. now gives only .17%

-Need to address gender inequality – keep policies local and help indigenous peoples

-Water Democracy: pact between all governments and all people guaranteeing fundamental human right of access to clean water

Alternative to corporate control of water:

Working examples are Public Services International, which provides alternatives to private water schemes and PUPs, which supports public water services

Some further examples of solutions were Acequia, an ancient Spanish ditch irrigation system and the International Rainwater Harvesting Alliance.

The presentation concluded that there is a need for a binding law, which would ensure both accountability and visibility. It is essential that we develop and maintain sustainable management and conservation. With these in mind, Barlow proposes a covenant that would entail an obligation to respect and action in the interest of citizens before the state, an obligation to protect, a responsibility to keep out third parties threatening the human right to water, and an obligation to fulfill, forcing governments to take on any additional measures to ensure this right.
The impediments to this covenant exist in water corporations, the northern countries, the World Bank, Green Cross International, and market-based globalization. According to Barlow, if we can assert the primacy of human rights, the need to distribute water publicly and without discrimination and promote water rights efforts on a national level, then we can overcome the problems of water conservation and distribution.

Slides shown in lecture today are available as a .pdf on Sakai.

There will be no reading assignment for Friday.

Blue Covenant Homework

1. Go to the resources page on Sakai and download the excel spreadsheet BCData.xls. This spreadsheet contains data from EarthTrends: The Environmental Information Portal and CIA The World Factbook.

2. You will be using this data to make three plots; the homework assignment will consist of these three plots, your interpretation of these plots, and some additional questions about the nature of the data. You will be looking at four sets of numbers for about 150 different countries.

a. Per Capita Actual Renewable Water Resources
b. % Access to an improved water source in 2004
c. % Access to improved sanitation in 2004
d. per capita gdp

3. Click on "Actual Renewable Water Resources: Per capita" at EarthTrends: The Environmental Information Portal, select "...or retrieve all data for this variable." and click on "View Technical Notes". Succinctly describe in your own words what is it that "Actual Renewable Water Resources: Per capita" measures.

4. Click on "Water and Sanitation: Access to an improved water source" at EarthTrends: The Environmental Information Portal, select "...or retrieve all data for this variable." and click on "View Technical Notes". Succinctly describe in your own words what is it that "Access to an improved water source" measures.

5. Click on "Water and Sanitation: Access to improved sanitation" at EarthTrends: The Environmental Information Portal, select "...or retrieve all data for this variable." and click on "View Technical Notes". Succinctly describe in your own words what is it that "Access to improved sanitation" measures.

6. Use the power of the internet to find a definition for per capita GDP. Succinctly describe in your own words what is it that per capita GDP measures.

7. Plot 1: in excel, plot % Access to improved water source in 2004 (y-axis) as a function of 2006 & 2007 average Per Capita Actual Renewable Water Resources (Cubic meters (m^3) per person per year) normalized to % of world average (x-axis)(highlight your two columns of interest and "insert" an (xy) scatter (plot) with only markers). Modify the x-axis so that it is logarithmic (right-click on one of the numbers on the axis, select "format axis" and then click the box next to "Logarithmic Scale"). Print out the graph, label the axis, and succinctly describe any trends that are evident in the data; specifically, how do any observed trends compare with any trends that you might have predicted?

8. Plot 2: in excel, plot % Access to improved water source in 2004 (y-axis) as a function of per capita gdp as % of world average (x-axis)(highlight your two columns of interest and "insert" an (xy) scatter (plot) with only markers). Modify the x-axis so that it is logarithmic (right-click on one of the numbers on the axis, select "format axis" and then click the box next to "Logarithmic Scale"). Print out the graph, label the axis, and succinctly describe any trends that are evident in the data; specifically, how do any trends compare with any trends that you might have predicted?

9. Plot 3: in excel, plot % Access to improved sanitation in 2004 (y-axis) as a function of per capita gdp as % of world average (x-axis) (highlight your two columns of interest and "insert" an (xy) scatter (plot) with only markers). Modify the x-axis so that it is logarithmic (right-click on one of the numbers on the axis, select "format axis" and then click the box next to "Logarithmic Scale"). Print out the graph, label the axis, and succinctly describe any trends that are evident in the data; specifically, how do any trends compare with the trends from Plot 2?

10. Sort the data by “% Access to an improved water source in 2004”. When you look through the list of data, is there any general inference to be made about the different regions of the world? That is, do some regions’ countries tend to belong in one end of the spectrum, or in the middle? The regions are: Europe, The Middle East, Asia, Africa, South America, Oceania and North America.

11. This homework assignment is is due Friday, April 2 at the beginning of class as a printed hard copy.

Summary for Monday March 29th

Below is a summary of today's lecture provided by Morton and Maya with a few italicized additions and hyperlinks from Prof. Low...

First lecture of The Blue Covenant, by Maude Barlow.

The overuse of water is rapidly decreasing some of the largest aquifers in the world. There are two main types of aquifers – superficial ones which are recharged continuously, and fossil aquifers which are not. The Ogallala aquifer which supplies water to more than one third of American crop irrigation was formed in the last ice age. It is emptied at an alarming rate, and it is not being recharged.

