South Africa is a water scarce country. We get 50% less thn the global annual average rainfall. Yet we allow our mining industry to consume vast quantities of water and allow them to pollute our rivers with heavy metals including uranium and poisons such as arsenic and other substances. Our next big crisis in this country, by 2015 will be an accute shortage of water.

We're starting community composting with food waste and yard clippings from public entities (jail, college, food stores, etc.) plus homes and businesses and the resultant compost material will be put into raised beds built with volunteer labor (lumber rescued from dumps) and we will have community gardens.
Advantages of raised beds are that virtually anyone--disabled, elderly, children--can work in them, they don't sit wet and they warm up faster in spring, and growing in compost has been shown to grow foods better by about 30 percent, needing less water, too, since it's all contained with the walls of the raised bed (I think 24-30 inches high by 4-5 feet across is best).
LOCALLY GROWN FOOD IS NOW A NECESSITY, as is using our water carefully, even those of us who have lots of water.
Food is a prosaic topic to many people, but we know it's critical to grow food locally or do without - at some point not far off.
Oceans are rising and there will be millions of refugees flocking into areas with food and water - so we'd better have a lot of food on hand.
---organic farmer in Downeast Maine

"The global effects of meat consumption don't stop on land. Agriculture also requires water consumption, and animal agriculture is no exception. Animal production consumes an amount of water roughly equivalent to all other uses of water in the United States combined. Besides grains, animals need water to survive and grow until they are slaughtered. One pound of beef requires an input of approximately 2500 gallons of water, whereas a pound of soy requires 250 gallons of water and a pound of wheat only 25 gallons. Meat production is inefficient as it requires the consumption of an extensive amount of resources over many months and years before becoming a usable food product. With the water used to produce a single hamburger, you could take a luxurious shower every day for two and a half weeks."

Excerpt from http://vegetarian.about.com/od/vegetarianvegan101/f/waterpollution.htm

Over and over again, the same answer to resolving food shortages, water shortages and desertification is given.

End the unnatural meat-eating/dominator culture (humans are herbivores) and its destruction of habitats for the sake of human and resource control. The earth must be allowed to recover its systems that sustain all life in accord with the requirements of ecology.

http://allinharmony.org

There is certainly plenty of water… but not if it is wasted in inefficient agribusiness excesses and not if companies such as Bechtel insist upon owning/controlling it.

'Early this year, there were reports of a U.S. meat packing company voluntarily recalling some 143.3 million pounds (about 65 million kgs) of raw and frozen beef products because plant employees had mistreated cattle on the way to the slaughter house." This is not correct. The beef was recalled in Southern California, because they hauled 'downer' cattle to be slaughtered, raising the possibility of Mad Cow disease in a country that not only refuses to test for it but forbids organic beef growers from testing for it.

Clearly, all countries should limit the number of meat animals that are permitted to be raised. That policy will not only save water but also the people's health.

Funny, I've always believed the "fruit" Eve enticed Adam to eat wasn't an apple, but meat. And something about eating meat brings out the beast in those not meant to eat meat. Look what happens to cattle fed ground up meat in their food source.

So if we stop growing and eating meat, not only will it solve a big part of the water problem, it might end the war mentality of so many as well, and then people of all countries could live in peace.

wilmoor,

I did a couple of designs along those lines... but, in my thinking, Adam and Eve were BOTH innocent.

It was the temple priests (who kidnapped the children of Eve and Adam, to rear them in the 'warrior cult') who caused Adam and Eve to leave paradise to go in search of their children...

And it was the temple priests who sought to insure that the child captives would not know how to return to their garden by telling them that they should fear apple trees ... an obvious DOOR TO RECOVERY of the Garden life.

So, I think meat-eating is the root of our deception war-making society. And the FIRST DECEPTION is in regard to diet since what one eats is ones most intimate act in regard to the rest of nature.

If that is askew (our most intimate interactions with nature)... everything else will be too... and thus available for re-interpretation by the architects of the elite temple orders and their war-making and control paradigms...

Here's the design: http://www.zazzle.com/allinharmony/product/235745620529001205

Make sure you check out the writing on the back of the shirt. There is one for Adam and one for Eve.

The other aspect of meat-eating as the root of 'violence training' for would-be warriors is indicated still today in the training of child soldiers by using violence against animals to shock and desensitize them to the act of killing.

Indeed, I think war-making and meat-eating have exactly the same root.

The other aspect of war-making societies, elitism, also depends to a desensitized point of view... the belief that others do not matter in the same way as oneself...

And the ability to eat 'meat' provides the requisite foundation for general desensitization... since meat-eating is highly unnatural and very cruel, it perfectly enables all other future acceptances of what is unnatural (but required by the culture) to be over-ridden in the heart of the collaborator/perpetrator/follower of elitist morals and principles.

