The Water Crisis: When Ignorance is Bliss

I attended the SDForum’s Green and Clean Evening Series last week on the topic of water. The experts agreed that we face a crisis: there is not enough water for all of the uses we have for it, and a great many people in the world suffer from a lack of safe drinking water. Water is mismanaged. Its pricing does not reflect the cost of providing it. Not only is water mismanaged, but so too is the tremendous amount of energy that it takes to move water around. And we cannot manage water well without data on its usage and costs. But there are a lot of political pressures to sustain the data void. For those with the ability to use water as they so please at a cost well below its value, ignorance is bliss. To learn more, check out my article summarizing the event. Also, take a look at the web site http://www.imagineh2o.org, an organization promoting more environmentally friendly approaches to water.

Check out DJ Cline’s photos of the event.