One issue with emptying groundwater reservoirs arises when the void left behind when the water is extracted cannot carry the weight of the ground above, causing the ground to collapse. This leaves large craters behind on the surface. This has happened in several places around the Aral Sea for example (and the video example of extreme water depletion and catastrophic subsidence in South-central Turkey). The Aral Sea is also an example of overuse, since the irresponsible extraction of water from its tributaries lead the lake to shrink to a fraction of its size (10% of what it used to be), leaving formerly vibrant fishing communities stuck in the middle of what is rapidly becoming a desert. What is left of the lake is so saline (21,000 ppm or over 10 times what we decided was drinkable) that most life in it disappeared, since most species are unable to adjust to such an extreme change in environment over only a few decades. In other places, such as Arizona, Northern China and elsewhere, water issues arise because people inhabit arid lands, which cannot support the populations without importing large quantities of water.

Two fifths of the world’s population does not have reliable access to clean water. The WHO estimates that 80% of all illnesses are caused by bad drinking water. In fact, more children die because of water-related issues than any other cause of death for children. This trend is exacerbated by global warming, which is causing increased rates of glacial melt; incidentally, a large quantity of water bodies in the developing world depends on glacial melt. The World Bank, which is the largest developmental aid agency in the world, prefers privatization to deal with water scarcity. However, as Maude Barlow notes, there could be a number of issues with this approach – mainly that for profit companies have a lesser tendency to keep in mind the greater good of the people, which leads to sub-optimal supply. One such example is Cochabamba in Bolivia, but these issues are commonplace all around the world.

Slides shown in lecture today are available as a .pdf on Sakai.

Claire's speaker's notes are available below.

The my maps page has been updated with the locations mentioned in today's lecture.

The reading for Wednesday will be: Global Water Shortage Looms In New Century

Privatization of water lecture notes from Claire

Privatization of water

- One of the major issues Barlow discusses in Blue Covenant: privatization, or the corporate control of water.

- Barlow opens her analysis with the following explanation:
“Water, of course, has traditionally been viewed as a public resource. Increasingly, however, freshwater supplies are being privatized in a whole range of ways as a powerful water industry moves to create a cartel resembling the one that now controls every facet of energy, from exploration and production to distribution.”

- It is important to recognize that water has traditionally been viewed as a public resource, and that it wasn’t until about 30 years ago that freshwater supplies began to be privatized and water became viewed as a commodity.

- Barlow stresses that the private sector understands that, in a world running out of clean water, whoever controls that water will be both wealthy and powerful.

- Private, for-profit organizations in countries around the world provide various services and have a multitude of functions, including:

- Municipal services
- Put massive amounts of freshwater in bottles for sale
- Control water used for industrial farming, mining, energy production, computers, cars and other water intensive industries
- Own and operated dams, pipelines, nanotechnology
- Water purification systems and desalination plants
- Overall technological infrastructure
- Control water trade and buy water rights (groundwater and watersheds)

- Other than France, which, since the late 1800s has encouraged the existence of a private water industry, the “Global North” (that’s Europe, North America, Australia, and Japan) has adopted universal public water and sanitation services to protect public health and to promote national economic development.

- With foundations built on a colonial legacy, the “Global South” (consisting of Africa, Asia, and South and Central America) mainly has urban water services only for the elite, with millions of poor urban dwellers having no access to water or sanitation, an issue that has been exacerbated in the past 30 years.

This begs the question…

Q: Why is privatization occurring in so many 3rd world countries?

A: The answer is three-fold:

1) Residents of third-world countries are moving from rural areas to megacities.

2) As population density increases, pollution in surface water also increases.

3) Third-world governments, which are plagued by poverty and consistently increasing debt, cannot meet demands for fresh water.

- By the end of the 1980s, a public model (like that of the “Global North”) for developing nations had been abandoned in favor of a private model that would benefit the private water companies of Europe.

- Barlow says that this was not at all coincidental, but was rather planned and intentionally carried out by some of the most powerful forces in the world.

- She traces this shift from a public to a private model of water services to ideology manifested under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, in which liberal market economics constituted the one and only choice for the whole world, including the developing world.

- Soon, this Washington Consensus became the guiding mantra for the elite running the global institutions involved in water development, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and even the United Nations.

- Although privatization had failed in England under Thatcher, this model (and not the far more successful model of public delivery) was exported to the developing countries of the “Global South.”

The World Bank

-The World Bank Group is a family of five international organizations that makes leveraged loans, generally to poor countries. First world countries control the World Bank and have voting power proportional to the amount they invest in it.

- The World Bank uses its power to open markets in the “Global South” for northern corporations.

- Although it had been promoting water privatization as one option several years prior to 1993, in that year, the World Bank adopted the Water Resources Management policy paper, which noted the “unwillingness” of the poor to pay for water services and stated that water should be treated as an economic commodity, with an emphasis on efficiency, financial discipline, and full-cost recovery – a principle that says that corporations can set water prices high enough to not only recover the cost of their investment, but to make profits for their investors.

- Increasingly, loans for public projects were rejected in favor of a private model, and between 1990 and 1996, the World Bank to funded more than 300 private water projects in the developing world.

- There are three basic types of water utility privatization:

1. Concession contracts give a private company a license to run the water system and charge customers to make a profit. The private company is responsible for all investments, including building new pipes and sewers to connect households.
India practices a form of extreme concession whereby whole river systems are leased to the companies who run them for profit without government interference.