Maybe a little tangential but nonetheless worth considering is how much water our bodies actually need.

For instance, what if you were consuming a frugivore's diet (what you are designed to do)?

Did you know that when the body is dehydrated, re-hydration is facilitated by sugar in the water? Our bodies actually prefer a certain type of re-hydration—that which involves sugar. So physiologically, human bodies often prefer peaches to plain water.

I wonder how far we could go in replacing the plastic bottle culture with a fruit carrying one? (or a fruit picking one if only we were ALLOWED to facilitate/implement such an obvious solution)

And fruit trees have another advantage over plastic, they are more sustainable… and could conceivably be where you need them when you need them… without having to cart them around.

As the consumption of meat rises, and the number of cattle increase, the production of greenhouse gases will also increase, as the rear end of a cow is a major emitter of methane, one of the more powerful of such gases - adding to the stress on water supplies as the climate becomes hotter...

"In many cases, he argued, this is good, up to a certain level, because they need proteins in their diet. But beyond that, it creates a problem."

All living things have protein. So, this statement is typical of our pseudo-science culture in which half-truths are institutionalized to disguise fundamental truth...

Plant and animal proteins ARE different. And animal proteins are very bad for humans who are herbivores for they cause acidification (leading to kidney problems, osteoporosis, etc.) and other complications whereas:

Plant proteins are FULLY assimilated without deleterious affect unless TOO MUCH is consumed.

As so many others have stated, it is virtually IMPOSSIBLE TO GET TOO LITTLE PROTEIN unless one is getting too little calories in general.

Fruits have protein, vegetables have protein, beans and nuts have protein, grasses, leaves and flowers have protein, seeds have protein… and these are the only types of proteins that we can consume without causing problems to ourselves.

Now, do you have any idea how much protein is actually ideal? More than optimal is NOT better than optimal. And optimal is a very small amount (~10% of total calories).

"According to Berntell, every calorie of food you take in translates into one litre of water."

Let us not be misled. We are living inside a cement reality.

Outside that reality, (years ago) we could eat WITHOUT ANY impact on water.

Remember, edible plants did grow abundantly (before the advent of burning other's habitats and/or spraying the lands with herbicides) long before agrarian temple societies sought to control what would be allowed to grow and the later expansion of this control structure into current agribusiness models.

Planting indigenous varieties is still a good idea. Planting for monetary, resource and social control is still the devil!

"Remember, did grow abundantly..."

should read:

Remember, edibles did grow abundantly...

ITSANAZIWORLDORDER

i like the t shirts. i'm not a great biblical fan so don't know enough about adam and eve. but your knowledge of proteins in vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds is something i can relate to as this is basically all i eat. i'm sure i get enough protein and if it wasn't for the stress from the daily encounters with some of the moronic, selfish, stupid homo sapiens i have to deal with, i would be one of the most healthy persons on the planet............water shortages will be/are a major problem in the very near future.

Perhaps water should be a commodity traded on the commodity markets like crude oil or wheat. Then speculators could bid for futures contracts on water...

To begin with let's agree that water is a right, not a commodity. It must never be privatized.
also when you talk about agriculture you will find one set of problems, demands, and water use in mega agribusiness, and an entirely different situation when it's small farmers. As Vandana Shiva pints out, the way Indian small farmers work, they d not waste water- they are using it sustainably. As do small farmers all over the Global South where they have not been put out of business by u.s. subsidies and wto regulations.

http://www.navdanya.org/earthdcracy/water/index.htm

"i'm not a great biblical fan "

Me either. Except...

I like the way the lies that are at the root of this temple-based, military culture can be highlighted by simply dramatizing the evident lies upon which its myths and symbols are based.

"To begin with let's agree that water is a right, not a commodity. It must never be privatized."

Absolutely.

Water already HAS been privitized in lots of countries.

We need to look at reality, even if we may not like it...

"Water already HAS been privitized in lots of countries.

We need to look at reality, even if we may not like it…"

Yes, this is true.

Every solution by the neo-malthusian psychopaths involves reducing consumption (and population or living standards). This planet has so much water on it is is mind boggling. It never gets consumed, it just changes it's location. In the oceans, we have so much water, we just need to remove the salt. We have nuclear desalination reactors.

There are infrastructure projects that could be paid for with debt free money to move water from areas with too much water to areas with not enough. The elite do not want this because their financial system requires excess usury to create fictitous capital that benefits only the elite. And they want to reduce population, giving us the peak oil hoax while sabotaging nuclear power plants to give us the unsafe nuclear power hoax, not to mention the man made CO2 global warming hoax.

http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2006/3313tamilnadu_desal.html

http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2004/eirv31/eirv31n17.pdf (sunbscription only)

"First, consider what we can do with nuclear energy. Take an hypothetical case: Imagine an agro-industrial colony in the middle of a desert, in a location not conveniently reachable from a variety of freshwater management projects now on the drawing boards, but adjacent to salt water from the sea.
We take half a dozen high-temperature nuclear reactor (HTR) modules, of the type which today could be produced on assembly lines. We put together these modules into a power plant producing 1-2 gigawatts of electric generating power and an additional 1-2 gigawatts of usable heat output. We apply a portion of that electric and thermal output to desalinating seawater, using a combination of existing processes, at the rate of 70-100 cubic meters per second.