2. Leases are contracts under which the company is responsible for running the distribution system and for making the investments necessary to repair and renew the existing assets, but the local government remains responsible for new investment.

3. Management contracts make the private company responsible only for managing the water service but not for any investments.

- Most of the World Bank’s current projects are leases or management contracts.

- Even though the notion of a partnership has the ring of democracy and shared responsibility, these contracts should all be considered privatizations because they all involve profits for the private companies and cutoffs to people who cannot pay for their “product.” What’s more, while those who live in third world communities have no alternative if the so-called partnership fails, the corporate partner will (and does) leave the partnership if the profits “dry up.”

- Using a “carrot and stick” approach, in which the carrot is both debt relief and the actual funds themselves, and the stick is the unspoken threat of the withdrawal of aid, countries are encouraged to adopt a private water services model.

The World Bank Manufactures Global Consensus on Privatization

- It is important that we examine how the World Bank and other global financial institutions came to impose this new model of water delivery on the “Global South”

- Sociologist Michael Goldman of the University of Minnesota has analyzed how the World Bank was able to promote a shift in water policy over a relatively short time, finding that it actively sought the buy-in of non-governmental organizations, think tanks, state agencies, the media and the private sector across the Global North and South.

- Through its Water Policy Capacity Building Program, the World Bank has put thousands of parliamentarians, policymakers, technical specialists, journalists, teachers, students, civil society leaders, and Third World elites through intensive programs on private water management so that they could then return to their respective third-world countries and promote a private model of water delivery to their governments.

- Their consensus is that debt and poverty are not the problem, but rather that the main problem with degraded water services in the Third World is inefficient and corrupt governments whose failure to protect water has led to a culture of wastefulness among the masses. Basically, the World Bank and its private sector colleagues maintain that the poor lack access to water because of their irresponsible governments, and that they are merely on an ethical mission of poverty alleviation.

Cochabamba Protests

- Known as the "Cochabamba Water Wars," these were a series of protests that took place in Cochabamba, Bolivia's third largest city, between January and April 2000 because of the privatization of the municipal water supply.

- In 2000, the World Bank declared it would not "renew" a $25 million loan to Bolivia unless it privatized its water services. According to Jim Shultz, executive director of the Democracy Center in Cochabamba, the World Bank believed that “poor governments are often too plagued by local corruption and too ill equipped to run public water systems efficiently. …[and that the use of private corporations] opens the door to needed investment and skilled management."

- A corporation called “Aguas del Tunari” took control of the water works of Cochabamba, and the government then passed Law 2029 which appeared to give Aguas del Tunari a monopoly over all water services.

- Demonstrations erupted when Aguas del Tunari imposed a large rate increase, reportedly to finance the Misicuni Dam project, a week after taking control of the Cochabamba water supply system. In a country where the minimum wage was less than US$70 per month, most residents were suddenly receiving monthly water bills of $20 or more.

- Protests ensued, with Oscar Olivera leading the Cochabamba people. After months of sometimes-violent protests, the Bolivian government conceded and Olivera signed a concord with the government guaranteeing the removal of Aguas del Tunari and turning Cochabamba’s water works over to La Coordinadora. Detained demonstrators were to be released and eventually Law 2029 was repealed.

Water Privatization Failure

- The only way for this to work is for the private sector to receive public subsidies, which they are meant to relieve. They depend on degrading water quality around the world.

This week's outside lecture opportunities

There are three outside lecture opportunities this week...


Professors Tim Dare (University of Auckland, New Zealand) and Justine Kingsbury (Waikato University, New Zealand) write:

“Philosophers are increasingly likely to appeal to scientific theories and scientific data in support of philosophical claims: one of the most exciting trends in recent philosophy has been this process of 'naturalisation'. This is surely a good thing, but we wonder whether there is something about the methodologies of science and philosophy which make philosophers especially prone to misuse science: to place undue weight on results a scientist would regard as marginal or unproven; to highlight favorable and ignore unfavorable data; to give illegitimate weight to the authority of science; to treat mere “resonances” between a scientific theory and a philosophical idea as though they amounted to scientific proof of the philosophical idea, and so on. We discuss examples of these vices (and would love to be given more!) in order to explore whether there is something intrinsic to scientific or philosophical inquiry which makes these vices particularly tempting to philosophers - if there is, then the vices we identify may pose a quite general challenge to the naturalisation of philosophy - and to recommend some steps to help philosophers avoid them.”


For the penultimate presentation in the W&L Geology Department Winter Seminar Series, Natalie Stier, a W&L geology major, will present a slightly expanded version of the talk that she gave at the SE-GSA meeting a few weeks ago in March. The talk will summarize her work this semester as part of an independent study (GEOL 403) into the compositional and textural characteristics of a diverse suite of xenoliths collected from three Quaternary basaltic flows in the Western Grand Canyon.


2010 Earle Bates Lecturer
The Nine Elements of a Sustainable Campus
April 2, 2010
12:15 PM - 1:15 PM
Stackhouse Theater, Elrod Commons

Dr. Mitchell Thomashow, President of Unity College in Maine, is well-known nationally in environmental circles. He is a scholar and writer who is specifically interestd in developing reflective, interdicsiplinary pedagogy for undergraduate and graduate programs in Environmental Studies.

Dr. Thomashow will propose "Nine Elements of a Sustainable Campus," designed to evoke a whole new twenty-first century catalogue of transformational sustainable practices for higher education that will help train a new generation of leaders.

This presentation will be of interest to faculty, staff and students as he discusses Infrastructure, Community and Learning.

Sponsored by the Program in Environmental Studies

Summary for Friday March 26th

Since we did not have a formal lecture today, there will be no summary. Your reading for Monday, courtesy of the Blue Covenant Group is an article from the April, 2010 issue of National Geographic: Water is Life.

The reading for Wednesday will be: Global Water Shortage Looms In New Century

Summary for Wednesday March 24th

Topic 1: Beer requires lots of water- mostly to grow the barley and hops. We looked at a region of the US where much of this barley is grown (The Snake River Valley of Southern Idaho) and the effects that of the massive withdraws from the Snake River for irrigation in a part of the world that does not receive much rainfall.

Topic 2: Water diversion: the Quabbin Reservoir in Central and Western Massachusetts- we took a look at the "drowning" of the towns of Dana, Enfield, Prescott, and Greenwich though the eyes of Jane Yolen who was looking though the eyes of a young girl growing up in the Swift River Valley. Our look at the controversy surrounding the Quabbin was admittedly very one-sided with a rather unabashed vilification of Boston and its residents. The other side to this story, of course, is that the Boston Metropolitan area has an excellent water source that serves 2.4 million people and that a relatively small number of people had to be removed from portions of the Swift River Valley in order for this to happen.

Our look at the four villages and hundreds of people displaced by the Quabbin should also be be considered in the context of the 1,200 villages and 1.3 to 5.3 million people that will have been "resettled" for the Three Gorges Dam in China by 2020...

There is no reading for Friday (take the opportunity to read or reread sections of BlueC or BottleM).

Slides shown in lecture today are available as a .pdf on Sakai.

The my maps page has been updated with the locations mentioned in today's lecture.

Summary for Monday March 22

Topic 1: Blue Covenant/Bottlemania project discussion. See here for details.

Topic 2: Water footprint of oil shale- Just like the Canadian tar sands that we discussed on Friday, US oil shale is an unconventional source of hydrocarbons that are economically viable at high oil prices and that uses large amount of water (2.6 to 4 units of water for every unit of oil extracted according to the BLM-warning: huge 673 page .pdf) in a part of the world that does not exactly have a great deal of water to spare.

Topic 3: The general concept of water footprint- According to Hoekstra and Chapagain (2007) US per capita water consumption is 1797 gallons/cap/day. Of that total use, 9% is domestic, 59% agricultural, and 32% industrial. You should be able to reproduce these numbers, be able to explain the differences between the different types of uses, and be able to tell where 'virtual' or 'embedded' water is found in these numbers. You should know where the USA ranks in the world in terms of per capita water consumption and why.

Topic 4: The specific water footprint of certain consumer goods- you should have a general idea of the amount of water that is required in the production of some common products. I do not want you to memorize the list that we presented in class this morning but you should have a general idea, for instance, that a can of Coke requires ~250 times the can's volume of water (mostly to grow the sweetener with a little bit to run the factory), and processed food can require way more water than unprocessed, and that corn-fed beef requires a huge amount of water per pound.

If you are interested in reading more about water footprints and what goes into their calculation, the Water footprint manual (Hoekstra et al., 2009) is an excellent (and exhaustive) resource. Also, I mentioned that US water consumption was down according to a recent USGS report (that compared 2005 to 2000 and 1980). A link to that study can be found here.

Slides shown in lecture today are available as a .pdf on Sakai.

The my maps page has been updated with the locations mentioned in today's lecture.

Bottlemania/Blue Covenant Project

Below is a list of the requirements for our Bottlemania/Blue Covenant Project

Blue Covenant Group:

1. Teach two lectures: Monday, March 29 and Wednesday, March 31
2. Relevant reading assignments (not from the book) for Monday and Wednesday (assigned on Friday and Monday respectively)
3. Quiz on Friday, April 2nd (four multiple choice or fill in the blank questions that are knowledge based, can be answered quickly, and are relevant to the material presented in lecture or the assigned readings
4. One homework assignment- due whenever it is decided to be most relevant (Friday April 2nd at the latest)
5. Ten final exam questions- multiple choice, fill in the blank, matching with at least a few short answer questions. Due Friday April 9th in class at the latest.

Bottlemania Group:

1. Teach two lectures: Monday, April 5 and Wednesday, April 7
2. Relevant reading assignments (not from the book) for Monday and Wednesday (assigned on Friday and Monday respectively)
3. Quiz on Friday, April 9 (four multiple choice or fill in the blank questions that are knowledge based, can be answered quickly, and are relevant to the material presented in lecture or the assigned readings
4. One homework assignment- due whenever it is decided to be most relevant (Friday April 9 at the latest)
5. Ten final exam questions- multiple choice, fill in the blank, matching with at least a few short answer questions. Due Friday April 9th in class at the latest.

6. From each individual, I will need a summary statement describing your specific individual contributions to the group project.

Water Footprint Homework

So, for the water footprint homework assignment, I have decided to change things a little bit by having you compare the results of four different calculators. This is due to my dislike for each of the four calculators for one reason or another (see comments below).