This provides ample freshwater for the domestic, irrigation, and industrial needs of a self-sustaining agro-industrial colony of 1 million people in the middle of a desert! The rest of the HTR power we use for pumping, between the sea and the location of our colony (at an elevation ofç let us say, 400 meters). A few more nuclear units cover the electricity and process-heat requirements of the colony itself.

Two dozen of such large-scale HTR desalination centers could produce rates of freshwater flows equivalent to that of the Nile and Euphrates combined a man-made river system!

Project designs for smaller, modular HTR units are at the ready-to-go engineering stage from the German firm Siemens and the Swedish-Swiss combine Asea Brown Boveri; and also from California-based General Atomics.

The HTR modules possess characteristics of stability and inherent safety which make them ideally suited for the region. For example, the General Atomics power plant design, first proposed for a Pacific coast location in southern California, has four modules (each at 135 megawatts-electric), located underground, for a total power output of about 540 megawatts; which gives a net electrical output of 466 megawatts, after fueling the attached multi-stage flash distillation process for desalting sea water.

In the most advanced design, electrical power can be drawn off the helium gas cycle directly, without the need for turbine generators. It would take about 22 of this type of facility to provide the volume of water equal to the current 3,500 million cubic meters of renewable water in the Jordan River Basin in other words, a second Jordan River.

Complete desalination units, including nuclear power sources, can be built in assembly-line fashion, and shipped into place on floating platforms for rapid transport and installation. The technology and most of the development work for such mass-produced units are already complete.

This application of nuclear power illustrates what can be done more generally, with the quality of productive power which nuclear technology embodies.

Apart from the unlimited potential of desalination, it is eminently possible to transfer huge quantities of freshwater from areas with a surplus of such water above all, the tropical rain regions of Central Africa into the Sahel, North Africa, and even into the Middle East.

Projects to accomplish this, through systems of canals, reservoirs, and pumping stations, have long been on the drawing boards.

About 60% of all the world's desalination plants are located in the Mideast. Turning salt water into drinking water requires reducing the parts per million (ppm) of dissolved solids (80% of which is sodium chloride or salt) from 35,000 ppm to less than 500 ppm, a reduction of 70 to 1. There are three methods of desalination: 1) distillation (evaporation using steam heat), 2) the reverse osmosis membrane system, and 3) electrolysis. Today, most of the plants are some form of the first method, using using multi-stage, vapor-compression systems. The efficiency of most of the Mideast plants is low, which has been acceptable only because of the low cost of local energy for example, flare gas that would otherwise be wasted from the oil fields.

However, with the provision of nuclear power to the region, and also the development of more intensive, efficient desalination methods, vastly more water can be made available per capita. The route for research and development on desalination should include optical biophysics, to study the how water "behaves" differently in retaining salts in living organisms, than in the surrounding medium."

Over 70% of the land mass is in the Northern Hemisphere where most of the people live, and much of that can not grow food due to water shortages that could be easily addressed. In Africa, the potential is much greater, but distribution to ports is hampered by poor infrastructure and the wars our elite fuel to keep the area from being productive, and the killing off of what they consider to be inferior race.

If there is a God, I say, cull the herd and start over. This experiment has failed, next time add a few more brain cells to the recipe, and put in an psychopath self-destruct gene. Maybe next time will work out better.

If you want to do something locally about the water shortages we all face from time to time, get yourselves some rainbarrels and set up a sweet system so you can irrigate your gardens.

Of the food commodities that are planned for inner cities stretching to the new suburb's question it seems to me, is one of how do we get nutrition at a price affordable to the masses of people transportation cost have become unaffordable to the poor now and will soon spread up the economic strata to larger and larger groups of economic status;starting with the aged , the in firmed , school children and others who won't have access and will be unable to afford well balanced nutritional meals. Think! what the health effects of inadequate nutrition will mean over time ,the basic food pyramid requirements, affordability of getting these food stuffs to the people where they live at a price they can pay for.
At what point do the strong and neighborhood leaders organize to ensure ,through what ever means necessary the procurement of these commodities block by block.
A hole new paradyme will come from the matrix of local control with whole neighborhoods establishing alliances with other like groups in adjacent neighborhood's part of this new para dyne neighborhood farms will develop in a communal setting would suggest organizing security interest similar to the type core groups of the 1960's.
"All power to the people"

Rain barrels are illegal in many areas.