The extended calculator at www.waterfootprint.org is the most extensive of the four and is quite thorough with agricultural and domestic water use but uses only income to calculate most of your industrial use. Also, while the domestic use inputs are relatively straight forward, the ag (food) are not. How long would it take you to determine how many kilograms of starchy roots, on average, you eat per week? For someone who really wants to get a good handle on their water use (particularly related to their food consumption), this is a good way of going about it; for our purposes, it is not. For the income input in this calculator, I would like for you to use the median income for 25+ years old with a Bachelor's Degree of higher ($60,493 for men, and $40,483 for women) according to the US Department of Commerce.

On the other end of the spectrum, Unilever via Go Blue has a promised One Minute Water Calculator which takes into consideration only domestic use, which, as we learned today accounts for only 9% of total water use in the USA.

The calculator at www.h20conserve.org is heavy on the domestic use inputs but also looks at a few additional non-ag consumption factors like bottled water, recycling, and rainwater harvesting. It also states at the end that the average American uses 1,190.5 gallons of water per day which is few less than the 1800 that is used more often (Hoekstra and Chapagain, 2007)

The Kemira water footprint calculator has a good variety of a limited number of inputs and certainly has the most impressive graphics.

Go to Sakai and complete a footprint using each of the four footprint calculators. Use your living situation here in Lex for your calculations. This homework assignment is set to "survey" mode and so I will only know whether or not you have completed the assignment, the specifics of your submissions will not be linked to you.

More outside lecture opportunities

In addition to the lectures mentioned here, the following outside lecture opportunities are coming up over the next two weeks.

Monday (TODAY) March 22 4:00 p.m.
"Images of a Changing Arctic and the Futures They Represent" in Classroom F
Professor David Caron
Law School Classroom F
"an interactive seminar"

David Caron is the President-Elect of the American Society of International Law, and the C. William Maxeiner Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley.

Tuesday, March 23 7pm
Stackhouse Theater, Elrod Commons
"Herculaneum: Living with catastrophe"
Andrew Wallace-Hadrill

In AD 79, Mt. Vesuvius erupted and buried the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Archaeological excavations in both towns are ongoing and last year in particular yielded several major discoveries in Herculaneum.The Department of Classics is proud to present Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Professor at the University of Cambridge, and Director of the Herculaneum Conservation Project, who will be discussing recent discoveries and the largest conservation project of a classical archaeological site. All are welcome. The lecture is free and open to the public. More information is available here.

Thursday March 25 12:15 PM - 1:15 AM???
The Chesapeake Bay Striped Bass
A Chesapeake Bay Program - Brown Bag Lunch
Huntley Hall 323

Dr. David Secor, from the University of Maryland CES/Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, will present "The Chesapeake Bay Striped Bass: Estuarine Homebody or Coastal Vagabond? Sewer Trout or Environmental Sentinel? Overfished or Resilient? Consumed or Consumer?" Dr. Secor will review how the life history and ecology of the Chesapeake Bay striped bass contributed to its apparent resiliency to climate change, habitat degradation, and fishing. He will also discuss ecosystem-based management of the bass including food web interactions, climate change, and biodiversity.

Wednesday April 2, 2010 12:15 PM - 1:15 AM
The Nine Elements of a Sustainable Campus (2010 Earle Bates Lecturer)
Stackhouse Theater, Elrod Commons

Dr. Mitchell Thomashow, President of Unity College in Maine, is well-known nationally in environmental circles. He is a scholar and writer who is specifically interested in developing reflective, interdisciplinary pedagogy for undergraduate and graduate programs in Environmental Studies. Dr. Thomashow will propose "Nine Elements of a Sustainable Campus,"designed to evoke a whole new twenty-first century catalogue of transformational sustainable practices for higher education that will help train a new generation of leaders.This presentation will be of interest to faculty, staff and students as he discusses Infrastructure, Community, and Learning. Sponsored by the Program in Environmental Studies.

Summary for Friday March 19

Topic 1: The Bottlemania and Blue Covenant projects are now underway! Those responsible for teaching Blue Covenant will be doing so during the of March 29 to April 2 and Bottlemania will be teaching from April 5 to 9. I will post instructions later this weekend about the specifics of what these projects will entail.

Topic 2: The role of dams in ecosystem fragmentation, part II- When most people think of the bio/ecological impacts of dams, they usually think of Salmon. Today, I took the opportunity to talk about some of my work as an environmental consultant on the role of dams in the lives of endangered populations of freshwater mussels in New England. Mussels have a two-stage reproductive cycle in which parasitic larvae called glochidia latch onto the gills of a host fish as an evolutionary mechanism for species distribution. Anything (such as dams or even poorly-designed culverts) that prevent the free travel of host fish will have an overall negative impact on mussel populations as well, however, dam impoundments also create excellent habitat for some species such as freshwater mussels. Generally, we think of dam building as being disruptive to habitats, but dam removal can also be disruptive to a small minority of individuals from species that, as a whole are adversely affected by the dam's presence. The presence sensitive species in anthropogenic environments such as impoundments creates obvious ethical issues that need to be considered during dam removal and, if certain protected species are present or suspected to be present there are legal issues as well. Considerations such as this also add to the cost of dam removal (which is tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars for relatively small structures or much more for major works).

Topic 2: We then turned our attention to the largest dam in the world- the Syncrude Tailings Dam in Alberta, CA. The activities of Syncrude, Suncor, and Shell Canada way north of the border touches upon three topics that are relevant to this course:

1. ...largest dam in the world...

2. Water Quality: The extraction of highly viscous hydrocarbons from tar sands requires the use of 2-4.5 units of water for each unit of oil recovered. Even with water recycling programs in place, this means that extraction activities in an area that is producing 1.126 million barrels per day (a barrel contains 42 US gallons) is going to produce a great deal of low quality water- and will have to figure out a way to deal with the implications of this.

3. Water footprint: The vastly higher water requirements for Canadian tar sand oil above and beyond those associated with the extraction of conventional petroleum resources demonstrates that the volume of embedded water that we as individuals and as a society use are dependent not only on what we use and how much of it we use but also on the means of production of the product or resource.

There will be no reading assignment for this weekend... ...with the assumption that you will be getting in the lion's (or lioness') share of your BC/BM reading.

Slides shown in lecture today are available as a .pdf on Sakai.

The my maps page has been updated with the locations mentioned in today's lecture.

Bottlemania/Blue Covenant Project lists

I will make an announcement in class tomorrow about the Bottlemania/Blue Covenant Project in which I will refer to the following list. Students with the following initials have chosen to be in the Bottlemania group.

CEB
ACB
BAB
ASB
CMC
CMC
GCA
JBH
TJ
EAM
DKM
TMM
JAP
TCR
GSR
RGS
VCS
JWS
CIS
EAV
CV

(Incidentally, we only have two people in our class who share initials and both are reading Bottlemania.)

Students with the following initials have chosen to be in the Blue Covenant group either by virtue of contacting me with their reference or by virtue of not contacting me before the Bottlemania Group filled.

CMB
KAB
ACC
JSD
DLG
SVG
AMK
EGL
TSM
BCM
SMP
CCR
MARS
RHR
RBS
CS
AHS
MW
ESY

Outside Lecture Oppurtunity: JECE Symposium- Friday

Panel discussion will count for outside lecture opportunities (except for the one that meets during our class). There are a total of four discussion. On a not unrelated note, our official policy for lecture attendance and summaries in excess of the five required will be 2 quiz points for each additional lecture.

Journal of Energy, Climate, and the Environment | Symposium 2010

Summary for Wednesday March 17th

Topic 1: There far less water flowing through the CO river than the 17.5 million acre feet per year that is promised to seven states and Mexico. This is an example of a difference between "wet" and "paper" water. You should be able to define these terms and describe a few examples of situations in which paper water exceeds wet water and why this is a problem.

Topic 2: The great dams of world (particularly the massive US projects from the 30s, 40s, and 50s are "imponderably massive", numerous, and permanent -see many quotes from the beginning of chapter 3 and throughout chapter 5 in Reisner

Topic 3: Dam Pros and cons- be able to list and describe the many reasons that we as as a society built dams and why dams might not be the best for everyone (and everything) involved.

Topic 4: The Grand Coulee Dam- be able to describe its awesome magnitude, its interesting history in the US legislature, and its important role in world history.

Slides shown in lecture today are available as a .pdf on Sakai.

The my maps page has been updated with the locations mentioned in today's lecture.

Please read The Canadian Oil Boom by Robert Kunzig for Friday.

Summary for March 15th

Topic 1: Groundwater overuse:

a. saline (or saltwater) intrusion: What is it? Why is it a problem? Where is it a problem?
b. change in local groundwater flow direction: Why does it happen? Why is it a problem?
c. drawdown:What is it? Why does it happen? What additional problems does it create?
d. pore collapse and subsidence: What is it? Why does it happen? Why is it a problem? Where are some examples of chronic subsidence? Where are some examples of catastrophic subsidence?

Topic 2: Induced seismicity- What is it? Why are the specific causes? (what is the role of lithospheric or increasing pore fluid pressure in altering the differential stress required for faulting to occur?) What are some examples of induced seismicity?

On Wednesday, we will continue our discussion of the dams and water resource management in the American West with a look at the Grand Coulee Dam and other large projects around the globe. Please read Chapter 5 (the GO-Go Years) in Cadillac Desert before class and start on Chapters 2 (The Red Queen) and 10 (Chinatown).

Slides shown in lecture today have been posted as a .pdf to Sakai.

The my maps page has been updated with the locations mentioned in today's lecture.

Upcoming Outside Lecture Opportunities

Thursday March 18 5:30-6:30 PM
W&L Geology Department Winter Seminar
Science Addition 214
"New Long-offset seismic data: a view into new giant oil discoveries."
Dr. Barbara Radovich
Refreshments provided

Barbara is a sequence stratigrapher with extensive world-wide experience in the petroleum industry. I think you will all enjoy her perspective on giant oil discoveries as seen with these new high-quality data she will show." -Chris Connors

Thursday March 18 7:00 PM
Northern Auditorium, Leyburn Library
"50 Years of Climate, Culture, and Landscape Change in the Mt. Everest Region" Alton Byers, The Mountain Institute (this lecture was already announced here.)

Friday March 19 -all day
Journal of Energy, Climate, and the Environment | Symposium 2010
The Intersection of Renewable Energy Development and Geoengineering

I am not sure what this is all about and I will not be attending; however, if you are considering going into law, this might be a really good opportunity to get one (or more) of your lectures.

Thursday March 25 5:30-6:30 pm
Science Addition 214
Laura Wilson, University of Colorado - Boulder
“Interdisciplinary approaches to late Cretaceous terrestrial and marine paleoecology"

Lecture Summary for Friday March 12

The topic for the day was the physical hydrology of the Colorado River, its importance in providing electricity, irrigation, and drinking water for the American West, its importance by proxy, those of us who eat food from the American West, and the legal division of its water (the 1922 compact). Important concepts from this lecture were: gradient (% grade), siltation, design life, hydro power as renewable energy.

On Monday, we will Continue our discussion of the dams and water resource management in the American West with a further look at groundwater extraction related subsidence, the Grand Coulee Dam. Please read Chapter 5 in Cadillac Desert before class.

Slides shown in lecture today have been posted as a .pdf to Sakai.

Do not forget to e-mail me (or print and hand in in class on Monday) your calculations for the average annual flow for the CO river over the last several decades. Remember that I want your answer in acre feet per year. I will look over the data on Monday afternoon and we will discuss your finding in lecture on Wednesday.

The my maps page has been updated with the locations mentioned in today's lecture.

Summary for Wednesday March 10th

Topic 1: Desalination: Why not (Part II)? Desalination is so energy intensive that it requires as much energy to desalination water as it does to pipe it 1600 km (about 1000 miles.) Not counting for gravity, that's from LA to Washington State!

Topic 2: Desalination: Who? The societies that choose to use desalination as part of their water resource management strategy tend to have lots of energy and money. 75% of the world's desalination capacity is in the Middle East and the USA is a major desalinator as well. Also, places like the UAE that receive 3-4 inches of rain per year and have no major rives are faced with desalination as their only option for expansion.

Topic 3: Introduction to Cadillac Desert- Issues addressed:

a. Threshold for growing crops without irrigation = 20 inches/year
b. Threshold for "arguably no place to inhabit at all" = 7 inches/year
c. Salinity of CO river at US-Mexico border = 1500 ppm
d. Salinity a serious problem in San Joaquin Valley of California, the "most productive farming region in the entire world”
e. "Virtually every drop of water in the state (CA) is put to some economic use before being allowed to return to the sea."
f. “In the East, to “waste” water is to use it needlessly or excessively. In the West, to waste water is not to consume it- to let it flow unimpeded and undiverted down rivers.”
g. “The problem in California is that there is absolutely no regulation over groundwater pumping, and, from the looks of things, there won’t be any for many years to come.”- you should be able to discuss the concept of groundwater as a renewable or non-renewable resource, rate of pumping vs. rate of recharge, drawdown, cone of depression, and subsidence in the context of groundwater overuse.

On Friday, we will Continue our discussion of the dams and water resource management in the American West. Please read Chapter 4 in Cadillac Desert before class.

Slides shown in lecture today have been posted as a .pdf to Sakai.

The my maps page has been updated with the locations mentioned in today's lecture.

Outside Lecture Oppurtunity: Micro-paleo stuff

Day: Thursday, March 11th
Time: 5:30
Location: A218? (possible room change)
Speaker: Dr. James D. Schiffbauer, Virginia Tech Geobiology Research Group
Title: The Origin of Complexity in Single-celled Organisms: Views from taphonomy, ultrastructure, and microchemistry

The Precambrian Earth housed some of the most important transitions in the development of the biosphere as we know it- from the oxygenation of the atmosphere and hydrosphere to the beginnings of complexity in both single-cellular and later multicellular organisms. This talk will focus on one of these transitions- the shift from a bacterial world to a eukaryote world- and perhaps more importantly, how we can recognize this event in the fossil record.

Summary for Monday March 8th

Topic 1: Septic systems- How do they work? who uses them? Why is an understanding of groundwater flow important? What determines groundwater flow velocity and direction? What are the differences between a WWTP and a septic system?

Topic 2: LUST- Leaky(ing) Underground Storage Tank(s)- What are they? What do they usually contain? How common are they? What are the specific water quality hazards related to LUST? What are BTEX compounds? How can the specific problems of water quality related to LUST be addressed? Our atypical example of a LUST was the massive Greenpoint spill in Brooklyn, New York.

Topic 3: Desalination:

What? -Seawater has 35,000ppm salinity (3.5%). According to our class (n=40), what is the upper salinity limit for salinity in drinking water?


Blue: I can not taste any salt in this sample.

Green: I can taste some salt in this sample; however, I would be able to drink water that tasted like this.

Red: This sample is disgusting and I would only drink it if I was in Haiti or Bangladesh.

Why? -people live near the ocean (remember the 50-50- 50% of US population lives within 50 miles of the ocean) and there is lots of ocean water (97% of total near surface water)

How? -distillation (most = 85-90%) or filtration (reverse osmosis) (you should be able to describe the mechanisms for both techniques...)

Why not? -The big problem with desalination is that it is very energy intensive which means that it is expensive and it exacerbates existing pollution problems from energy. Quite a bit of research and effort is going into figuring out new filtration techniques that are more energy efficient (and cheaper). Other issues include danger to marine biota related to water intake (getting caught in poorly designed intake apparatuses) and discharge of highly saline waste water

On Wednesday, we will finish up with desalination with the "who?" and begin our discussion of dams. Please read the Introduction for Cadillac Desert before class.

Slides shown in lecture today have been posted as a .pdf to Sakai.

There is an outside lecture opportunity this Thursday.

The my maps page has been updated with the locations mentioned in today's lecture.

Summary for Friday March 5th

Topic 1: Importance of conservation of natural areas from a water resource standpoint.

more "natural" area = more areas where water is being cleaned by natural systems = cleaner water & less money that humans ultimately need to pay for treating water.

Topic 2: Sewers: Throughout the world, the use of sewers for the transport and removal of water waste ranges from zero treatment ("pipe into the river") to multi-stage treatment techniques that discharge water that is actually higher quality that the surrounding environmental water.

Topic 3: Though WWTP are like snowflakes in that no two are exactly alike, there are certain key treatments stages that need to be addressed at each facility:

0. Pretreatment: screening (removal) of large object
1. Primary treatment: settling tanks in which solids are removed through gravitational settling
2. Secondary treatment: aerated tanks in which disolved organic compounds are removed through controlled biological reactions involving microbes
3. Tertiary treatment: any post secondary treatment- could involve filtration, removal of P &/or N, et cetera- should involved disinfection in order to kill microbes from the secondary treatment stage and from the original waste.
4. Discharge: into a river, ocean, irrigation recycling program, or pumped into the ground.

Topic 4: Drugging our waters: The four big issues raised by the article were:

1. bioactivity of drugs and hormones or chemicals that mimic hormones
2. synergy between very small amounts of many different drugs in drinking water
3. Since this is a relatively new problem, there is not much research on the effects of ingesting drugs or combination of drugs in very small dosages (and certainly no research on the long term effects).
4. Our current system of treating waste water is inadequate in removing complex compounds such as the the pharmaceutical products and byproducts that were discussed in the article.
5. Removal of these compounds is possible using current technology; but, is would be really expensive.

You should also be familiar with the solutions for the problem of drugs in our waters discussed in the article.

Topic 5: Cocaine in Italy's rivers: According to Zuccato, 2005, the people of the Po river watershed (most of Northern Italy) are using 2.7 times more cocaine that previous (official) estimates. You should be familiar with the methods used in this study, why these sampling methods were important, and what the major implications of the study are.

On Monday, we will talk about LUST, and desalination treatment. Please read:

Water agencies debate desalination a shourt article in the San Fransisco Chronicle from February 15, 2009 by Kelly Zito and
‘Desalination to cover all our water needs by 2011’ a short article on water shortages in Cyprus from March 2, 2010 by Sebastian Heller

Slides shown in lecture today have been posted as a .pdf to Sakai.

The my maps page has been updated with the locations mentioned in today's lecture.

Summary for Wednesday March 3rd

Topic 1: According to the EPA, the US generated 2.6 million tons of E-waste in 2005 (2-4% of total solid waste). About 13% of this was recycled and 50-80% of recycled e-waste is exported- often to countries without the environmental and workers' rights regulations that are present in the US. Export is banned by 32 countries (mostly the EU) through the 1989 Basal Convention which was not ratified by the US of Canada. E-waste is a water quality concern because toxic metals such as Pb, Cd, and Hg are present.

Topic 2: Hg

Topic 3: The RCRA of 1976: what changes did it require for new and existing landfills and why is it so important to water quality?

Topic 4: Pb is highly toxic and has been employed throughout history for an abundance of uses; as a result, there is a lot of lead in our environment. You should know the health effect of lead exposure, the sources of environmental lead, why lead exposure in children is such a problem, the role of Thomas Midgely Jr. and Clair Patterson in the levels of environmental lead in the US, and the implications of the recent study by Reyes (2007) on the impact of childhood Pb exposure on crime. If you are interested in reading about the fascinating history of Pb use, toxicity research, and regulation, there are excellent resources here and here.

I would like for you to read two articles for Friday's class:

Cocaine in surface waters: a new evidence-based tool to monitor community drug abuse by Ettore Zuccato et al. (2005)- a peer-reviewed article from the Journal Environmental Health on the prevalence of cocaine metabolites in the rivers of Northern Italy (.html) (.pdf)

Drugging Our Waters by Elizabeth Royte on the prevalence of prescription drugs and drug metabolites in US waters. (.html) (.pdf)

Do not forget about the outside lecture opportunity double header tomorrow evening...

Slides shown in lecture today have been posted as a .pdf to Sakai.

The my maps page has been updated with the locations mentioned in today's lecture.

Outside Lecture Oppurtunities: Iceland and Mexico

Thursday, March 4th (tomorrow) there is an outside lecture opportunity double header. First up, Dr. Sheila Seaman from the University of Massachusetts will be presenting a lecture highlighting some of her ongoing projects in Iceland as part of the W&L Department of Geology Seminar Series. Her talk, titled Iceland: volcanoes, glaciers, and some horses will discuss the petrology of this unique tectonic setting, as well as the rigors of performing field work in an exotic locale (and, according to the title, glaciers and some horses as well). The talk will be held at 5:30pm in Science Addition A114 and should be appropriate for a general audience.


Following closely at 7:00pm, Dr. Emily Wakild of Wake Forest University will present a talk titled "Where are the Parks? Great Ideas, Cultural Contexts, and Conservation in Mexico" in the Northern Auditorium of Leyburn Library. For those of you who wish to attend either or both of these lectures for credit, remember that your submitted document must contain both a brief summary and a comment about the most interesting thing that you learned from the talk.